New Books in Performing Arts

Infinite Dreams: The Life of Alan Vega (Backbeat, 2024) by Laura Davis-Chanin and Liz Lamere is the first biography on the life of Alan Vega, best known as the co-founder of the punk duo Suicide. In their exhaustive biography Davis-Chanin and Vega's wife of 30 years, Liz Lamere, start with Vega's early life and attempts at astrophysics in college, to his encounter with Iggy Pop that changed his path and encouraged him to become an artist and performer. Infinite Dreams describes Vega’s many experiments across a variety of media, including the partnership with Marty Rev that became Suicide, which challenged audiences to look deep inside themselves and to not settle for distractions. Delving into his artistic life as well as his personal trials, Infinite Dreams combines candid photos, drawing, images of art pieces, and reminiscence of a wide array of musicians and artists, creating an intimate glimpse into the life of Vega and those he influenced. 

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy (University Press of Mississippi, 2020) explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. In this first book on the subject since Obama’s presidency, musicologist Timothy P. Storhoff describes how, after specific policy changes, musicians were some of the first to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. This ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and a common desire to restore the once-thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.

Dr. Timothy Storhoff is an orchestra administrator, fundraiser, and ethnomusicologist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.

Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University ([email protected]).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tara López's Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (University of Texas Press, 2024), is an immersive study of the influential and predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene in El Paso, Texas. Punk rock is known for its daring subversion, and so is the West Texas city of El Paso. In Chuco Punk, Tara López dives into the rebellious sonic history of the city, drawing on more than seventy interviews with punks, as well as unarchived flyers, photos, and other punk memorabilia. 

Connecting the scene to El Paso's own history as a borderland, a site of segregation, and a city with a long lineage of cultural and musical resistance, López throws readers into the heat of backyard punx shows, the chaos of riots in derelict mechanic shops, and the thrill of skateboarding on the roofs of local middle schools. She reveals how, in this predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene, women forged their own space, sound, and community. Covering the first roots of Chuco punk in the late 1970s through the early 2000s, López moves beyond the breakout bands to shed light on how the scene influenced not only the contours of sound and El Paso but the entire topography of punk rock.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ramón Espejo's book The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000: From Jimmy Valentine to The Vagina Monologues (Legenda, 2024) delves into the fascinating journey of American drama in Catalonia, exploring how the theatrical output of a world superpower has impacted (and transformed) the stages of an allegedly minor actor in the cultural scene of the 20th century. Yet, while Catalonia is the birthplace of such geniuses as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí or Antoni Gaudí, it is also that of playwrights Joan Brossa, Manuel de Pedrolo, Fermín Cabal or Jordi Galcerán, among others. All of them grew up in, and imbibed, a theatrescape in which American borrowings were not only habitual (often the only foreign plays around) but inspiring and groundbreaking. If Alias Jimmy Valentine re-defined theatrical decorum in Catalonia in the early 1900s, The Vagina Monologues, in the 1990s, challenged prevalent sexual taboos. Throughout the 20th century, Catalonia went from a peripheral, marginalized region of a once vast empire to a booming and largely autonomous centre of culture, recognized all over the world and admired for its uniqueness and original artistic contributions. American plays accompanied, and often directly inspired, such a journey.

Ramón Espejo is Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain, and is one of the leading American drama and theatre scholars in Europe.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This fifth edition of Film, Form, and Culture (Routledge, 2024) offers a lively introduction to both the formal and cultural aspects of film.

With extensive analysis of films past and present, this textbook explores how films are constructed from part to whole: from the smallest unit of the shot to the way shots are edited together to create narrative. Robert P. Kolker and Marsha Gordon demystify the technical aspects of filmmaking and demonstrate how fiction and nonfiction films engage with culture. Over 265 images provide a visual index to the films and issues being discussed. This new edition includes: an expanded examination of digital filmmaking and distribution in the age of streaming; attention to superhero films throughout; a significantly longer chapter on global cinema with new or enlarged sections on a variety of national cinemas (including cinema from Nigeria, Senegal, Burkina Faso, South Korea, Japan, India, Belgium, and Iran); new or expanded discussions of directors, including Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Oscar Micheaux, Agnès Varda, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Jafar Panahi, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and Penny Lane; and new, in-depth explorations of films, including Within Our Gates (1919), Black Girl (1966), Creed (2015), Moonlight (2016), Wonder Woman (2017), Get Out (2017), Black Panther (2018), Parasite (2019), Da 5 Bloods (2020), The French Dispatch (2021), The Power of the Dog (2021), RRR (2022), and Tár (2022).

