New Books In Dance

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking to Peggy Wang about her new book, The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art (Minnesota University Press, 2021). In the book, Wang asks readers to reconsider the term “global” and “world” in relation to the (often simplistically interpreted) artistic projects of some of the most famous Chinese artists of the postsocialist period. A meticulously researched chapter is devoted to: Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Sui Jianguo, Zhang Peili, and Lin Tianmiao. In each case, Wang argues that their oeuvres are critical projects that are shaped by and comment upon artists’ and art critics’ self-understanding as Chinese actors in ambivalent relation to the newly accessible “Western art world.” The book’s theoretical claims will of course speak to scholars of art history as well as Chinese literature and culture. I would be remiss not to mention, however, how excited I am by the teaching potential of this text, both as a foundation from which to understand the complexity o

In her new book, Fan Sites: Film Tourism and Contemporary Fandom (U Iowa Press, 2021)(University of Iowa Press, 2021), Abby Waysdorf explores why and how we experience film and television-related places, and what the growth of this practice means for contemporary fandom. Through four case studies—Game of Thrones tourism in Dubrovnik, Croatia and Northern Ireland, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks in Orlando, Florida, fandom of The Prisoner in Portmeirion, Wales, and Friends events in the United Kingdom and United States—this book presents a multifaceted look at the ways place and fandom interact today. Fan Sites explores the different relationships that fans build with these places of fandom, from the exploratory knowledge-building of Game of Thrones fans on vacation, the appreciative evaluations of Harry Potter fans at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, to the frequent “homecoming” visits of Prisoner fans, who see Portmeirion as a “safe vault” and the home of their fandom. Including engaging

“This is America”: Race Gender and Politics in America’s Musical Landscape by Katie Rios (Lexington Books, 2021) examines an eclectic mix of different artists and cultural products, from Laurie Anderson and Childish Gambino to Hamilton. The artists Rios studies confront problems of race and gender that have deep roots in American history, often by championing social movements that have recently swept the nation such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. While a musicologist by training, Rios is concerned with more than the sonic signifiers of political dissent and resistance. She finds a shared language of cultural and political critique in a wide array of music, videos, dance, visual arts, and theater. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium

Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. In Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty (Bloomsbury, 2019), James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, er

Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s (U Illinois Press, 2019) explores the history of the Black Arts Movement through the experience of activist and organizer, Hoyt W. Fuller (1923-1981). In the first book to document and analyze Fuller's profound influence on the movement, Jonathan Fenderson attends to the paradox between Fuller's central role in the Movement and his marginal place in African-American historiography. Though focused on Fuller, the project is not simply a biographer; it is a series of historical vignettes covering different aspects of Fuller's cultural activism. As it chronicles Fuller's life, the book also address pivotal events and formative moments that grant insight into the ways the Black Arts Movement took shape at the local level; the ways artists shaped the Movement; how race, class, gender, sexuality, and corporate interests impacted the Movement; and, especially, how recovering Hoyt Fuller's work fundamentally alters our knowledge of th

Proposing the concept of transformance, a conscious and rigorous process of self-cultivation toward a reconceptualized body, Liang shows how theater practitioners of minoritized cultures adopt transformance as a strategy to counteract the embodied practices of ideological and economic hegemony. This book observes key Taiwanese contemporary theater practitioners at work in forging five reconceptualized bodies: the energized, the rhythmic, the ritualized, the joyous, and the (re)productive. By focusing on the development of transformance between the years of 2000–2008, a tumultuous political watershed in Taiwan’s history, the author succeeds in bridging postcolonialism and interculturalism in her conceptual framework. Ideal for scholars of Asian and postcolonial theater, Bodies and Transformance in Taiwanese Contemporary Theater shows how transformance, rather than performance, calibrates with far greater precision and acuity the state of the body and the culture that it seeks to create. Peilin Liang is Associa

