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

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 ownership. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

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 readers into the film and its wide-reaching influence. 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

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 Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

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 politics of transnational helping. She is the author of the books Batman Saves the Congo: Business, Disruption and the Politics of Development with Alexandra Budabin (2021); Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World with Stefano Ponte (2011); Population Politics and Development: From the Policies to the Clinics (2008) and edited Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power (2016) and New Actors and Alliances in Development (2014). She also disseminates her work in popular media like Al Jazeera and The Conversation. Lisa was the founding Vice-President of the Global South Caucus of the International Studies Association (ISA). Alexandra Cosima Budabin (@ABudabin) is Senior Researcher at the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton (USA). She is a Researcher at the Platform Cultural Heritage Cultural Production of the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bolzano in Italy. Her research on non-state actors in human rights, humanitarianism and development has appeared in Perspective on Politics, New Political Science, Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity and The Conversation. Her first book Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development with Lisa Ann Richey has been published with University of Minnesota Press. Alexandra’s current research looks at transnational advocacy to confront sexual violence in conflict; digital solidarity for refugees; and the intersection of BLM activism and anti-racist protest in Italy. Aditya Srinivasan assisted with this episode. Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Today I talked to Vivian Kirkfield about her book Making Their Voices Heard: The Inspiring Friendship of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe (Little Bee Books, 2020). Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. On the outside, you couldn't find two girls who looked more different. But on the inside, they were alike--full of hopes and dreams and plans of what might be. Ella Fitzgerald's velvety tones and shube-doobie-doos captivated audiences. Jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington couldn't wait to share the stage with her, but still, Ella could not book a performance at one of the biggest clubs in town--one she knew would give her career its biggest break yet. Marilyn Monroe dazzled on the silver screen with her baby blue eyes and breathy boo-boo-be-doos. But when she asked for better scripts, a choice in who she worked with, and a higher salary, studio bosses refused. Two women whose voices weren't being heard. Two women chasing after their dreams and each helping the other to achieve them. This is the inspiring, true story of two incredibly talented women who came together to help each other shine like the stars that they are. Mel Rosenberg is a professor of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is also the founder of Ourboox, a web platform that allows anyone to create and share awesome flipbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Jake Johnson, author of Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (University of Illinois Press, 2021) takes as his subject the artifice of musicals—no one really bursts into song and dance to liven up a simple conversation and even the historical characters are not true-to-life. He argues that it is the very unreality of musicals that makes them powerful sites of belief—whether it is a reflection of the beliefs of the creators of the work, or what audiences want to believe about themselves. He focuses on how musicals serve large and small communities across America and shape local religious, political, cultural, and familial identities. Rather than using examples from the commercial Broadway theater, however, Johnson brings to life more idiosyncratic productions from the middle of America from the “Senior Follies,” a Ziegfeld-follies like production staffed by older performers to a re-imagining of The Sound of Music written for a polygamous community called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the current political climate where consumers are fixated on the urban/rural divide and differences in the “flyover” states from the coasts, it seems especially important to turn critical attention to musical and dramatic practices outside of Broadway institutions. 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 member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

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-hand accounts of art school teaching and is deeply informed by disciplines ranging from art history and art theory to the philosophy of art, education and creativity. Michael Newall speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the masterclass and the crit, the pervasive idea of the Romantic genius, creative disagreements with Kant, and the lessons for the future that a historical perspective may offer. Michael Newall is a programme leader in art and philosophy at the University of Kent. 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 Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke UP, 2021), Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential. Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University and Chair of MESAAS. Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on alternative solidarities, refugee care, and displacement in Turkey and the Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

