New Books in Performing Arts

Some fields have an easier time describing themselves than others. "History is the study of past events." "Biology is the study of living organisms." But art? Is art a discipline? Is it a practice? Who gets to answer this most fundamental of questions, and why do we prefer not to try? Between Discipline and a Hard Place, written from the perspective of a practising artist, proposes that, against a groundswell of historians, museums and commentators claiming to speak on behalf of art, it is artists alone who may define what art really is.

Between Discipline and a Hard Place is a passionate treatise arguing for a new way of understanding art that forefronts the role of the artist and the importance of inclusion within both the concept of art and the art world.

Alana Jelinek speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about a disciplined and disciplinary approach to thinking about art and its value outside the current preoccupation with economic considerations and the great potential of interdisciplinary working.

Alana Jelinek is an artist and a researcher at the University of Hertfordshire.

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Luci Marzola's book Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building Studio System (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before. 

Using extensive archival research, Marzola's book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here, the studio system is seen as a technology-dependent business with connections to the larger American industrial world. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians' societies. Rather than focusing on the technical improvements in any particular motion picture tool, this book centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with technology in this creative industry. Engineering Hollywood argues that the American industry was stabilized and able to dominate the motion picture field for decades through collaboration over technologies of everyday use. Hollywood's relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation-with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. As such, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of cooperation that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades.

Luci Marzola is a film and media historian who writes about the technology, labor, and infrastructure of the American film industry in the silent and classical eras. She teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California Irvine and at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Intellect’s Global Punk Series (2019-present) has produced edited collections of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work into local, national, global, and trans-global punk scenes. Series editors, Russ Bestley, Mike Dines, Alistair “Gords” Gordon, and Paula Guerra discuss the inception, creation, and production of the series in this New Books Network Interview. In addition to the punk series, they discuss the Punk Scholars Network, additional books on punk coming out on the imprint, and DIY Academic publishing. Volumes 1 and 2 of the series are currently available and the next two titles will be out this fall. Scholars interested in participating in the series or learning more about the PSN can contact Dines ([email protected]) or Bestley ([email protected]).  

The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global (2019) is the first edited volume to explore and critically interrogate punk culture in relation to contemporary, radicalized globalization. Documenting disparate international punk scenes, including Mexico, China, Malaysia and Iran.

Trans-Global Punk Scenes (2021) brings together contributors from a range of disciplines to examine the global influence of punk in the new millennium, with a focus on punk demographics, the evolution of subcultural punk styles, and the notion of punk identity across cultural and geographic boundaries. International in scope and analytical in perspective, the chapters offer insight into punk scenes in New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore, Ireland, South Africa, Mexico, the UK and US, Siberia and the Philippines.

Punk Identities, Punk Utopias: Global Punk and Media (December 2021) This new volume in the acclaimed Global Punk series extends the critical inquiry to reflect broader social, political, and technological concerns impacting punk scenes around the world, with international contributors, ranging through topics from digital technology and new media to gender, ethnicity, identity, and representation.

Punk! Las Américas Edition (December 2021) This book challenges 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. Compiling academic essays and punk paraphernalia (interviews, zines, poetry, and visual segments) into a single volume, the book seeks to explore punk life through its multiple registers, through vivid musical dialogues, excessive visual displays, and underground literary expression.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate 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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Phil Rosenzweig's Reginald Rose and the Journey of 12 Angry Men (Fordham Press, 2021) is the first biography of a great television writer, and the story of his magnum opus In early 1957, a low-budget black and white movie opened across the country. Consisting of little more than a dozen men arguing in a dingy room, it was a failure at the box office and soon faded from view. Today, 12 Angry Men is acclaimed as a movie classic, revered by the critics and beloved by the public, and widely performed as a stage play, touching audiences around the world. 

Rosenzweig is a Professor of Business Administration at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he has used 12 Angry Men for many years to teach executives about interpersonal behavior and group dynamics. It is also a favorite of the legal profession for its portrayal of ordinary citizens reaching a just verdict, and widely taught for its depiction of group dynamics and human relations. The book tells two stories: the life of a great writer and the journey of his most famous work, one that ultimately that outshined its author. More than any writer in the Golden Age of Television, Reginald Rose took up vital social issues of the day - from racial prejudice to juvenile delinquency to civil liberties - and made them accessible to a wide audience. His 1960s series, The Defenders, was the finest drama of its age, and set the standard for legal dramas. This book brings Reginald Rose's long and successful career, its origins and accomplishments, into view at long last.  Drawing on extensive research, and brimming with insight, it casts new light on one of America's great dramas - and about its author, a man of immense talent and courage.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock’s right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all.

Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962).

In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison’s career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership.

Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies.

Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms.

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Anne Bogart's The Art of Resonance (Methuen Drama, 2021) locates the essence of theatre in the experience of resonant vibration among performers and between performers and audience members. The point of art, Bogart argues, is not to express oneself, but rather to create the conditions for "re-sounding," a process that requires both fully engaged performers and a fully engaged audience. Bogart draws on examples from music to physics to neuroscience in a book of essays that is animated by the same restless curiosity that characterizes her ground-breaking directing. This is a book for anyone interested in the profound question of why we are drawn to the theatre both as artists and as audiences.

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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Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2021) explores the legacy of the Great Catastrophe—the death and expulsion from Turkey of 1.5 million Greek Christians following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922—through the music and dance practices of Greek refugees and their descendants over the last one hundred years. The book draws extensively on original ethnographic research conducted in Greece (on the island of Lesvos in particular) and in the Greater Boston area, as well as on the author’s lifetime immersion in the North American Greek diaspora. Through analysis of handwritten music manuscripts, homemade audio recordings, and contemporary live performances, Dr. Panayotis League traces the routes of repertoire and style over generations and back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, investigating the ways that the particular musical traditions of the Anatolian Greek community have contributed to their understanding of their place in the global Greek diaspora and the wider post-Ottoman world.

Panayotis League is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University.

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.

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Films about chainsaw killers, demonic possession, and ghostly intruders. Screaming audiences with sleepless nights or sweat-drenched nightmares in their immediate future. Presumably, almost everybody has experience with horror films. Some people would even characterize themselves as horror fans. But what about the others—the ones who are curious about horror films, but also very, very nervous about them? In A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies (Oxford University Press, 2021), Mathias Clasen, Associate Professor of Literature and Media Studies at Aarhus University, delves into the science of horror cinema in an attempt to address common concerns about the genre. He also asks whether horror films can be a force for good—do horror films have health benefits, can they be aesthetically and morally valuable, and might they even have therapeutic psychological and cultural effects? The book addresses these questions in short, readable chapters, peppered with vivid anecdotes and examples and supported by scientific findings.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Movies open a window into our collective soul. In Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency (New Star Books, 2021), Stephen Lee Naish guides us through recent cinematic phenomena that reflect/refract our contemporary political existence. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. He is the author of several books on film, politics, music, and pop culture. He lives in Kingston, Ontario. He has appeared on the New Books Network three times for previous books: Create of Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper (2016), Deconstructing Dirty Dancing (2017), Riffs and Meaning (2018)

From Star Wars-scope blockbusters and Hollywood coming-of-age comedies to independent horror productions, Naish draws out the ways these movies shape, and are shaped by, their audience's own dissatisfactions. In his discussion of the Star Wars franchise, Naish highlights a conflict between internet discussion-fueled fandom vs the Disney Empire that shares features with the ongoing rebellions depicted in the films themselves. A passionate fan base who can now voice their discontent via the internet is feeding back into the studio's agenda and criticizing the actions of characters within the film and the actors alike. Chapters on the super-heroes genre and disaster movies draw out the climate-based social tensions these reflect. Depictions of masculinity ("Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown") on screens large and small bleed into discussions of the work and presence of Nicholas Cage, David Lynch, and Dennis Hopper -- with a side-excursion into Valerie Solanas's strikingly prescient SCUM Manifesto. Stephen Lee Naish's Screen Captures adds a sharpening filter to the film-goer's experience on the big and little screen.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Washington, DC is known as the birthplace of hardcore punk. The raw, innovative, new sound coming out of the nation’s capital in the late 1970s is examined in Shayna Maskell’s Politics as Sound: The Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978-1983 (U Illinois Press, 2021). Maskell examines the DC hardcore scene between 1978 and 1983, focusing on the bands Bad Brains, Minor Threat, State of Alert (S.OA.), Government Issue (G.I.), and Faith. She explores the culturally, historical, and political impact of DC as the site for the emergence of hardcore punk. A brief history of Washington DC situates the scene in a broader cultural narrative that moves beyond just the music’s aesthetics. Focusing on race, class, and gender in the hardcore scene and specifically on the ways in which the scene embodied and embraced white, middle-class masculinity, Maskell presents the complicated and at times contradictory representations of these signifiers that were born out of hardcore. Maskell uses interviews with participants, albums, and ephemera—zines, posters, flyers—to document and analyze this historical moment. Maskell's work is a strong examination of hardcore and its broader impact in the punk subculture, especially when it intersects with race, class, and gender.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate 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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