New Books in Performing Arts

In Part 3, Professor Michael Dobson offers close-readings of some of the play’s most important speeches, including Brutus’s deliberation over Caesar’s assassination and the rival speeches given by Brutus and Antony to “Friends, Romans, countrymen” at Caesar’s funeral — speeches that display the potential power of rhetoric. Speeches and Performers: Brutus, 2.1, “It must be by his death …” (Anton Lesser) Caesar, 3.1, “I could be well moved …” (“I am as constant as the Northern Star”) (Andrew Woodall) Brutus, 3.2, “Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my cause …” (Anton Lesser) Antony, 3.2, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears …” (Mark Quartley)

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Xiaomei Chen's book Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (Columbia UP, 2023) looks at three "founding fathers" of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian. Dr. Chen argues that these three theatre artists laid the groundwork for Mao-era Chinese drama during the earlier Republic period, and that there is more continuity between the two periods than has typically been supposed. She also argues that these artists were not mere victims of heavy-handed political ideologues, but were passionate and sophisticated political thinkers in their own right. By telling the stories of these three figures and their effect on later Chinese drama, Dr. Chen helps us understand why the performing arts have such notable political consequence in the history of 20th century China.

Note: our interview with Dr. Chen on her 2016 book Staging Chinese Revolution can be found here.

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.

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The cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim around the globe and details his many contributions to the art of filmmaking. Kiarostami began his illustrious career in his native Iran in the 1970s, although European and American audiences did not begin to take notice until he released his 1987 feature Where’s the Friend’s House? His films defy established conventions, placing audiences as active viewers who must make decisions about actions and characters while watching the narratives unfold. He asks viewers to question the genre construct (Close-Up) and challenges them to determine how to watch and imagine a narrative (Ten and Shirin). In recognition for his approach to the craft, Kiarostami was awarded many honors during his lifetime, including the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for Taste of Cherry.

In Abbas Kiarostami: Interviews (UP of Mississippi, 2023) ,editor Monika Raesch collects eighteen interviews (several translated into English for the first time), lectures, and other materials that span Kiarostami’s career in the film industry. In addition to exploring his expertise, the texts provide insight into his life philosophy. This volume offers a well-rounded picture of the filmmaker through his conversations with journalists, film scholars, critics, students, and audience members.

Monika Raesch is associate professor of film studies and video production at Suffolk University. A native of Germany, she is editor of Margarethe von Trotta: Interviews, published by University Press of Mississippi, and author of The Kiarostami Brand: Creation of a Film Auteur. Her work has appeared in such publications as the Journal of Film and Video and Feminist Media Studies.

Kaveh Rafie is a PhD candidate specializing in modern and contemporary art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation charts the course of modern art in the late Pahlavi Iran (1941-1979) and explores the extent to which the 1953 coup marks the recuperation of modern art as a viable blueprint for cultural globalization in Iran.

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What is art, and who gets to define it? Museums have long staked a claim on knowing what to show, but there has always been a wide range of how viewers engage with art. There is also a wide range of artists and what is considered art, from classical masters like Titian to modern conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp.

Lance Esplund is an art critic, journalist, educator, and author. His book, titled The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art, is about telling the reader how to become a better viewer of art, what to look for, and how to engage with the works of more conceptual and modern artists.

Lance and Greg discuss how people can think when they engage with works of art, and the intentions that can be known from the artists. They discuss art history courses and what they get right and wrong, how art is always changing and yet still the same as the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, and Lance’s tips for how to go through a museum.

Gregory LaBlanc is a lifelong educator with degrees in History, PPE, Business, and Law, Greg currently teaches at Berkeley, Stanford, and HEC Paris. He has taught in multiple disciplines, from Engineering to Economics, from Biology to Business, from Psychology to Philosophy. He is the host of the unSILOed podcast. unSILOed is produced by University FM.

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Writer and academic Anthony Gardner (NSK from Kapital to Capital, Politically Unbecoming) interviews Marko Ilić about his new book A Slow Burning Fire, which documents Yugoslavia's cultural output throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.

This first comprehensive study of the former Yugoslavia's alternative art scene tells the origin stories of some of the most significant artists of the late twentieth century. In Yugoslavia from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, state-supported Students' Cultural Centers became incubators for new art. This era's conceptual and performance art—known as Yugoslavia's New Art Practice—emerged from a network of diverse and densely interconnected art scenes that nurtured the early work of Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), and others. In this book, Marko Ilić examines Yugoslavia's New Art Practice in light of the political upheavals of the 1980s.

Countering the usual binary of official versus unofficial art, Ilić shows that the Students' Cultural Centers were an expression of Yugoslavia's “third way” political and economic system, which was founded on workers' self-management. Ilić examines key actions, gestures, and propositions affiliated with the New Art Practice, including the conceptual and dematerialized art practices that emerged from Zagreb's Student Center Gallery, the struggle of Belgrade's Students' Cultural Center (where Abramović performed her career-defining Rhythm 5), to break into the international art scene, the pre-Žižek culture of Ljubljana, and Sarajevo's miraculous dokumenta, held in the midst of Yugoslavia's disintegration.

Produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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Part 2 focuses on the play’s key interpretive questions: how we are invited to judge the central characters. Is Caesar, in Shakespeare’s story, really a tyrant who needed to be killed? Is Brutus a noble political hero or a misguided egoist? With Professor Michael Dobson, you’ll discover how Shakespeare restructured this familiar story to make easy judgments impossible. Professor Dobson also discusses the Roman values that the characters strive to embody and how these values generate friendships, rivalries, and violence.

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How can sociology help us understand art and music? In The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music: New Directions and New Discoveries (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), the editor Lisa McCormick, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, draws together the latest research in cultural sociology that examines art and music. Global in scope, and eclectic in choice of subjects and methods, the book is united by the shared approach of the strong programme in cultural sociology. As a result, the book offers a cultural approach to cultural objects, setting new agendas and explaining controversies. The range of topics, both historical and contemporary, make the book essential reading across both arts and humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in art and music!

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Clive Nwonka and Anamik Saha discuss their forthcoming book Black Film, British Cinema II (publishing in March with Goldsmiths Press), a book which brings together scholars, thinkers and practitioners to consider the politics of blackness in contemporary British cinema and visual practice.

Black Film British Cinema II considers the politics of blackness in contemporary British cinema and visual practice. This second iteration of Black Film British Cinema, marking over 30 years since the ground-breaking ICA Documents 7 publication in 1988, continues this investigation by offering a crucial contemporary consideration of the textual, institutional, cultural and political shifts that have occurred from this period. It focuses on the practices, values and networks of collaborations that have shaped the development of black film culture and representation. But what is black British film? How do such films, however defined, produce meaning through visual culture, and what are the political, social and aesthetic motivations and effects? How are the new forms of black British film facilitating new modes of representation, authorship and exhibition? Explored in the context of film aesthetics, curatorship, exhibition and arts practice, and the politics of diversity policy, Black Film British Cinema II provides the platform for new scholars, thinkers and practitioners to coalesce on these central questions. It is explicitly interdisciplinary, operating at the intersections of film studies, media and communications, sociology, politics and cultural studies. Through a diverse range of perspectives and theoretical interventions that offer a combination of traditional chapters, long-form essays, shorter think pieces, and critical dialogues, Black Film British Cinema II is a comprehensive, sustained, wide ranging collection that offers new framework for understanding contemporary black film practices and the cultural and creative dimensions that shape the making of blackness and race.

Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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In her latest book, Rude Girls: Women in 2 Tone and One Step Beyond (Sally Brown Publishing, 2023), Heather Augustyn explores the ska revival in the UK during the lates 1970s and 1980s. The 2 Tone label represented unity of black and white in both the content of the songs, and appearance of the bands. While race may have been central to this declaration, where did gender fit in? Many bands had few, if any, women in their lineup and so women had to do it for themselves. Empowered by punk and impassioned by Jamaican ska and reggae, they took up the microphone, the saxophone, drumsticks. Women demanded their space on the stage and in the studio. Through exclusive interviews with more than 50 women involved in ska in the UK during the '70s and '80s, Rude Girls: Women in 2 Tone and One Step Beyond tells their stories of adversity, perseverance, and sisterhood for an inspiring look at half of the story that has never been told.

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles discuss The Place Is Here (Sternberg Press, 2019) and the range of perspectives on black art in Thatcherite Britain offered by the collection of artworks, essays, and conversations found in the book.

The Place Is Here begins to write a missing chapter in British art history: work by black artists in the Thatcherite 1980s. Richly illustrated, with more than two hundred color images, it brings together artworks, essays, archives, and conversations that map the varying perspectives and approaches of a group of artists who challenged the dominance of white heterosexual men in the canon of contemporary art. The many artists discussed and displayed here do not make up a “movement” or a school or a chronological progression, but represent the diverse interests and activities of artists across a decade and beyond. They grapple with black nationalism, anti-colonialism and postcolonialism, anti-Thatcherism, black feminism, black queer subjectivity, psychoanalysis, forms of narrative and documentary image-making, in different ways and through different modes of representation across a range of media.

The book, which grows out of a series of exhibitions that began in 2014, offers essays, close readings of selected works, panel discussions, and archival presentations, bringing together different voices and generational perspectives. Contributions come from the artists themselves, established scholars, and younger practitioners, critics, and art historians. They discuss the exhibitions, call for a reappraisal of dominant art historical approaches, and consider the use and role of the archive in artworks; look at works by Mona Hatoum, Martina Atille, Said Adrus, Chila Kumari Burman, and Pratibha Parmar; and present key documents and other material.

Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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