Focusing on the efforts to recover, repatriate, and rebury thousands of fallen soldiers from the China-Burma-India Theater, this chapter analyzes how the disparate treatment of American bodies and Chinese bodies defined the Sino-American relations in the immediate postwar period. The first part of this chapter examines how well-established institutions, ambulant resources, and cooperative regimes enabled US servicemen to salvage the bodies of American soldiers from distant theaters of war to reinter them in national and private cemeteries on American soil. The second part addresses the struggle of the Chinese government in Nanjing, the Chinese military command in India, and the Chinese communities in Burma to provide proper burials for the dead of the Nationalist expeditionary forces. China lacked the formal institutions and infrastructure to manage war graves in foreign territories, and failed to garner the support of local authorities. When the political chaos of the Chinese Civil War led to the cessation of funding from the Nationalist government, the graves of Chinese soldiers in India and Burma fell into oblivion.

Chapter 2 considers the limits of performance translation, drawing from the author’s experiences working with three internationally acclaimed Argentinian theatre artists. The chapter first examines the potential “over-translatedness” of Claudio Tolcachir’s global sensation, La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Coleman Family’s Omission), in which audience identification seemingly transcends cultural difference and risks “over-translatability.” Considerations of the “local” underscore the translational limitations of “American realism” and challenges in staging plays bearing a culturally bound performance style for which there is no obvious US or UK equivalent. A case in point is the grotesco criollo, a tragicomic genre and acting style developed in 1920s Buenos Aires and still informing local theatre making. To illustrate, the chapter discusses the author’s and Rafael Spregelburd’s collaborative search for countering anticipated “under-translatedness” when bringing his plays to US stages. At the same time, the “untranslatable” can function as a productive performance strategy, thus the chapter concludes with an examination of Lola Arias’s Campo minado/Minefield, in which three Argentinian and three British ex-combatants reenact their 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War experiences. While translation is built into the multilingual production through projected supertitles, the untranslatable asserts itself at nearly the play’s end in a provocative moment of untranslatability.

Four themes characterize the role of the Pacific’s newly made navies in the making of the US “New Navy.” Demand for new and surplus technology accelerated innovation. Testing and battlefield observation of novel weapons helped refine decisions about acquisitions and strategy. Threat perceptions of ascendant newly made navies in the Pacific made manifest the immediate need for a US New Navy. And, finally, threat perceptions were instrumentalized as political capital in order to sell the utility of navalism to a skeptical public. Appreciating these relationships textures accounts of the emergence of the US empire in the Pacific, the study of military history in the context of international society, and the advent of prototypically “modern” navies. In this the history of the nineteenth-century Pacific is a useful primer for competition in the region between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.

Chapter 1 develops the book’s theoretical frame as well as provides initial experiential examples. In the author’s practice, theatrical translationality has inspired reconsiderations of actor-training practices, rehearsal processes, and artist-audience expectations, and it has modified her approaches to translation and direction. To illustrate, the chapter first turns to the author’s decades-long working relationship with Argentinian dramatist Ricardo Monti and the collaborative process in translating and publishing ten of his lyrical and imagery-rich texts into English, and her experience in directing the English-language translation of his play Visit with US actors. The chapter then shifts to a scholarly perspective to apply a theory of translationality to the radical revisionary processes at work in Argentinian playwright-director Daniel Veronese’s “Chekhov Project,” a multi-production endeavor that involved not only his versions of Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya but also an original play, Mujeres soñaron caballos (Women Dreamt Horses). The chapter concludes with the author’s reflections on translating Veronese’s original play for a New York theatre festival, interpreting its success as largely the result of a translational collaboration between text, author, translator, director, cast, and producer. A theory of translationality accommodates and encourages these interlinked theatrical and performance elements, experiences, and participants.

The Pacific not only inspired early investments in the New Navy but the region also offered a series of crises in which the United States could deploy naval assets. As of 1890, the New Navy could muster only five modern warships into its model “Squadron of Evolution.” As a collective, it was a force that mattered little to the North Atlantic balance of power. In the Pacific, by contrast, New Navy ships were sufficient to force Chile – a longtime antagonist – into diplomatic settlements during the Chase of the Itata (1891) and the Baltimore Incident (1891–1892). These successful acts of “cruiser diplomacy” delivered political results. Naval proponents cited operations in the Pacific as evidence of the New Navy’s efficacy and necessity. By 1893, as its sailors and marines intervened in the Hawaiian Coup, the New Navy already had a record of coercion in the Pacific. Such results undergirded celebrations and naval reviews from Astoria, Oregon to New York City, as officials displayed the New Navy and its achievements to the public and the world.

The book’s final chapters engage with the actor (and spectator) as translational agent and site. Chapter 3 considers performances by what playwright-dramaturg Kaite O’Reilly calls the atypical actor, focusing on how current conversations in disability and Deaf studies and in theatre, dance, and performance translation studies might mutually illuminate. To illustrate, the chapter examines first the author’s performance work with deaf performance artist Terry Galloway and the Mickee Faust Club and its “ethic of accommodation,” counterposing an ethic of translationality that avoids accommodation’s asymmetric power dynamic. Next considered are O’Reilly’s plays and dramaturgical practices, where translationality can be seen operating between individuals, institutions, and cultures and highlighting the artistic potential for incorporating into performance frequently sidelined access devices. The chapter continues, adopting a translational approach to actor training and casting before concluding with self-translation as perhaps an even more effective disruptor of the prevailing disability-as-theatrical-metaphor, returning first to Galloway and the author’s participation in the Disability and Deaf Arts festival production of The Ugly Girl before closing with reflections upon watching disability rights activist and well-known British actor Liz Carr perform in Assisted Suicide: The Musical, a master-class in self-translation.