How can we make creative industries fair and inclusive? In Reimagining the Creative Industries: Youth Creative Work, Communities of Care (Routledge, 2021), Miranda Campbell, an associate professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University, explores this question theoretically and empirically to present a new vision for both young creative workers and creative production itself. Drawing on ideas of ordinariness and the everyday, along with the need for care and inclusivity, the book is critical of current creative industry practice at corporate level, whilst offering new models and new methods for making culture. With examples from a range of art and cultural forms, the book is essential reading for creative industries, arts and humanities, and social science scholars, as well as for creative practitioners everywhere. 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

Edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja, Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-21st Century (University of Michigan Press, 2021) is a multi-authored, collaboratively conceived book of essays that tackles key challenges facing scholars studying music of the United States in the early twenty-first century. This book encourages scholars in music circles and beyond to explore the intersections between social responsibility, community engagement, and academic practices through the simple act of working together. The chapters of the volume address issues of race, nationalism, mobility, cultural domination, and identity; as well as the crisis of the Trump era and the political power of music. Each contribution to the volume is written collaboratively by two scholars, bringing together contributors who represent a mix of career stages and positions. Through the practice of and reflection on collaboration, Sounding Together breaks out of long-established paradigms of solitude in humanities scholarship and works toward social justice in the study of music. See the book's companion site here.  Dr. Charles Hiroshi Garrett is Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan and Dr. Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music and Professor of American Studies at Harvard University. Learn more about the Eileen Southern Initiative, for which Dr. Oja is co-director, here.  Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama's carnival.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first book in 15 years to take a comprehensive look at Wim Wenders's extensive filmography. In addition to offering new insights into his cult masterpieces, the 10 essays in this volume highlight the thematic and aesthetic continuities between his early films and his latest productions. Wenders's films have much to contribute to current conversations on intermediality, whether it be through his adaptations of important literary works or his filmic reinventions of famous paintings by Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth. Wenders has also positioned himself as a decidedly transnational and translingual filmmaker taking on the challenge of representing peripheral spaces without falling into the trap of a neo-colonial gaze. Making Films That Matter argues that Wenders remains a true innovator in both his experiments in 3D filmmaking and his attempts to define a visual poetics of peace. Olivier Delers is Associate Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Richmond, USA. Martin Sulzer-Reichel is Director of Arabic at the University of Richmond, USA. Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is MA in Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance (Duke UP, 2020), Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism, a tactic of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Anna Watkins Fisher speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the underhand tactics of the parasite - artists like the collective Ubermorgen, Núria Güell, the writer Chris Krauss, or Roisin Byrne - by which it appropriates the logic of their hosts - Amazon, the Spanish State, Dick, and in the case of Byrne, Watkins Fisher herself. Ubermorgen, Amazon Noir Núria Güell, Stateless by Choice, Humanitarian Aid Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present Ann Liv Young archive.org capture, Sheryl Is Present Lauren Barri Holstein Anna Watkins Fisher is a cultural and media theorist whose research spans the fields of digital studies, performance studies, visual culture, environmental humanities, and critical theory. She is an associate professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The Play in the System is available as an open-source download. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. 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 1963, sisters Barbara Ann and Rosa Hawkins and their cousin Joan Marie Johnson traveled from the segregated South to New York City under the auspices of their manager, former pop singer Joe Jones. With their wonderful harmonies, they were an immediate success. To this day, the Dixie Cups’ greatest hit, “Chapel of Love,” is considered one of the best songs of the past sixty years. In Chapel of Love: The Story of New Orleans Girl Group the Dixie Cups (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Rosa Hawkins and Steve Bergsman discuss the ups and downs of one of the most successful girl groups of the early 1960s. Telling their story for the first time, in their own words, Chapel of Love reintroduces the Louisiana Music Hall of Famers to a new audience. Podcast guest Steve Bergsman is a longtime journalist who has written over a dozen books. His most recent book was a biography of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Stephanie M. Pridgeon's book Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film (U Toronto Press, 2020) examines recent cinematic depictions of Jewish involvement in 1960s and 1970s revolutionary movements in Latin America. In order to explore the topic, the book bridges critical theory on religion, politics, and hegemony from regional Latin American, national, and global perspectives. Placing these theories in dialogue with recent films, the author asks the following questions: How did revolutionary commitment change Jewish community and families in twentieth-century Latin America? How did Jews contribute to revolutionary causes, and what is the place of Jews in the legacies of revolutionary movements? How is film used to project self-representations of Jewish communities in the national project for a mainstream audience? Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements is rife with contradictions. On the one hand, it was a natural progression of patterns of political participation, based on the ideological affinities shared between socialist movements and Marxist revolutionary politics. On the other hand, involvement in revolutionary politics would also upset the status quo of Jewish communities because of the extreme nature of revolutionary practices (e.g., guerrilla warfare), revolutionary groups' alignment with Palestine, and the assimilation into non-Jewish culture that revolutionary involvement often entailed. These contradictions between Jewish self-identification and revolutionary activity continue to confound cultural understandings of the points of contact between identities and political affinities. In this way, Revolutionary Visions contributes to timely debates within cultural studies surrounding identities and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Quyền Văn Minh (b. 1954) is not only a jazz saxophonist and lecturer at the prestigious Vietnam National Academy of Music, but he is also one of the most preeminent jazz musicians in Vietnam. Considered a pioneer in the country, Minh is often publicly recognized as the “godfather of Vietnamese jazz.” Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam: Quyền Văn Minh and Jazz in Hà Nội (UP of Mississippi, 2021) tells the story of the music as it intertwined with Minh’s own narrative. Stan BH Tan-Tangbau details Minh’s life story, telling how Minh pioneered jazz as an original genre even while navigating the trials and tribulations of a fervent socialist revolution, of the ideological battle that was the Cold War, of Vietnam’s war against the United States, and of the political changes during the Đổi Mới period between the mid-1980s and the 1990s. Minh worked tirelessly and delivered two breakthrough solo recitals in 1988 and 1989, marking the first time jazz was performed in the public sphere in the socialist state. To gain jazz acceptance as a mainstream musical art form, Minh founded Minh Jazz Club. With the release of his debut album of original compositions in 2000, Minh shaped the nascent genre of Vietnamese jazz. Minh’s endeavors kickstarted the momentum, from his performing jazz in public, teaching jazz both formally and informally, and contributing to the shaping of an original Vietnamese voice to stand out among the many styles in the jazz world. Most importantly, Minh generated a public space for musicians to play and for the Vietnamese to listen. His work eventually helped to gain jazz the credibility necessary at the national conservatoire to offer instruction in a professional music education program. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Haaz Sleiman (هاز سليمان) is a Lebanese actor who has appeared as Tarek in Tom McCarthy’s 2007 award-winning film The Visitor, for which he was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male and the role of Jesus in the American TV mini-series Killing Jesus. He’s also appeared alongside Edie Falco and Anna Deavere Smith (guest on The Proust Questionnaire) in the hit show Nurse Jackie, and stars in Chloe Zhao’s 2021 blockbuster Eternals, where he plays (spoiler alert!) the path-breaking role of Ben, the husband of superhero Phastos as the first wonderful, compelling, and courageous same-sex couple in the Marvel universe.  Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and writes frequently about photography, art, literature, and other subjects. He is also the host of the podcast “Think About It” and editorial director at Warbler Press. Twitter: @UliBaer; Intragram. Caroline Weber is a specialist of French literature, history, and culture. She is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York City. Twitter: @CorklinedRoom. Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Why does a clarinet play at lower pitches than a flute? What does it mean for sounds to be in or out of tune? How are emotions carried by music? Do other animals perceive sound like we do? How might a musician use math to come up with new ideas? This book offers a lively exploration of the mathematics, physics, and neuroscience that underlie music in a way that readers without scientific background can follow. David Sulzer, also known in the musical world as Dave Soldier, explains why the perception of music encompasses the physics of sound, the functions of the ear and deep-brain auditory pathways, and the physiology of emotion. He delves into topics such as the math by which musical scales, rhythms, tuning, and harmonies are derived, from the days of Pythagoras to technological manipulation of sound waves. Sulzer ranges from styles from around the world to canonical composers to hip-hop, the history of experimental music, and animal sound by songbirds, cetaceans, bats, and insects. He makes accessible a vast range of material, helping readers discover the universal principles behind the music they find meaningful. Written for musicians and music lovers with any level of science and math proficiency, including none, Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music (Columbia UP, 2021) demystifies how music works while testifying to its beauty and wonder. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Banksy is the world's most famous living artist, yet no one knows who he is. For more than twenty years, his wryly political and darkly humorous spray paintings have appeared mysteriously on urban walls around the globe, generating headlines and controversy. Art critics disdain him, but the public (and the art market) love him. With Banksy: Completed (MIT Press, 2021), artist and critic Carol Diehl is the first author to probe the depths of the Banksy mystery. Through her exploration of his paintings, installations, writings, and Academy Award-nominated film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Diehl proves unequivocally that there's more to Banksy than the painting on the wall. Seeing Banksy as the ultimate provocateur, Diehl investigates the dramas that unfold after his works are discovered, with all of their social, economic, and political implications. She reveals how this trickster rattles the system, whether during his month-long 2013 self-styled New York “residency” or his notorious Dismaland of 2015, a full-scale dystopian “family theme park unsuitable for children” dedicated to the failure of capitalism. Banksy's work, Diehl shows, is a synthesis of conceptual art, social commentary, and political protest, played out not in museums but where it can have the most effect—on the street, in the real world. The questions Banksy raises about the uses of public and private property, the role of the global corporatocracy, the never-ending wars, and the gap between artworks as luxury goods and as vehicles of social expression, have never been more relevant. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford UP, 2018) explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene —the mise-en-scène— where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film. While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945. Jennifer Fay is Associate Professor of English and Director of Film Studies, Vanderbilt University Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is MA in Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Today, oral histories of everyday Singaporeans are more widely circulated in the nation’s mediascape than ever before. At first glance, storytelling in Singapore appears to have lost its monolithic quality, becoming diffuse and diversified. But as Dr Cheng Nien Yuan argues, Singapore has become a Storytelling State, marketing bite-sized pieces of consumable lives as authentic windows to the private self. The result is the use of personal stories within the neoliberal public sphere, mirroring a growing global phenomenon. To tell this story, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Cheng Nien Yuan to discuss her award-winning research that charts Singapore’s development into a storytelling state over the last decade. About Cheng Nien Yuan: Cheng Nien Yuan is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney’s School of Literature, Art and Media, as well as the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Her research centres around the politics and poetics of storytelling in Singapore. She obtained her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies in 2020 at Sydney University. Her thesis titled ‘The Storytelling State: Performing Life Histories in Singapore’ was awarded the 2020 John Legge Best Thesis in Asian Studies Prize by the Asian Studies Association of Australia. She has published in the journals Studies in Theatre and Performance (2021), Performance Paradigm (2018), and the Oral History Review (2017). She is also a dramaturg and performance-maker. Cheng is currently based in the Intercultural Theatre Institute in Singapore, where she researches their pedagogy and practice. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The Physics of Banjos is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and David Politzer, 2004 Nobel Laureate and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. This extensive conversation examines many of the intriguing aspects associated with the physics of banjos, including the ocarina effect, string-stretching, the subtleties of how we hear pitch, transient growth, and the mysterious ringing sound of banjos; while also touching briefly on contemporary issues in black holes and particle physics. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The Strange Genius of Mr. O.: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2021) by Carolyn Eastman is at once the biography of a remarkably odd celebrity---a gaunt, opium-addicted Scottish orator who lectured in a toga--and a tour of the fledgling United States. James Ogilvie arrived in the United States in 1793 as an educated, impoverished, and deeply ambitious teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1819, he was a celebrity known simply as "Mr. O" who counted the nation's leading politicians, writers, and intellectuals among his admirers. Following Ogilvie on lecture tours from the Atlantic coast as far west as frontier Kentucky, Eastman reconstructs his path to renown, explaining how and why Ogilvie mattered to the citizens of the early republic. His example inspired countless men and more than a few women to become amateur orators and helped inaugurate America's golden age of oratory. At a time when Americans were eager for national unity, Ogilvie and his audiences hoped that eloquence might knit a divided public together---that educated, elevated oratory might provide a bedrock for citizenship and civic belonging. In Eastman's hands, Ogilvie's remarkable life story has as much to tell us about a fascinating man as it has to reveal about the nation he helped fashion. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The 2015 #WakingTheFeminists Campaign for gender equality in Irish theatre highlighted the marginalization of women in this industry and led to several significant initiatives that interrogated existing theater practices and pushed for inclusion and representation. Inspired by this movement, three academics, David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase, joined forces to co-edit a two-volume collection of scholarship on Irish women playwrights. In this episode, these three scholars discuss their new volumes entitled The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716-2016) (Liverpool UP 2021). Spanning from the eighteenth-century to the present day, The Golden Thread brings together the work of leading scholars in Irish theater and women’s writing with that of theater practitioners to recover the often-hidden contributions of women playwrights. The collection develops a counter-canon of Irish playwrights that examines issues of class, sexuality, and disability. Colleen English is a scholar of Irish and Romantic literature based at Loyola University Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Scholarly Seminar at the Newberry Library. Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/colleenjenglish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines published in 2021 by the University Press of Mississippi by Mary Talusan focuses on the Philippine Constabulary band, a military band organized in 1902 that served the colonial government in the Philippines until World War II. Founded and led for most of its history by Walter Loving, a Black soldier in the American military, the band visited the United States four times between 1904 and 1939 and it is these visits that Talusan examines in Instruments of Empire. Listening with what Talusan calls the imperial ear, American commentators understood the group’s command of the standard band repertory of the period not as a result of the Filipino musician’s training and skill, but as evidence of their so-called natural musical ability which had been tamed by the allegedly civilizing influence of American colonial rule. Tracing the band’s reception over time, Talusan analyzes the cultural, political, and social causes and byproducts of American imperial ambitions. 