Emily Apter's and William Pietz's Fetishism and Cultural Discourse collects a number of papers originally given at a conference sponsored by New York University's Department of Performance Studies. The essays, which use the concept of fetishism to discuss subjects as diverse as psychoanalysis, feminist theory, Marxism, Dutch still life, Mapplethorpe photographs, Wilde's Salome, feminist performance art, and 19th-century photography, bear out the editors' contention that “fetishism has since the early 1980s enjoyed a curious resurgence of popularity as a trope of criticism and aesthetics” (p. 1).

It is sometimes, however, not easy to see much similarity in the very different ways that the critics collected in this volume use the word “fetishism.” Part of the problem is that the word historically has been used in at least three different cultural-historical discourses, as indeed several of the essays usefully detail. One of the best of these, William Pietz's “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx” traces the genealogy of the word “fetish” from its first use by Portuguese sailors in the 16th century to describe African magical charms and religious objects to its use by Marx for economic theory and, most recently, to its use by