Contemporary Performance Translation opens with a consideration of the impossible but necessary stakes in translating for the stage, taking inspiration from the author’s own collaborations with Argentinian playwrights in translating their work for the English-language stage, with particular attention paid to the ten-play translation project with dramatist Ricardo Monti. The project’s theoretical frame of translationality is developed in conversation with current artistic and critical approaches to contemporary theatre and performance translation. A translational approach to performance translation, precisely because of the complexities brought about by its linguistic, cultural, aesthetic, and technical engagements, has great potential for complicating the often-assumed unidirectional destiny of a given translation and for exposing the dangerous asymmetries contained within the increasing globalization of English. An overview of the four central chapters and conclusion complete the introduction.

The themes of technical parity and cultural insecurity endured into the 1890s as Japan replaced Chile in the role of Pacific threat to the US New Navy. As the relative power of the Chilean Navy faded after 1892, Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) created a new challenge to US narratives about its civilizational superiority and technological prowess. Much as California’s security was a source of anxiety during the US–Chilean naval race in the 1880s, Hawaii now served as a new site of conflict between US and Japanese imperialisms – acutely in the crises of 1893 and 1897. US policymakers and naval officers used recent experiences with Chile (and China) as a lens through which to understand Japan. The upshot: the origins of the US–Japanese competition – culminating eventually in World War II – were intimately tied to navalist politics and US–Chilean tensions in the 1880s.

China has long been a major target of primary sanctions and more recently of secondary sanctions. Like many other states, China has begun to explore legal efforts to resist US secondary sanctions, for instance by adopting a blocking statute. Unfortunately, it appears that these legal efforts, like those of many other states, cannot make much difference in practice, although they are not meaningless. However, China is different from many other states in that it has the potential to economically or technically overtake the US. Due to its ever-growing economic power, together with its legal efforts, China is expected to be able to neutralise US secondary sanctions in the future. Going forward, China, despite its growing power, is expected to maintain its basic policy of opposing unilateral sanctions and is unlikely to impose secondary sanctions to achieve its foreign policy aims. It will continue to emphasise the principles of sovereignty equality and non-intervention in internal affairs.

This chapter reviews the leading explanations for the creation of the US “New Navy” and then proposes the book’s core argument: that US naval expansion in the 1880s and 1890s was disproportionately a reaction to the Pacific’s navies and their wars. In a regional context, the US New Navy was one among many newly made, industrial fleets racing for security and prestige. The Introduction then explains the implications of this thesis for historical accounts of the “Pacific World,” US Empire, and military technological development. It concludes with a chapter outline of the book.

The United States provides limited direct support to its citizens abroad, but provides significant indirect support, via a global order in which capitalism, and US businesses in particular, can thrive. Historically, driven by laissez-faire ideological commitments and a limited welfare state at home, the US has rarely and only reluctantly organized or offered significant assistance when its citizens abroad have been in distress. However, mobilization by hostage families and advocacy organizations has forced the US to take a more active role in recent years, especially in prominent cases. With a vast security, diplomatic, and intelligence apparatus at its disposal to conduct matters of state, the US does not rely on citizens abroad to conduct foreign policy. It has sometimes engaged in repression of dissenting citizens through travel controls, and it has subjected citizens and others to significant surveillance. Although US citizens in distress abroad often receive limited direct assistance, US businesses can, in contrast, avail themselves of robust federal and state government aid for their commercial activities overseas – in line with US interests and ideology.

In the face of its international reputation for intransigence and foot-dragging on climate warming policy, combined with its deserved reputation for profligate fossil fuel consumption, the USA has actually reduced its greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. Continued compounded muddling, consisting of stricter national administrative regulation of energy efficiency and pollution control, new state and local government initiatives, further non-governmental governance developments and market-driven economic responses are together likely to support extending the current trends of reduced energy intensity and reduced greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades, perhaps even to accelerate it. But a U.S. commitment to doing the right thing – whether conceived as doing what it would take to achieve the level of zero net emissions by 2050, or to accomplish the even more draconian reductions needed to soon halt global temperature rise – is unlikely in the absence of something that causes coalescence of a new normative political landscape.

The United States federal government is stimulating private investment in the hydrogen sector with the goal of producing and using 10 million metric tonnes (MMT) of clean hydrogen by 2030 and 50 MMT by 2050. Recent measures include $8 billion in grants for ‘hydrogen hubs’, $1.5 billion in research funding, and tax credits (uncapped) for qualifying investments or production. The response from industry, communities, and state and local governments to the grant program has been strong. However, implementation delays and regulatory uncertainty may delay infrastructure development and create risks for early investors. Thus, the outlook for success is still uncertain.