In The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Losaida (NYU Press, 2021), Karen Jaime argues that the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe has always been a queer space. While acknowledging elements of masculinist posturing among some artists affiliated with the Nuyorican, Jaime also argues that the Cafe has provided space for artists to articulate queer aesthetics since the 1970s. Jaime also investigates the contested history of the term "Nuyorican." Is it an aesthetic label? An ethnic group? Both? Something else entirely? She situates these questions within the history of a changing Losaida (or Lower East Side), as the Cafe adjusts to a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Jaime's book should be of interest to anyone engaged in spoken word, immigrant politics and aesthetics, and the literary history of New York. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. White’s journey to earn a PhD in tuba The Baltimore School for the Arts The importance of having a village The hidden curriculum Why teaching and mentoring are equally important for educators to do A discussion of the book I’m Possible: A Story of Survival, A Tuba, and the Small Miracle of a Big Dream Today’s book is: I'm Possible: A Story of Survival, a Tuba, and the Small Miracle of a Big Dream (Flatiron Books, 2021), a memoir by Dr. Richard Antoine White. When he and his mother didn’t have a key to a room or a house, they had each other. Richard believed he could look after his mother, even as she struggled with alcoholism and sometimes disappeared, sending Richard into loops of visiting familiar spots until he could find her again. One night, when he almost died searching for her in the snow, he was taken in by his adoptive grandparents. When Richard joined the school band, he discovered a talent and a sense of purpose. He was ac

Johnny Cash famously declared himself to be “The Man in Black”. He sang that he dressed in a “somber tone” for “the poor and the beaten down, livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town” and for “the prisoner who is long paid for his crime, but is there because he's a victim of the times”. He famously performed for inmates of Folsom, San Quintin, and a number of other less well-known prisons. Cash publicly supported Native American activists and invited prominent African American guests on his prime-time television show. Yet, he initially supported Richard Nixon, shared the stage with the arch-conservative preacher Billy Graham, and recorded songs that glorified the South’s Lost Cause mythology. How do we make sense of these seemingly contradictory political acts and messages? In Citizen Cash: The Political Life and Times of Johnny Cash, Michael Stewart Foley argues that Cash embodied a “politics of empathy” in which the singer always supported the underdog. This book makes the case that Johnny Cash deserves

“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a character. In following the life of this concept, Butler reveals the impossibly charming, ambitious, questionable cast of characters that have defined the terms of Western acting in the twentieth century. In the process, he clears up many of the public misunderstandings around Method as an approach and as a style. In this discussion, Butler details hi

In this episode of the Queer Voices of the South podcast, John Marszalek interviews author Baker A. Rogers about their research on drag kings in the South and about their own experience performing as a drag king. While drag subcultures have gained mainstream media attention in recent years, the main focus has been on female impersonators. Equally lively, however, is the community of drag kings: cis women, trans men, and non-binary people who perform exaggerated masculine personas onstage under such names as Adonis Black, Papi Chulo, and Oliver Clothesoff. King of Hearts: Drag Kings in the American South (Rutgers UP, 2021) shows how drag king performers are thriving in an unlikely location: Southern Bible Belt states like Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. Based on observations and interviews with sixty Southern drag kings, this study reveals how they are challenging the region’s gender norms while creating a unique community with its own distinctive Southern flair. Reflecting the region’s racial diversit

In this special follow-up episode in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I again speak with Rich Brownstein, author of Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide (McFarland, 2021). In this interview, Rich lists the 15 greatest holocaust films from his long-time study. He uses the categories he developed for his book and chooses 3 films from each group. I hope our conversation is both interesting and informative! Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2021), Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other

