“Diana Taylor advances a timely and necessary theorization of the politics of performance, delivering nuanced and heartfelt analysis of the creative strategies of artists and activists who labor to intervene in historical and contemporary injustices across the Americas. Showcasing Taylor as a scholar, activist, and accomplice present at the site of performance, ¡Presente! is an intellectually brilliant and crucial model of politically engaged theory.” — Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, coeditor of Blacktino Queer Performance
“A major project drawn from a life's work of travel, searching, introspection, and unceasing political commitment to and collaborations with artists and activists, ¡Presente! is a work of great power, poetics, and political impact.” — Josh Kun, University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication
"For a work so theoretically rigorous, ¡Presente! stands out for its wide legibility. By foregoing unnecessary academic jargon and taking pains to explain her own ethical entanglements in plain English, Taylor’s scholarship makes for a surprisingly smooth read, though it is at times heartbreaking: she does not minimize the grimmer aspects of her subject matter, which include devastating accounts of kidnappings, torture, and genocide. The uninitiated reader will find her writing clear and unpretentious, and may discover that her gloss of the postcolonial canon does much to demystify." — Sam Adrien Smith, Full Stop