New Books in Performing Arts

In Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance (Routledge, 2022), Hongwei Bao analyses queer theatre and performance in contemporary China. Boa documents various forms of queer performance - including music, film, theatre, and political activism - in the first two decades of the twenty first century. In doing so, Bao argues for the importance of performance for queer identity and community formation. T...

In Part 3, Professor Emma Smith offers close-readings of some of the play’s most important scenes, which dramatize the wide range of relationships and types of love explored in the play. Speeches and performers: Orsino, 1.1, “If music be the food of love, play on …” (Jeffrey Blair Cornell) Malvolio and Olivia, 1.5, “I marvel your Ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal …” (Amanda Harris) An...

Deanne Williams's newest book, Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Performance and Pedagogy (Bloombury, 2023), is a groundbreaking study of the girl actor in the medieval and early modern world, demonstrating the existence of the girl performer in England long before the Restoration. Challenging existing academic assumptions about the supposed male dominance of the early modern stage,...

Drawing from sources including the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion, An Ethology of Religion and Art: Belief as Behavior (Routledge, 2020) proposes an improved understanding of both art and religion as behaviors developed in the process of human evolution. Looking at both art and religion as closely related, but not identical, behaviors a more coherent definition of religion c...

In Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke UP, 2023), Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and wri...

The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen (Life Drawn, 2023) is very well-reseraech graphic novel based on the life of beloved Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, whose “Golden Voice” helped define Cambodia’s Golden Age of music until her mysterious disappearance in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Developed in partnership with Sothea’s family. There is a saying in Cam...

The idea that women are dangerous - individually or collectively - runs throughout history and across cultures. Behind this label lies a significant set of questions about the dynamics, conflicts, identities and power relations with which women live today. The Art of Being Dangerous: Exploring Women and Danger through Creative Expression (Leuven UP, 2021) offers many different images of women, som...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho...

Part 2 looks at the many instances of inversion and transgression, looking at how characters cross boundaries of gender, status, and social role, and how they are punished or rewarded. Professor Emma Smith looks closely at the final scene and how it settles—or doesn’t— the characters’ roles and the play’s own status as a comedy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppor...

The history of race in American theater is more complicated than you might think, writes Dr. Josephine Lee in Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (UNC Press, 2022). Dr. Lee, a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, examines the linked histories of orientalism, Blackface and Yellowface, in nineteenth and early twent...

How are women represented in Chinese crime films? In what ways do the representation reflect traditional Chinese values and contemporary Chinese social-cultural norms? How did boys’ love culture emerge in China? What is the role of the Chinese state in queer media production and queer culture in China? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, and an affilia...

One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the early twentieth century, the studio has been a constant presence in cinema history, responsible for the creation of acclaimed films, blockbuster brands, and iconic superstars. In The Warner Brothers (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Chris Yogerst fol...

Dr. Richard Waugaman is an emeritus supervising and training analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. He is also a well-respected author. With regard to his career he has said, “I have practiced clinical psychoanalysis for over 40 years. Initially, my publications were mostly on psychoanalysis.” In 2002, he made a discovery when he learned that the traditional theory about wh...

Digging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi (Factory 25, 2015) is the most comprehensive collection of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi possible with 36 films including: A Little Stiff, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, In the Bathtub of the World, Tripping with Caveh, I Am a Sex Addict, and The Sheik and I. Writings by Bill Brown, Arnold Barkus, Greg Watkins, Thomas Logoreci, Alison Bechdel, Amanda Field...

Twelfth Night, named for the celebration that is both the culmination and the close of the Christmas festivities, is a bittersweet romantic comedy at once melancholy and merry. Through its central plot, in which the female Viola takes on the guise of the male Cesario and becomes beloved of both men and women, this play is also one of Shakespeare’s most modern approaches to identity and sexuality....

Art of Transition: The Field of Art in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2022) investigates contemporary art in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union. By drawing on historical and ethnographic research, this study examines the challenges faced by Russian artists in building a field of art as their society underwent rapid and significant economic, political, and social transformation. In doing so,...

Who was Harry Smith? Was he an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter? Was he a charlatan? A genius? Was he a moocher, a schmuck, a bum? As John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (FSG, 2023) reveals, Smith was all of these and more. Best known for editing The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smith was also a pioneer in experimental film who Jonas Mekas considered one of th...

In A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023), Diana W. Anselmo queers the earliest development of the "fangirl." Gathering an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs, A Queer Way of Feeling explores how, in the 1910s, girls coming of age in the United States used cinema to forge a foundatio...

While there is little doubt that women were active participants in medieval musical culture, their role has nevertheless been variously obfuscated, undermined, and overlooked, in large part because of the relative absence of named women composers. Work from recent decades has sought to re-insert women into our music-historical narratives, often by broadening their scopes and shifting away from str...

Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (Oxford UP, 2022) looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehi...

Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of...

Hamid Keshmirshekan's book The Art of Iran in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Tracing the Modern and the Contemporary (Edinburgh UP, 2023) deals with the exploration and theorization of Modern and Contemporary art of Iran through the examination of art movements and artistic practices in relation to other cultural, social and political discourses during the twentieth and twenty-first cen...

The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing over 2300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation as a “live band” was—and continues to be—sustained by thousands of live concert recordings from every era of the group’s long and colorful career.  In Live Dead: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings, and the Ideology of Liveness (Duke UP, 2023)...

In Part 3, Professor Stephen Greenblatt offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll get an in-depth look at the powerful relationship between Antonio and Bassanio, the climactic confrontation between Antonio and Shylock in the court, and the hard-edged poignancy of the play’s most famous speech: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” Speeches and performers: Antonio, 1.1, “I pray y...

K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2022) is about K-pop dance and the evolution and presence of its dance fandom on social media. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul, the book traces the evolution of K-pop dance from the 1980s...