This untold origin story of the filmmaker explores its transatlantic history. Alfred Hitchcock called The Lodger "the first true Hitchcock movie," one that anticipated all the others. And yet, the story of how The Lodger came to be made is shrouded in myth, often repeated and much embellished, by even Hitchcock himself. The truth--revealed in new archival discoveries--is stranger still.  In The First True Hitchcock: The Making of a Filmmaker (University of California Press, 2022), Henry K. Miller situates The Lodger against the backdrop of a continent shattered by war and confronted with the looming presence of a new superpower, the United States, whose most visible export was film. The details of The Lodger's making in the London fog and its attempted remaking in the Los Angeles sun is the story of how Hitchcock became Hitchcock. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic

Caught on film, the iconic jump of escaped POW Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) over an imposing barbed wire fence on a stolen motorcycle has become an unforgettable symbol of a disaffected 1960s America. Dana Polan's Dreams of Flight: 'The Great Escape' in American Film and Culture (U California Press, 2021) offers the first full-length study of The Great Escape, the classic film based on a true story of American and Allied prisoners of war who hatched an audacious plan to divert and thwart the Wehrmacht and escape into the nearby countryside. Polan centers The Great Escape within American cultural and intellectual history, drawing a vivid picture of the country in the 1960s. We see a nation grappling with its own military history; a society undergoing significant shifts in its culture and identity; a film industry in transition from Old Hollywood's big-budget runaway studio films to the slow interior cinema of New Hollywood. The book combines history with fan anecdotes and a close study of filmic style to bring

In Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life (Duke UP, 2021), Dr. Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and

How should we understand the role of television in everyday life? In On Living with Television (Duke UP, 2021), Amy Holdsworth, a Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Film & Television Studies at the University of Glasgow uses an autobiographical and autoethnographic approach to understand an object that has ‘always been there’ in many people’s lives. The book combines analysis of programmes, including In the night garden, Man vs food and Last Tango in Halifax, with rich theoretical reflections from television studies, cultural studies, and beyond. Exploring ideas of time, home, and care, the book will be essential reading across the humanities, as well as for anyone watching television! Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In PUNK! Las Americas Editions (Intellect Books, 2021), editors Olga Rodrguez-Ulloa, Rodrigo Quijano, and Shane Greene have compiled a collection of academic essays and punk paraphernalia (including interviews, zines, poetry, and visual segments) exploring punk life. Part of the Global Punk Series, the volume is a collective challenge to the global hegemonic vision of punk. The book interrogates the dominant vision of punk--particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism--by analyzing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of "America," a term that hides the heterogeneous struggles, global histories, hopes, and despairs of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century experience. The book explores punk life through its multiple registers: vivid musical dialogues, excessive visual displays, and underground literary expression. Check out the Book Trailer on YouTube or Instagram.  Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Weste

Are celebrities “disruptors” who revitalize the development field, or are they just charismatic ambassadors for big business? In Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) the authors argue that celebrities play both roles, and that understanding why and how yields insight into the realities of neoliberal development. As elite political participants, celebrities shape development practices through strategic partnerships that are both an innovative way to raise awareness and funding for neglected causes and a troubling trend of unaccountable elite leadership in North-South relations. The authors use actor Ben Affleck’s Eastern Congo Initiative to illustrate this dynamic, arguing that his charisma and reach helped bring new approaches to bear on the region’s development. Learn more about the book here.   Lisa Ann Richey (@BrandAid_World) is Professor of Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark where she works on the politic

If one were to devise a motto for the art school of today, the choice between 'you too are an artist' and 'abandon all hope you who enter here' would be difficult. Despite significant changes in mainstream art education in recent decades, many anglophone art schools have not abandoned the principal tools of the masterclass or the crit that stem from some stubborn 18th-century ideas and the belief that creativity is the preserve of the artistic genius. Considering these histories can shed light on the role of the art school in the 21st century. Research on art schools has been largely occupied with the facts of particular schools and teachers. Michael Newall's A Philosophy of the Art School (Routledge, 2021) presents a philosophical account of the underlying practices and ideas that have come to shape contemporary art school teaching in the UK, US and Europe. It analyses two models that, hidden beneath the diversity of contemporary artist training, have come to dominate art schools. The book draws on first-han