Robert P. Kolker is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is the author/editor of several books on film including The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies (2008), A Cinema of Loneliness, 4th edition (2011), The Cultures of American Film (2014), The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema (2016), Politics Goes to the Movies (2018), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (2019), and, with Nathan Abrams, Kubrick: An Odyssey (2024).

Marsha Gordon is Professor and Director of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, USA. She is the author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (2023), Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (2017), and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (2008), and co-editor of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (2019) and Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012).

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (2016), he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His work also appears on Pages and Frames.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike. 

Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There is in certain circles a widely held belief that the only proper kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge. This belief often runs parallel to the notion that legitimate knowledge is obtained when a scientist follows a rigorous investigative procedure called the 'scientific method'. 

In Do the Humanities Create Knowledge? (Cambridge UP, 2023), Chris Haufe challenges this idea. He shows that what we know about the so-called scientific method rests fundamentally on the use of finely tuned human judgments directed toward certain questions about the natural world. He suggests that this dependence on judgment in fact reveals deep affinities between scientific knowledge and another, equally important, sort of comprehension: that of humanistic creative endeavour. His wide-ranging and stimulating new book uncovers the unexpected unity underlying all our efforts – whether scientific or arts-based – to understand human experience. In so doing, it makes a vital contribution to broader conversation about the value of the humanities in an increasingly STEM-saturated educational culture.

If it is agreed that the humanities are valuable and essential, are there better and worse ways in which to generate humanistic knowledge? This book offers compelling answers.

Chris Haufe is the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of How Knowledge Grows (2022) and Fruitfulness (2024).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this interview, Dr. Nicholas Taylor-Collins discusses his most recent book Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature (Manchester UP, 2022).

Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature explores the intertextual connections between early modern English and modern Irish literature. Characterizing the relationship as 'dismemorial', the book explores how ghosts, bodies, and the land are sites of literary connection through which modern/contemporary Ireland draws on Shakespeare's England.

Dr. Nicholas Taylor-Collins is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. His reasearch focuses on Shakespeare and modern and contemporary Irish literature.

Helen Penet is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at Université de Lille (France).

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar Paris (Indiana University Press, 2022) is a captivating study of the culture and politics of the vibrant community of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Making their way to the French capital from various sites in Eastern Europe, members of this Jewish community developed their own cultural institutions, including theatre companies, musical groups, and choruses. Left-leaning in their politics, these newly French Jews typically understood their cultural and community work as expressions of a Socialist or Communist politics. This political orientation also drew non-Yiddish-speaking and non-Jewish audiences to the work of these organizations and artists, establishing forms of solidarity across cultural and religious groups and classes, in Yiddish and in French. 

Throughout the book, Underwood examines closely the history of key cultural organizations that brought Yiddish speakers in Paris together and worked to disseminate Yiddish language and culture throughout a wider community in France. Understanding their efforts as profoundly modern, even avant-garde, these cultural and political actors forged and expressed a Jewish diaspora nationalism they regarded as compatible with French republicanism. France was a space of multicultural possibility that seemed the perfect place to build the future. 

Taking the reader through the work of various figures and groups, Underwood follows the solidarity, performances, and pluralism of the Yiddish community in interwar Paris up to the eve of the Second World War. Attentive to the devastating experiences that awaited so many French and European Jews after 1939, the book remains focused on the present of the interwar period throughout, emphasizing the community's hopes for an inclusive French society respectful of forms of religious, racial, cultural, and linguistic difference.

Drawing on a wealth of archival materials the author pursued in sites in multiple countries, the book includes some very real and moving stories. Apart from the historical actors Underwood sought out directly and through family members, the lives and experiences of so many actors, singers, musicians, and engaged community members spring off many of the book's pages. It's a compelling book that will be of great interest to scholars across subfields and disciplines, and I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.