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 member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address (Duke UP, 2021), Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges. In addition to further our understanding of Nollywood, Indirect Subjects makes important theoretical contributions to the fields of media studies, cultural history, and the study of global capitalism. Dr. Matthew Brown is an Assistant Professor in the The Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. 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 The Girl Singer (Fireside Industries, 2021), her latest collection of poems, Marianne Worthington weaves together nature writing, feminism, and country music to form a powerful strand of interlocking poems. In the book's first section, Worthington inhabits famous woman singers like Hazel Dickens and Sara Carter, but also unsung artists who struggled to find a voice or an audience in the patriarchal world of country music. Later sections pivot to more personal themes, but the resonances of the first section remain in lines that recall the lyrics of folksongs, evocations of the singing of birds, and poems that make use of traditional song structure. The collection as a whole is an immensely satisfying volume that should appeal to poetry fans in general, as well as fans of country, folk, and old-time music. 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 ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

By March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks, production companies, and the thousands of workers who make film and television possible were forced to adjust their time-honored business and labor practices. In Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (U Texas Press, 2021), Kate Fortmueller asks what happened when the coronavirus closed Hollywood. Hollywood Shutdown examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected film and television production, influenced trends in distribution, reshaped theatrical exhibition, and altered labor practices. From January movie theater closures in China to the bumpy September release of Mulan on the Disney+ streaming platform, Fortmueller probes various choices made by studios, networks, unions and guilds, distributors, and exhibitors during the evolving crisis. In seeking to explain what happened in the first nine months of 2020, this book also considers how the pandemic will transform Hollywood practices in the twenty-first century. 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

Alisa Freedman's book Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost (Association for Asian Studies, 2021) explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of “curators” of Japan, displaying and explaining selected aspects for viewers. Beliefs in U.S. hegemony over Japan underpin this curation process. Japan on American TV takes a historical perspective to understand the diversity of Japan parodies and examines six main categories of television portrayals representing different genres and comedic forms: (1) stereotypes of judo instructors (1950s and 1960s); (2) samurai parodies (prevalent in the 1970s); (3) the Bubble Economy Era in Sesame Street’s Big Bird in Japan (1988); (4) “Cool Japan” parodies (1990s through the present); (5) eager fans in sketch series (2010s); and (6) makeover reality shows (2019). These examples show changing patterns of cultural globalization and perpetuate national stereotypes while verifying Japan’s international influence. Television presents an alternative history of American fascinations with and fears of Japan. Written in an accessible style that will appeal to scholars, teachers, students, and anyone with an interest in Japan and popular culture, as well as an ideal text for classroom use, Japan on American TV offers a gentle means to approach racism, cultural essentialism, cultural appropriation, and issues otherwise difficult to discuss and models new ways to apply knowledge of Asian Studies. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford UP, 2021), Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions. Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

“Made of light and later sound, the film experience cannot be touched, but that does not mean it is immaterial.” So writes Dr. Caetlin Benson-Allott in her third academic monograph, The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television (University of California Press, April 2021). In The Stuff of Spectatorship, Dr. Benson-Allott turns away from that canonical concept of medium specificity to explore the nature of material specificity. How might the cinematic and televisual apparatus be expanded to incorporate the lost off-the-air recording, the decaying VHS tape, the mediocre branded Cabernet, and the eruption of violence at your local multiplex? It is not just what you watch, but how you watch, that makes meaning. This reframing not only has profound implications for how critics and fans enjoy their preferred media, while laying bare the racist and classist commitments at the heart of our shared material media cultures. In this discussion, Dr. Benson-Allott describes the origin of her latest project, details her decision to include herself as a character in the proceedings, and talks about her work as the editor at the disciplinary flagship, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Caetlin Benson-Allott is Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television (University of California Press, 2021), Remote Control (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (University of California Press, 2013). She is also Editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), the scholarly publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and writes a regular column on politics, platforms, and contemporary media for Film Quarterly. 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 writing has been published in Public Books, Literary Hub, Feminist Media Histories, Ms., and Camera Obscura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Devotional Hindu Dance: A Return to the Sacred (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) sheds light on the purpose of Hindu dance as devotional. Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall explains the history of Hindu dance and how colonization caused the dance form to move from sacred to a Westernized system that emphasizes culture. Postcolonialism is a main theme throughout this text, as religion and culture do not remain static. MisirHiralall points to a postcolonial return to Hindu dance as a religious and sacred dance form while positioning Hindu dance in the Western culture in which she lives. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Before Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (Princeton UP, 2021) brings together more than fifty articles, translated into English for the first time, that Wilder (then known as Billie) published in magazines and newspapers between September 1925 and November 1930. From a humorous account of Wilder's stint as a hired dancing companion in a posh Berlin hotel and his dispatches from the international film scene, to his astute profiles of writers, performers, and political figures, the collection offers fresh insights into the creative mind of one of Hollywood's most revered writer-directors. Wilder's early writings--a heady mix of cultural essays, interviews, and reviews--contain the same sparkling wit and intelligence as his later Hollywood screenplays, while also casting light into the dark corners of Vienna and Berlin between the wars. Wilder covered everything: big-city sensations, jazz performances, film and theater openings, dance, photography, and all manner of mass entertainment. And he wrote about the most colorful figures of the day, including Charlie Chaplin, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Prince of Wales, actor Adolphe Menjou, director Erich von Stroheim, and the Tiller Girls dance troupe. Film historian Noah Isenberg's introduction and commentary place Wilder's pieces--brilliantly translated by Shelley Frisch--in historical and biographical context, and rare photos capture Wilder and his circle during these formative years. Filled with rich reportage and personal musings, Billy Wilder on Assignment showcases the burgeoning voice of a young journalist who would go on to become a great auteur. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The volume, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, edited by John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy (University of Illinois Press, 2021), illustrates the power of performing diverse environmentalisms to highlight alternative ways of human beingness to improve the prospects for maintaining life on the planet under threat. In the interview, I spoke with editors John McDowell and Rebecca Dirksen, who detail how poetics and performance represent strategies in managing human and nonhuman entanglements with contemporary, wicked problems (e.g., threats to bicultural diversity and rampant environmental degradation, unresolved colonial histories, and capitalist pressures). Understanding diverse environmentalisms as embodiments of knowing demonstrates “the power of performances and expressive culture to move people to action: resisting, negotiating, and finding solutions to environmental problems. These are not only performances of diverse environmentalisms, but sources of inspiration and strength for us all” (261).  Performing Environmentalisms is an edited volume of ten essays broken up into three parts: Perspectives on Diverse Environmentalisms, Performing the Sacred, and Environmental Attachments. The compilation demonstrates how environmentalisms as artistic expression serve to curate tradition and create space for cultural sustainability. The array of case studies generates new strategies that incorporate a diverse set of peoples—injecting their knowledge, experiences, and practices into global conversations. Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change is a must read for anyone interested in investigating how creative, alternative sets of environmentalisms interpreted though traditional knowledges are integral to navigating local and global climate and ecological issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Tracing more than two centuries of history, Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer (University of New Mexico Press, 2020) uncovers a vast array of different voices that capture the state’s love affair with the world’s most famous writer. From mountain men, pioneers, and itinerant acting companies in mining camps to women’s clubs at the turn of the twentieth century and the contemporary popularity of Shakespeare in the Parks throughout Montana, the book chronicles the stories of residents across this incredible western state who have been attracted to the words and works of Shakespeare. Gretchen Minton explores this unique relationship found in the Treasure State and provides considerable insight into the myriad places and times in which Shakespeare’s words have been heard and discussed. By revealing what Shakespeare has meant to the people of Montana, Minton offers us a better understanding of the state’s citizens and history while providing a key perspective on Shakespeare’s enduring global influence. Gretchen Minton is a Professor of English at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT. Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The opinions expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, and the Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Why do we love the music we love? In Why You Like IT: The Science & Culture of Musical Taste (Flatiron Books, 2019) musicologist Nolan Gasser, architect of Pandora Radio’s Music Genome Project, discusses how psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, and culture combine to define our musical tastes—what he calls “inculturing.” From the Northern California Redwoods to Paris to Africa, from Nashville to New York City, and from medieval music to Phillip Glass to Led Zeppelin to Taylor Swift, Dr. Gasser takes us on a ride through our minds and how they process, understand and, yes, like music. David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

