New Books in Performing Arts

Florida A&M University professor and former Miss FAMU Kimberly Brown Pellum, Ph. D., recently released her book, Black Beauties: African American Pageant Queens in the Segregated South (History Press, 2020). The book explores the glamorous history of African American beauty queens by using the stories of former contestants to address colorism and racism still prevalent in the industry. “My mother...

In 1933, the Chicago Symphony performed the Symphony in E Minor by Florence B. Price. It was the first time a major American orchestra played a composition by an African American woman. Despite her success, Price sank into obscurity after her death in 1953. Dr. Rae Linda Brown spent much of her career researching and writing about Price’s life and music, as well as advocating for African American...

How has social media changed inequality in the cultural industries? In The Politics of Expertise in Cultural Labour: Arts, Work and Inequalities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Karen Patel, AHRC Leadership Fellow based at Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University, considers the idea of expertise in cultural labour, examining how it is understood and displayed by...

From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting: The Labor Plays of Manny Fried (SIU Press 2020) collects three plays by Manny Fried alongside a thorough explanation of his work and life by theatre scholar Barry Witham. Witham traces Fried’s long career as a labor organizer and Communist Party militant, as well as the obsessive lengths the FBI went to in order to suppress his activism. Fried is unique among Amer...

In New Orleans Carnival Balls: The Secret Side of Mardi Gras, 1870-1920 (LSU Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Atkins draws back the curtain on the origin of the exclusive Mardi Gras balls, bringing to light unique traditions unseen by outsiders. The oldest Carnival organizations emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and ruled Mardi Gras from the Civil War until World War I. For these organizations, Carn...

Mitchell and Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Routledge, 2019) is Caridad Svich’s love letter to the 1998 musical that introduced the world to its favorite East German ex-pat genderqueer rock star, Hedwig. A tribute both to the New York that spawned the musical and the glam rock that inspired it, this book contextualizes the show in a way that allows the reader to appreciate both its “ahead of i...

Gertrude Hoffman is one of many entertainers who were big stars in vaudeville before World War I, but whose celebrity faded as the American public was seduced by radio and film after the Great War. Sunny Stalter-Pace recounts Hoffmann’s groundbreaking career and contextualizes her work as a dancer, comedienne, producer, and choreographer in the American cultural landscape in Imitation Artist: Gert...

Vanita Reddy, in her book Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture (Duke University Press, 2016), locates diasporic transnationality, affiliations and intimacies through the analytic of beauty. Through her analysis of Asian American literary fiction and performance artwork and installations, Reddy lingers on moments, objects and subjective positions that reveal the...

The Blackface minstrel show is typically thought of a form tied to the 19th century. While the style was indeed developed during the Antebellum period, its history stretches well into 20th- and even 21st-century America. Far from being the endpoint posited by much of the existing literature on the topic, the Jazz age of the 1920s actually saw a flourishing of Minstrel activity, as new forms of med...

In Sovereignty (Northwestern University Press, 2020) playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle weaves together two stories separated by 170 years but joined by a common dilemma: how can Cherokee people fight for justice under an unjust colonial legal framework? In present-day Oklahoma, Sarah Ridge Polson attempts to bring her abuser to justice using the Violence Against Women Act. In 1835, her ancestors try t...

In The Autistic Stage: How Cognitive Disability Changed 20th-Century Performance (Sense Publishers, 2015) (Sense Publishers, 2015), Telory Arendell creates a revolutionary fusion of disability studies and performance studies. Arendell touches on the work of autistic poet and librettist Christopher Knowles, portrayal of autism in film, and the use of theatre as a therapy for those on the autism spe...

In Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Manuel Betancourt explores what makes Judy Garland’s landmark album great, and why it holds such a central place in queer culture. A hit when released in 1961 (it was the first album by a woman ever to win the Grammy award for Best Album), Judy at Carnegie Hall quickly came to occupy a central place in the gay imaginary. And yet...

Nasser Rahmaninejad’s A Man of the Theatre: Survival as an Artist in Iran (New Village Press) provides a fascinating glimpse into the political and artistic life of Iran. This memoir discusses the difficulties of creating progressive theatre under the murderous and repressive regime of the Shah (supported by the United States), the “prison commune” created by an ad hoc body of Marxist and Islamist...

In Fifty Playwrights on their Craft (Bloomsbury, 2018), Caroline Jester and Caridad Svich talk to writers from the US, the UK, and countries around the world about what it means to be a playwright today. Playwrights range from avant-gardists like Erik Ehn and Sibyl Kempson to well-known playwrights like Willy Russell and Paula Vogel. Each playwright provides a definition of what a playwright is, a...

What is the place of classical music in contemporary society? In Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Marianna Ritchey, an assistant professor of music history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explores the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and classical music, showing how many of the democratizing and innovative elements...

Television informs our perceptions and expectations of leaders and offers a guide to understanding how we, as organizational actors, should communicate, act, and relate. Join NBN host Lee Pierce (s/t) and editor/contributor Dr. Creshema Murray as they discuss Leadership Through the Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) an edited collection of televi...

In Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture (University of North Carolina Press), Grace Elizabeth Hale tells the epic story of the Athens, Georgia music scene. Hale explains how a small college town hard to get to even from Atlanta gave rise to dozens of great bands. Some of them are household names like R.E.M. and The B-52’s, but perhaps more interes...

In Officer Clemmons: A Memoir (Catapult, 2020), François Clemmons tells the story of how he became the first ever African-American recurring character on a children’s television when he took on the role of the friendly police officer in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. But this book is more than a behind-the-scenes show business memoir. It is a touching coming of age story that reveals what it felt like...

In his powerful new book, A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2020), Greg Garrett brings his signature brand of theologically motivated cultural criticism to bear on this history. After more than a century of cinema, he argues, movies have altered our cultural perspectives in the same way that religious narratives have. And in fa...

In Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, 2020), Shana Redmond explores the ways in which Paul Robeson, silenced by state repression in his lifetime, still speaks to us today. Through explorations of Robeson’s genre-defying genius as well as reflections on how Robeson’s legacy continues today, Redmond re-contextualizes Robeson as a thoroughly contemporary fig...

Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Clifford Mason, celebrated actor, director, writer, and playwright, and author of thirty-four plays, is a sweeping history of Black theatre from the early nineteenth century through 1959. With an “Introduction” section, and six concise chapters, Macbeth in Harlem traverses such s...

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-s...

In Shakespeare for Snowflakes: On Slapstick and Sympathy (Zero Books, 2020), Ian Burrows examines the fraught meeting place of slapstick and tragedy, asking us under what literary and performative conditions we extend and withhold sympathy. Using source material as diverse as YouTube comments and the plays of Sarah Kane and William Shakespeare, Burrows forces us to confront the limits of our own e...

This is a book of encounters. Part memoir, part essay, and partly a guide to maximizing your capacity for fulfillment and expression, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness (Cornell University Press, 2016) taps into the artistic side of what we often take for granted: the stories we tell, the people we love, the metaphors used by scientists, even our sex lives. A folklo...

The Hour of All Things and Other Plays (Intellect Books, 2018) collects four plays by Caridad Svich, a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement playwright. The plays take place in Venezuela, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southwest Detroit, as well as cyberspace and the place of dreams. In these works, Svich interrogates themes of globalization and environmental collapse in language that is poetic, rough, hear...