New Books in Performing Arts

Why study the arts in school? In Schools and Cultural Citizenship: Arts Education for Life (Routledge, 2023), Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham and Christine Hall, Emeritus Professor and former Head of Education at the University of Nottingham, examine this question by introducing findings from the Tracking Arts Learning and Engagement (TALE) Project. The book ref...

Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Ca...

John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) has long been recognized as one of the seminal films of the sixties, with its revisionary mix of genres including neo-noir, New Wave, and spaghetti western. Its lasting influence can be traced throughout the decades in films like Mean Streets (1973), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1995), The Limey (1999) and Memento (2000). Eric Wilson's compelling study Point Blank...

With Professor Laurie Maguire, Part 2 explores the play’s many ambiguities — its uncertain geography, mental space, and genre — and how they reflect the play’s ethical ambiguities. Does Prospero contrast with or resemble the “foul witch” who was Caliban’s mother, or the brother who betrayed him for the sake of power? Is he a figure of spiritual regeneration or of colonization? We also look more cl...

In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke UP, 2023), Grant Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces whil...

In the October 12, 2023 issue of The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg offered an annotated list of the 100 greatest film books of all time. Drawing on a jury of 322 people who make, study, and are otherwise connected to the movies, Feinberg assembled an annotated list that reads like the ultimate film study syllabus. In this interview, Dan Moran asks him about the voting process, top winners, so...

The Tempest, one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, draws on themes and stories that fascinated him throughout his career while also taking his art form to unexpected new places. Set in the course of a single day on a magical island, the play focuses on a magician named Prospero who plots to punish the enemies who exiled him to the island 12 years ago — including his own brother. But will Prospe...

Today we have a  group session (read: an hour and a half) with the authors Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michal Levin discussing their new book Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023). Acknowledging that “We’re not the first to think about music in the clinical situation” the authors focused on the analytic project “as a kind of music in its own rig...

Upon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the...

Never watch The Exorcist, Marlena Williams's mother told her, just as she'd been told by her own mother as a Catholic teen in rural Oregon when the horror classic premiered. And like her mother, Mary, Williams watched it anyway. An inheritance passed from mother to daughter, The Exorcist looms large--in popular culture and in Williams's own life, years after Mary's illness and death. In Night Moth...

In Part 3, Professor Simon Palfrey offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll hear the play’s dark energies emerge through Mercutio’s speech about “Queen Mab”; see how Juliet discovers a new, eroticized vision of the world and of herself as she awaits her wedding night, and witness one of the most iconic scenes in literature, when Juliet on her balcony imagines the...

Geraint D'Arcy's book Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explores some of the less frequently questioned ideas which underpin comics creation and criticism. “Mise en scène” is a term which refers to the way in which visual elements work together to create meaning in comics. It is a term that comics have borrowed from cinema, which borrowed it in turn from theatre...

A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez's Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023)is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes au...

Tom Boomershine, one of the pioneers of performance criticism for biblical texts, joined the New Books Network to discuss the publication of First-Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences: The Gospels as Performance Literature (Cascade Books, 2022), a collection of his essays dating back to 1981. On this episode, we discuss his life and career in scholarship, his conviction that the New Testament...

Modernist Iranian art represents a highly diverse field of cultural production deeply involved in discussing questions of modernity and modernization as practiced in Iran. This book investigates how artistic production and art criticism reflected upon the discourse about gharbzadegi (westoxification), the most substantial critique of Iran's adaptation of Western modernity, and ultimately proved to...

With Professor Simon Palfrey, Part 2 looks closely at the play’s characters, and especially at the intelligence and swiftness of Juliet. You’ll see how the lovers apprehend new possibilities of human life, but also how their social world constrains their possibilities; and how the play might seem to offer the possibility of comedy, but how it’s destined for tragedy all along. And the tragedy doesn...

What makes a film a classic? In A Taste of Honey (Bloomsbury, 2023), published as part of the BFI Film Classics series, Melanie Williams, a Professor of Film and Television Studies in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, tells the story of the films production and reception. The book explores the key themes of the film situating ideas of class, gender, ra...

From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode to Hip-Hop chronicles the journey with profiles of fifty albums that have defined, expanded, and ultimately transformed the genre into what it is today. From 2 Live Crew's groundbreaking As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989 to Cardi B's similarl...

American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance (Cambridge UP, 2022), Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s,...

Before South Korea became the democracy and media powerhouse that it is today, it underwent several decades of authoritarian rule during the Cold War from the late 1940s to late 1980s. Amidst this authoritarian period, South Korea’s filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors nevertheless found ways to push the boundaries of both cinema and politics. This is the topic of Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democ...

July 3, 1981, was a pivotal night for the future of America's newest art form: hip hop. In New York's Harlem World Club, the Fantastic Romantic Five and the Cold Crush Brothers competed, with an unprecedented $1,000--and their reputations--on the line in a highly anticipated rap battle. The show drew hundreds of fans to settle a question that still dominates hip hop circles: Who's the best? In Har...

Jessica Lowell Mason and Nicole Crevar's Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art (Vernon Press, 2023) boldly reasserts the importance of the Madwoman more than four decades after the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal work in feminist literary criticism, 'The Madwoman in the Attic'. Since Gilbert and Gubar's work was published, the Madwoman has reemerged to...

Children of families who are locked in a fatal feud, Romeo and Juliet risk community, identity, and life to pursue an all-consuming love. Today, Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous love stories in the world. But the play isn’t simply a celebration of love or an idealization of the lovers. This wild and dangerous play lays bare the link between desire and death, between love and loss. The tr...

Tracy Rutler's Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool UP, 2021) explores the imaginaries of novels and plays from the "liminal" period that followed the end of Louis the XIV's reign in France. Examining a range of French works from the 1730s and 1740s, including writing by Antoine François Pr...

The iconic Black rock band Living Colour's Time's Up, released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial success of their debut record Vivid. Time's Up is a musical and lyrical triumph, incorporating distinct forms and styles of music and featuring inspired collaborations with artists as varied as Little Richard, Queen Latifah, Maceo Parker, and Mick Jagger....