When faced with some of the complex identity questions which often arise in borderlands, Koreans in China – known as Chosonjok in Korean, Chaoxianzu in Chinese – have long seemed adept at navigating the shifting demands of being both Chinese and Korean. Sunhee Koo’s new book, Sound of the Border: Music and Identity of Korean Minority Nationality in China (U Hawaii Press, 2021), makes a strong case for Chaoxianzu music being a clear index of this, reflecting as it does the layered cultural worlds of this community living in Yanbian prefecture where China, North and South Korea, and the wider world collide. Offering an in-depth account of the shifting styles, genres and themes present in Chaoxianzu musical output across the decades, Koo examines the form and content of Korean folksongs and traditional instrumentation, Chinese- and North Korean-inflected socialist propaganda tunes, and more recent commercialised blends of essentialised ‘ethnic’ music and South Korean pop. Woven into the book’s close musical analysis are rich reflections on the often-tumultuous social and political contexts navigated by Chaoxianzu musicians and their publics over time, all of which reveals that from these intersecting cultural worlds has emerged not so much a musical chimera as a varied and distinctive musical tradition in its own right. Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Daniel Alexander Jones' Love Like Light: Plays and Performance Texts (53rd State Press, 2021) collects seven plays and performance texts from the past twenty-five years. Together, they provide a panoramic view of a remarkable playwright, songwriter, improviser, and performer. In our conversation we discuss Jones' early exposure to theatre as a high school student in Springfield, MA, his discovery of Ntozake Shange's work, his emergence in the Radical Alternative Theater scenes in Austin and the Twin Cities, and his more recent work at New York venues including Soho Rep and Joe's Pub. Love Like Light should be of interest to anyone interested in queer performance, Afromysticism, and abstract structures of performance writing. 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 ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Despite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production (University of Texas Press, 2021), highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freelancers has critically shaped the entertainment industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the books, Kate Fortmueller, Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia, proposes a media industry history that positions underrepresented and quotidian experiences as the structural elements of the culture and business of Hollywood. Resisting a top-down assessment, Fortmueller explores the wrangling of labor unions and guilds that advocated for collective action for everyday actors and helped shape professional norms. She pulls from archival research, in-person interviews, and firsthand observation to examine a history that cuts across industry boundaries and situates actors as a labor group at the center of industrial and technological upheavals, with lasting implications for race, gender, and labor relations in Hollywood. 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

[This episode contains explicit content.] Artists from Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse command fascination not only for their work but also for their drug addictions and the manner of their death. Communions is an attempt to understand the role that opiates play in the artistic lives of those who are gripped by addiction. Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions probes the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture. Adam Lehrer speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about addiction and class, our fetish for the artist flirting with death, communing with his heroes, his experience of the opioid crisis, and the role for art criticism in unraveling these issues. Lehrer reads a chapter on Darby Crash from Communions. Adam Lehrer is a writer and art critic, but he’s also a former heroin addict himself. He blogs at Safety Propaganda. A Statement On My Severed Relationship With The Quietus Art's Moral Fetish Darby Crash Frisk, film based on a novel by Dennis Cooper Dash Snow Beautiful Boy, film based on memoirs by David and Nic Sheff Zoë Tamerlis Lund Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. 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 Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (U Toronto Press, 2021), Katja Praznik counters the Western understanding of art – as a passion for self-expression and an activity done out of love – and instead builds a case for understanding art as a form of invisible labour. Focusing on the experiences of art workers and the history of labour regulation in the arts in socialist Yugoslavia, Praznik unpacks the contradiction at the heart of artistic production, and shines a light on how the economic reality of creative work has often been obscured by the mystification of artistic endeavour. Drawing on Marxist-feminist analysis, the book demonstrates the value of recognising that artistic labour is ultimately a category of work. In this way, Praznik offers a strategic framework for enhancing our understanding of the struggle for equity in the world of institutionalised art production. Katja Praznik is Associate Professor within the Arts Management Program at the University at Buffalo. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2017) by Hiromu Nagahara is the first English-language history of the origins and impact of the Japanese pop music industry. The book connects the rise of mass entertainment, epitomized by ryūkōka (“popular songs”), with Japan’s transformation into a middle-class society in the years after World War II. With the arrival of major international recording companies like Columbia and Victor in the 1920s, Japan’s pop music scene soon grew into a full-fledged culture industry that reached out to an avid consumer base through radio, cinema, and other media. The stream of songs that poured forth over the next four decades represented something new in the nation’s cultural landscape. Emerging during some of the most volatile decades in Japan’s history, popular songs struck a deep chord in Japanese society, gaining a devoted following but also galvanizing a vociferous band of opponents. A range of critics—intellectuals, journalists, government officials, self-appointed arbiters of taste—engaged in contentious debates on the merits of pop music. Many regarded it as a scandal, evidence of an increasingly debased and Americanized culture. For others, popular songs represented liberation from the oppressive political climate of the war years. Tokyo Boogie-Woogie is a tale of competing cultural dynamics coming to a head just as Japan’s traditionally hierarchical society was shifting toward middle-class democracy. The pop soundscape of these years became the audible symbol of changing times. Hiromu Nagahara is an associate professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Andrea Warner's Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography (Graystone Books, 2018) tells the story, often in Buffy's own words, of the life of the remarkable artist and activist. Buffy Sainte-Marie's musical career is as varied and fascinating as those of her Canadian contemporaries Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, but he work has not always achieved the recognition it deserves. Warner's book is in part an attempt to rectify that by presenting Buffy's complete story to a new generation of readers and listeners. We encounter Buffy as a coffee shop folkie, an electronic music pioneer, and indigenous activist, a Sesame Street cast member, and finally as an elder stateswoman of Canadian music. This is a book for longtime fans or for new initiates who have never heard songs like Power in the Blood, Now That the Buffalo's Gone, The Universal Soldier, or The War Racket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The female form has been a fraught site of filmic meaning – of desire and violence, of sex and death – from the very beginnings of cinema. But how deep do these meanings travel? How are our understandings of gender and sexuality not the stuff of screen representation but shaped by film technology and culture as well? Published in November 2020 by Fordham University Press, Genevieve Yue’s Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, “in rich archival and technical detail… examines three sites of technical film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. Within each site, she locates a common motif, the vanishing female body, which is transformed into material to be used in the making of a film. The book develops a theory of gender and film materiality through readings of narrative film, early cinema, experimental film, and moving image art.” In this discussion, Dr. Yue articulates her relationship to interdisciplinary research, traces her personal journey from dissertation to book, and argues for the centrality of material culture in feminist film studies. Genevieve Yue is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Media and director of the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College, the New School. Her essays and criticism have been published in October, Grey Room, The Times Literary Supplement, Reverse Shot, Artforum.com, Film Comment, and Film Quarterly. She is also an independent film programmer and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Flaherty Film Seminar. 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, Ms., and Camera Obscura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

One of the world’s most multicultural cities, twentieth-century Cairo was a magnet for the ambitious and talented. During the 1920s and ’30s, a vibrant music, theater, film, and cabaret scene flourished, defining what it meant to be a “modern” Egyptian. Women came to dominate the Egyptian entertainment industry—as stars of the stage and screen but also as impresarias, entrepreneurs, owners, and promoters of a new and strikingly modern entertainment industry. In Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring '20s (W. W. Norton, 2021, in arrangement with Saqi Books), Raphael Cormack unveils the rich histories of independent, enterprising women like vaudeville star Rose al-Youssef (who launched one of Cairo’s most important newspapers); nightclub singer Mounira al-Mahdiyya (the first woman to lead an Egyptian theater company) and her great rival, Oum Kalthoum (still venerated for her soulful lyrics); and other fabulous female stars of the interwar period, a time marked by excess and unheard-of freedom of expression. Buffeted by crosswinds of colonialism and nationalism, conservatism and liberalism, “religious” and “secular” values, patriarchy and feminism, this new generation of celebrities offered a new vision for women in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Our sense of smell is a uniquely visceral—and personal—form of experience. As Hsuan L. Hsu points out, smell has long been spurned by Western aesthetics as a lesser sense for its qualities of subjectivity, volatility, and materiality. But it is these very qualities that make olfaction a vital tool for sensing and staging environmental risk and inequality. Unlike the other senses, smell extends across space and reaches into our bodies. Hsu traces how writers, artists, and activists have deployed these embodied, biochemical qualities of smell in their efforts to critique and reshape modernity’s olfactory disparities.  Hsuan L. Hsu's The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (NYU Press, 2020) outlines the many ways that our differentiated atmospheres unevenly distribute environmental risk. Reading everything from nineteenth-century detective fiction and naturalist novels to contemporary performance art and memoir, Hsu takes up modernity’s differentiated atmospheres as a subject worth sniffing out. From the industrial revolution to current-day environmental crises, Hsu uses ecocriticism, geography, and critical race studies to, for example, explore Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists’ response to racialized discourse about Asiatic odors, and the devastation settler colonialism has reaped on Indigenous smellscapes. In each instance, Hsu demonstrates the violence that air maintenance, control, and conditioning enacts on the poor and the marginalized. From nineteenth-century miasma theory theory to the synthetic chemicals that pervade twenty-first century air, Hsu takes smell at face value to offer an evocative retelling of urbanization, public health, and environmental violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts