Dismissal, in fact, is the default response to khayal (the preeminent genre of North Indian classical music), well before we get to know what khayal is, and vaguely term its strangeness 'classical music'. Those who later become acquainted with its extraordinary melodiousness forget that on the initial encounter it had sounded unmelodious. These words are part of the introduction to Amit Chaudhuri’s newest book Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music (New York Review Books / Faber and Faber, 2021). The book is part guide to Indian music, part memoir of Chaudhuri’s life, part examination of modern culture. In this interview, I ask Amit to explain what makes Indian music so special, both in general and to his life. We explore how Indian music influenced the writing of this most recent book, and how his musical experiences in India and abroad have affected how he sees the world. Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, several collections of short stories, poetry and essays, one nonfiction work, and a critical study of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds the titles of Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia in England and Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University in India. In addition to his writing, he is also a singer in the North Indian classical tradition and a composer and performer in a project that brings together the raga, blues, and jazz with a variety of other musical traditions. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Finding the Raga. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. 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 creative work? In Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries (Columbia UP, 2021), Michael Siciliano, an assistant professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, explores this question through a comparison of a recording studio and a digital content creation company. The book considers the meaning and practice of ‘creative’ labour, considering its ambivalences, the passions and commitments, as well as the compromises and alienations associated with this area of economy and society. It represents a crucial intervention to the literature on cultural production, as well as offering an important understanding of the impact of digital modes of distribution and production on creative industries. A rich and fascinating comparative ethnography, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Maureen Mahon’s book, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Duke University Press, 2020), focuses on the contributions to rock and roll by African American women from Big Mama Thornton to Tina Turner, and the erasure and marginalization of most of these women in other histories of popular music. Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll and puts them back into a narrative that generally emphasizes the role of white male guitar players in the development of the genre. She considers how the racialized vocal timbre of African American women’s voices has shaped rock from the girl groups of the early 1960s to the background singers who created the sound of some of the most iconic tracks recorded by the bands of the British invasion. Running throughout the book is a deep analysis of how the stereotypes about Black women crashed into the lived experiences of her subjects, affecting their careers, their relationships, and their music. By uncovering this hidden history, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century. 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

From ships and novels to Mardi Gras, water, and television, how does the legacy of the Middle Passage, the leg of the Atlantic through which African people were trafficked as slaves, reverberate through the creations of writers and authors of the African diaspora? In this episode of New Books Network, Dr. Lee M. Pierce interviews Dr. Tara G. Green about her latest book on the Middle Passage, rebirth, trauma, water, social death, and resistance. In Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song (Ohio State UP, 2018), Tara T. Green turns to twentieth- and recent twenty-first-century representations of the Middle Passage created by African-descended artists and writers. Examining how these writers and performers revised and reimagined the Middle Passage in their work, Green argues that they recognized it as a historical and geographical site of trauma as well as a symbol for a place of understanding and change. Their work represents the legacy African captives left for resisting “social death” (the idea that Black life does not matter), but it also highlights strong resistance to that social death (the idea that it does matter). Dr. Tara T. Green is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UNC Greensboro where she is also the Linda Arnold Carlisle Excellence Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Lee M. Pierce is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo and host of the RhetoricLee Speaking podcast. Connect on Gmail and social media @rhetoriclee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Throughout In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (University of Michigan Press, 2021), Dr. Philip Auslander addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows. Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation. Auslander’s term to denote the musician’s presence before the audience is musical persona. While the presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book’s analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea has been a monograph, a documentary film, a stage play, and now a published script from Northwestern University Press.  This play weaves together interviews Johnson conducted with gay Black men from the South with Johnson's own recollections of growing up young, gifted, gay, and Black in Hickory, North Carolina. These stories are funny, heart-breaking, and inspiring, and reveal a collective portrait of gay Black Southern life that is much more complex than the simple narrative of repression and escape so often associated with this community.  In this interview we discuss what keeps Johnson returning to these stories, his relationship to Black spirituality, and the techniques he used to embody these men when he performed Sweet Tea as a one man show. 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

Jack Black, Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy (Routledge 2021). In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. On this episode of New Books Network, your host Lee M. Pierce (they) interviews author Jack Black (he) about psychoanalysis, PC culture, The Office, and the subversive potential of comedy to change our collective experience. Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy engages with the social and cultural tensions inherent to our understandings of political correctness, arguing that comedy can subversively redefine our approach to ‘PC debates’, contestations surrounding free speech and the popular portrayal of political correctness in the media and society. Aided by the work of both Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, this unique analysis adopts a psychoanalytic/philosophical framework to explore issues of race, racism and political correctness in the widely acclaimed BBC ‘mockumentary’, The Office (UK), as well as a variety of television comedies. Jack Black is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. After completing his postgraduate studies at Loughborough University, his research has continued to explore the interrelationships between sociology, media and communications and cultural studies. The clip from The Office discussed in the interview is here. Connect with Jack on Twitter @jackstblack and with Lee @rhetoriclee.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Carrie Noland's Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary (University of Chicago Press, 2020) goes past conventional understandings of Cunningham that insist that randomness was his central goal as a choreographer, instead providing a portrait of a choreographer interested in story, connection, and affect. For Noland, chance is a starting point in understanding Cunningham, not a final destination. His chance operations were always shaped and modified by a keen choreographic and theatrical eye. Chapters explore his relation to many other artists and thinkers, including John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, James Joyce, and Bill T. Jones. 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

Felicia Rose Chavez' The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Breakbeat Poets, 2020) is a practical and persuasive guide to revolutionizing the teaching of creative writing. Combining theory, memoir, and pedagogy, this book guides the reader through the process of de-centering whiteness (and de-centering the instructor) to allow all students but particularly students of color to find their unique voices and pursue their personal and and artistic goals. The insights in this book are derived from the creative writing classroom, but they are readily applicable to any creative pursuit. This is a must-read book for creative writing instructors looking for ways to break down the rigid hierarchies that have defined the creative writing classroom for more than eighty years. 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

In Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records (Equinox, 2021), founder Bill Nowlin combines memoir with a history of the founding and evolution of Rounder as he talks about his experiences as one of the labels three founders. Rounder Records was born in 1970, a "hobby that got out of control," a fledgling record company more or less conceived while the Sixties were still in flower, which began on just over $1,000. Founded by three friends just out of college, the Boston-area company produced over 3,000 record albums, the most active company of the last half-century specializing in roots music and its contemporary offshoots. Rounder won 56 Grammy Awards and documented a swath of music that in many cases might otherwise never have been presented to a broader public. It's arguably a quintessentially American success story. This book focuses on the early years up to and just through when Rounder evolved to a second stage, with a generational change that has kept the label healthy and flourishing when so many other cultural enterprises from the era have folded or gone dark. It's the story of three people with no background in business who took an idea and, through hard work and passion, built up something of lasting cultural significance.  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

The Art of Experiment: Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design (Routledge, 2020) is a handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times. In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. Hughes and Armstrong search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself, examining how we have manipulated these historically through an anthropocentric focus. Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes speak with Pierre d'Alancaisez about their approach to knowledge-making and organa paradoxa as an apparatus for incorporating the unexpected into research and practices. They also talk about sending cockroaches into space, living Shakespearean bricks, and about the value of experimentation in establishing productive cross-disciplinary collaborations. Some of the works discussed in the interview are described and illustrated in a Nature article. Caustic Ophelia from Brick Dialogues is on Bandcamp. The Hanging Gardens of Medusa can be seen here. They were also a subject of a study by the British Interplanetary Society. Hughes' and Armstrong's earlier collaboration with Espen Gangvik The Handbook of the Unknowable is available in full here. 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

Owed (Penguin, 2020) is the second collection of poems by Dr. Joshua Bennett, poet, professor, and artist. This volume is a wide-ranging, celebratory book focused on what Bennett calls "the Black quotidian," including the poetry of the barbershop, plastic slip-covers on couches, and the benign struggle between a father and a son over a pair of long johns. Throughout the book, Bennett's attention to detail and gift for both sound and sense are on dazzling display. In this conversation we discuss Owed, as well as Bennett's evolving relationship to spirituality, his process of learning to write out loud through poetry slams, and his experience of being a new father. Bennett is also the author of the poetry volume The Sobbing School, the monograph Being Property Once Myself, and the upcoming Spoken Word: A Cultural History. 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

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms. While such strategies may at times be no more than a profitable lure, the most probing and powerful instances of sexual provocation serve to illuminate, question, and transform our understanding of sex and sexuality. In Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media (Indiana UP, 2021), award-winning author Maria San Filippo looks at the provocative in films, television series, web series and videos, entertainment industry publicity materials, and social media discourses and explores its potential to create alternative, even radical ways of screening sex. Throughout this edgy volume, San Filippo reassesses troubling texts and divisive figures, examining controversial strategies--from "real sex" scenes to scandalous marketing campaigns to full-frontal nudity--to reveal the critical role that sexual provocation plays as an authorial signature and promotional strategy within the contemporary media landscape.  A trailer for the books is available on YouTube. Both of San Filippo's IUP books are 30% off (through May) using code SANFILIPPO at iupress.org Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

During the Cold War, cultural diplomacy was one way that the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union tried to cultivate goodwill towards their countries. As Anne Searcy explains in her book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2020), dance was part of this effort. She focuses on two tours of the USSR undertaken by American troupes when the American Ballet Company visited the Soviets in 1960, and when choreographer George Balanchine returned to the country of his birth in 1962 with his New York City Ballet Company. These popular tours functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. Although geo-political tensions feature in the book, Searcy is just as concerned with the reception of these tours by Soviet and American critics, and how they filtered their opinions on the dances and performers they saw through local aesthetic debates, tinged by political realities. 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

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this centre of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labours. Shannan Clark. author of The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2020), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the origins of the creative class, their labour union struggles and successes, the role of the Works Projects Administration, and institutions like the Design Laboratory and Consumer Union which foretell the experiences of today’s culture workers. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary 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

Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu (Harvard UP, 2021) is a study of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China—and arguably of the entire traditional era. In a set of interconnected essays, Jack W. Chen offers new readings of the Shishuo xinyu that draw upon social network analysis, performance studies, theories of ritual and mourning, and concepts of gossip and reputation to illuminate how the anecdotes of the collection imagine and represent a political and cultural elite. Whereas most accounts of the Shishuo have taken a historical approach, Chen argues that the work should be understood in literary terms. At its center, Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance is an extended meditation on the very nature of the anecdote form, both what the anecdote affords in terms of representing a social community and how it provides a space for the rehearsal of certain longstanding philosophical and cultural arguments. Although each of the chapters may be read separately as an essay in its own right, when taken together, they present a comprehensive account of the Shishuo in all of its literary complexity. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. 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 Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming (Duke University Press, 2021), Dr. Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV's shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s. Drawing on interviews with industry workers from programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Klein demonstrates how MTV generated a coherent discourse on youth and identity by intentionally leveraging stereotypes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Klein explores how this production cycle, which showcased a variety of ways of being in the world, has played a role in identity construction in contemporary youth culture—ultimately shaping the ways in which Millennial audiences of the 2000s thought about, talked about, and embraced a variety of identities. Dr. Amanda Ann Klein is associate professor in the Department of English at East Carolina 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Catapult, 2019) is a fascinating tour through a wide range of narrative structures that are inspired by forms in the natural world. As Jane Alison writes, "For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel--one we're actually told to follow--and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. . . . But: something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?" Whether the meandering path of a snail, the spiral shape of a shell, or the expanding energy of an explosion, these forms can liberate writers from the strictures of linear, Aristotelian narrative. Part memoir, part craft book, and part manifesto, Meander, Spiral, Explode is sure to interest fiction writers, but also playwrights, poets, and anyone interested in formal experimentation in storytelling. 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

After decades of criticism about perhaps the most famous director in history, it seems that nothing is left to be said. But maybe critics just haven’t been willing to be surprised by the films they have watched again and again. On this episode of New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews famed literary critic Dr. D.A. Miller (h) about ropes, shoes, desserts, stains, and the other surprising little touches that characterize Hitchcock’s surplus style. In Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago Press, 2016), D. A. Miller does what seems impossible: he discovers what has remained unseen in Hitchcock’s movies, a secret style that imbues his films with a radical duplicity. Focusing on three films—Strangers on a Train, Rope, and The Wrong Man—Miller shows how Hitchcock anticipates, even demands a “Too-Close Viewer.” Dwelling within us all and vigilant even when everything appears to be in good order, this Too-Close Viewer attempts to see more than the director points out, to expand the space of the film and the duration of the viewing experience. And, thanks to Hidden Hitchcock, that obsessive attention is rewarded. In Hitchcock’s visual puns, his so-called continuity errors, and his hidden appearances (not to be confused with his cameos), Miller finds wellsprings of enigma. Hidden Hitchcock is a revelatory work that not only shows how little we know this best known of filmmakers, but also how near such too-close viewing comes to cinephilic madness. Works by D.A. Miller mentioned in this interview: “My Lockdown with ‘Death in Venice,’” LA Review of Books Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Nate Chinen's Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (Vintage, 2019) is an essential guide to 21st century jazz. Named a best book of the year by NPR, GQ, Billboard, JazzTimes and many more, Chinen's book profiles many of the most exciting voices in jazz, from Kamasi Washington to Henry Threadgill to Cécile McLorin Salvant. Chinen shows that contemporary jazz thrives off its interplay with genres including classical, hip-hop, R&B, and rock. Jazz, now as always, is an ever-evolving polyglot genre, not a set of canonical works captured in amber. This is a great book for jazz aficionados looking to expand their knowledge of today's foremost players or for general music fans looking for a window into the diverse and exciting world of jazz.  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

After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in Haiti (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a study of carnival, politics, and the musical engagement of ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians in contemporary Haiti. Drawing on more than a decade and a half of ethnographic research, Rebecca Dirksen presents an in-depth consideration of politically and socially engaged music and what these expressions mean for the Haitian population in the face of challenging political and economic circumstances. The book centers the voices of Haitian musicians and regular citizens by extensively sharing interviews and detailed analyses of musical performance in the context of contemporary events well beyond the musical realm. Dr. Rebecca Dirksen is an ethnomusicologist working across the spectrum of musical genres in Haiti and its diaspora. Her research concerns cultural approaches to development, crisis, and disaster; sacred ecologies, diverse environmentalisms, and ecomusicology; and applied/engaged/activist scholarship. She is a professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington and a founding member of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT). Dr. Isabel Machado serves as reviews editor for the Oral History Journal and is guest editing a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Festival Studies on the “Materiality of Festivities.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Scientists have scientific reason and use the scientific method. Humanists have... Emotion? Close reading? Not so, argues Eric Hayot in Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia UP, 2021). Contrary to popular belief, the humanities involve both reasoning and methods. Humanist reason, Hayot shows, is philosophically and historically grounded and applicable to almost every discipline. Part history of philosophy, part methods handbook, and part manifesto, Humanist Reason will change the way we advocate for the humanities in the twenty-first century. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Evening Plays (Theatre Communications Group, 2020) collects three plays by experimental playwright Richard Maxwell. The plays are inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, and all three concern death and dying. The Evening focuses on characters whose lives revolve around cage-fighting and drinking, and also includes searing meditations on the process of dying. Samara reads a bit like a western, though one filtered through a mystic sensibility reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges. Paradiso is, like its Dantean precursor, a fractured, future-oriented work that exists on the border of the human. Videos of The Evening and Paradiso can be found here and here. Several of his paintings are currently on view between Dunkin’ Donuts and Frames Bowling Alley on the second floor of the south building at Port Authority Bus Terminal. 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

Premiered in 1944, Appalachian Spring is a ballet developed in a close collaboration between the composer Aaron Copland and choreographer Martha Graham. It is one of Copland’s most famous compositions, but its very popularity has obscured the performance and publication history of this iconic Americana work. In fact, most people are familiar with the orchestral suite Copland arranged from the ballet’s music rather than with the original composition. Even Copland lost track of the many different published versions of the score. Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett and Aaron Sherber have stepped into this muddle and co-edited a critical edition of the score of the original music for the ballet, published by A-R Editions in 2020 as part of a series called Music of the United States of America (MUSA). MUSA is a joint venture between the Recent Researches in Music series of editions and the American Musicological Society with significant funding support from the National Endowment of Humanities. The series aims to reflect the breadth of American music and includes editions of musicals, popular songs from different eras, art music, and various kinds of folk music. The critical edition includes a companion website and an introductory essay about the work, its performance history and an explanation of the provenance of the sources DeLapp-Birkett and Sherber used to inform their edition, along with copious notes that describe each editorial decision. In an unusual addition, the score also includes images of the Martha Graham Dance Company’s production of the ballet which illustrate the connections between the music and the dance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Xiaomei Chen's Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda (Columbia UP, 2016) examines the changing place of revolutionary propaganda in a changing China. Chen analyzes the "grey areas" in deceptively simple plays and films, showing how a contemporary film about Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping can also be read as an indictment of the corruption and inequality of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." In our discussion we also touch on Xiaomei's family's history as prominent Chinese actors and her own intellectual journey, beginning as a Red Guard and ending as a tenured professor at UC Davis. 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

How do we think about situations and things do not exist but might, engage in pretense and fiction, and create new works of art? These are central cases in which we’re using our imaginations, but what is imagination, and how should it be explained? In Explaining Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2020), Peter Langland-Hassan distinguishes using mental imagery to think about things and thinking about imaginary things, and proceeds to give a reductive account of both. On his view, imagining isn’t a sui generis mental state, as the received view holds. Instead, it can be reduced to more basic states, in particular belief, desire, and intention. Langland-Hassan, who is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, uses his account to explain the central cases of imagination, defends his view against objections, and considers how recent advances in Deep Learning might help explain the creative process. 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 the history of women’s work in film and TV help address inequality today? In Women’s Activism Behind the Screens: Trade Unions and Gender Inequality in the British Film and Television Industries (University of Bristol Press, 2020), Frances Galt, a Teaching Associate in history at Newcastle University, looks at the history of women’s struggles for equality within unions in the screen industry, to show the lessons of how gender equality has progressed and receded since the 1930s. The book draws on a rich blend of archival, oral history, and policy document research, presenting the context for key moments in the fight to support the status of women in the film and television industries. A fascinating history, with crucial lessons for contemporary activism, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Maybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020) could be described as a memoir in essay form. Collecting pieces from the past two decades, this book covers Luc Sante's childhood as an immigrant from Belgium, his engagement with the downtown arts scene that gave rise to punk, and the eventual downfall of a version of New York that may have been dangerous but certainly allowed space for creative experimentation, even failure. It also includes essays covering sideshow photography, detective fiction, and experimental film, and profiles of figures including Barbara Epstein, H.P. Lovecraft, and Vivian Maier. As Sante says in this interview, in the war between poetry and prose he is a non-combatant: these essays often read as prose poems in the deep lyricism and experimentation with form. 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

The medium of cinema emerged during the height of Victorian-era European empires, and as a result, settler colonial imperialism has thematically suffused film for well over a century. In Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World on Film (Routledge, 2020), Drs. Janne Lahti (Academy of Finland Fellow in history, University of Helsinki) and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Professor of English, Virginia Tech University) bring together a collection of scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine how film has been used to both justify and, in some cases, push against global systems of settler colonial conquest. The essays in the collection are truly global, stretching from Australia to central Asia to Hawaii, the American West, and beyond, and cover film history from the early twentieth century up to the “final frontier” of early twenty first century science fiction films. Together, Lahti and Weaver-Hightower make a strong case for further settler colonial cultural studies as a means of understanding how entertainment can be a force for resistance or a tool for colonial oppression. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University Press, 2021) by Dr. Daphne Brooks is a lyrical masterpiece that takes readers on an exhilarating journey through a century of Black sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé. In writing alongside the sistas who cared for Black women's musicianship like Pauline Hopkins and Janelle Monaé, Brooks casts contemporary performers as archivists, acclaimed writers as sound theorists, record label originators as music critics, and fans as the vital keepers of Black sound. Brooks’ liner notes are a “requiem” for the oversight of Black women musicians and their intellectual resonance, powerfully uncovering their sonic, visual, and kinesthetic innovations through a Black feminist conceptual lens. On each step of the journey, Brooks presents Black sound women as radical intellectuals, as the creators of modernity, and as the fierce leaders of revolutionary world-making. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, entitled How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (Restless Books, 2020), and edited by Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert. It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to New York City’s Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood, Broadway, literature, politics, and resistance. We take deep dives into cuisine, language, popular culture, and even Yiddish in the other Americas, including Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. The book presents a bountiful menu of genres: essays, memoir, song, letters, poems, recipes, cartoons, conversations, and much more. Authors include Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and luminaries such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, Michael Chabon, Abraham Cahan, Sophie Tucker, Blume Lempel, Irving Howe, Art Spiegelman, Alfred Kazin, Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, Paula Vogel, and Liana Finck. Readers will laugh and cry as they delve into personal stories of assimilation and learn about people from a diverse variety of backgrounds, Jewish and not, who have made the language their own. The Yiddish saying states: Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Man plans and God laughs. How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish illustrates how those plans are full of zest, dignity, and tremendous humanity. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). 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 today’s episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, Sneha Annavarapu talks with Dr. Caterina Fugazzola, Earl S Johnson Instructor in Sociology at the University of Chicago, about her research on the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Fugazzola briefly discusses her current book project (under contract with Temple University Press) in which she explains how grassroots groups organizing around sexual identity have achieved significant social change—in terms of visibility, social acceptance, and participation—in virtual absence of public protest, and under conditions of tightening governmental control over civil society groups. But, more pertinently to our special series, our guest tells us about what drew her to the project, and the kinds of dilemmas, issues, and opportunities that marked her fieldwork in the region. For instance, she walks us through what it is like to do ethnographic fieldwork on a cruise ship! We also chat about what it means to do ethnographic observations online and why teaching digital ethnographic methods is a welcome opportunity to rethink our very dated presumptions around physical co-presence in fieldwork being desirable to gather more “authentic” data. In all, tune in for a very candid, witty, and insightful conversation around fieldwork and for a dose of Dr. Fugazzola’s vivacious and contagious energy for the affordances of digital ethnography. Learn more about Ethnographic Marginalia here. Dr. Caterina Fugazzola is is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Sociology. Her general interests include social movements, gender and sexuality studies, transnational sociology, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Howard Sherman's Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) provides a fascinating tour of contemporary productions of Wilder's great play.  Why does this play from 1938 continue to speak to contemporary audiences, and how does it speak differently in different settings? How is it both timeless and continually timely? And how have contemporary stagings dealt with its reputation as a wholesome, dull chestnut? Whether performed in a maximum security prison, at a hospital, or at prestigious theatres like Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, Our Town communicates a universal message about paying careful attention to the small details of life. The "our" of its title refers not just to fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, but to all of us. 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

Tavia Nyong’o's Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018), examines a broad range of artists and disciplines, from Adrian Piper to Kara Walker to the meaning of the auroch's in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Throughout the book, Nyong’o draws the reader's attention to the ways Black and queer artists construct alternative worlds in a context of brutality and discrimination. Negotiating between the twin poles of Afro-futurism and Afro-pessimism, Nyong’o summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life. 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

The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan’s greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye. The lyrical tone of the writing of Japanese film scholar Linda C. Ehrlich perfectly complements the understated, yet powerful, tone of the films. From An Elemental Cinema, readers will gain a special understanding of Kore-eda’s films through a novel connection to the natural elements as reflected in Japanese traditional aesthetics. An Elemental Cinema presents Kore-eda’s oeuvre as a connected whole with overarching thematic concerns, despite frequent generic experimentation. It also offers an example of how the poetics of cinema can be practiced in writing, as well as on the screen, and helps readers understand the films of this contemporary director as works of art that relate to their own lives. Linda C. Ehrlich—writer, teacher, editor—has published extensively about world cinema, art, and traditional theatre in a number of acclaimed academic journals. Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. 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 familiar story of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by legendary blues "bad men" like Stagger Lee undergird the persistent racial myths surrounding "authentic" blues expression.  Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020) unpacks the figure of the American blues performer, moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey and Big Mama Thornton to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White to reveal that blues makers have long used their songs, performances, interviews, and writings to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression.  Using examples of fictional and real-life blues artists culled from popular music and literary works from writers such as Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, and Sherman Alexie, Kimberly Mack demonstrates that the stories blues musicians construct about their lives (however factually slippery) are inextricably linked to the "primary story" of the narrative blues tradition, in which autobiography fuels musicians' reclamation of power and agency. 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

The devil is a defiant, nefarious figure, the emblem of evil, and harbinger of the damned. However, the festive devil—the devil that dances—turns the most hideous acts into playful transgressions. Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo, Festive Devils of the Americas (Seagull Books, 2015) presents a transnational and performance-centered approach to this fascinating, feared, and revered character of fiestas, street festivals, and carnivals in North, Central, and South America. As produced and performed in both rural and urban communities and among neighborhood groups and councils, festive devils challenge the principles of colonialism and nation-states reliant on the straight and narrow opposition between good and evil, black and white, and us and them. Learn more about festive devils here, and in the work of Rose Cano, who is currently studying how Peruvian devils manifest in Seattle, Washington. Of notable influence on this text is Leda Martins’ concept of spiral time, which you can learn more about in Martins’ chapter, “Performances of Spiral Time,” in Performing Religion in the Americas: Media, Politics, and Devotional Practices of the Twenty-First Century (Seagull Books, 2007). Milla Cozart Riggio is James J. Goodwin Professor of English Emerita at Trinity College. Angela Marino is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Paolo Vignolo is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Colombia, Bogota. Other contributors to the book Festive Devils of the Americas include Miguel Rubio Zapata and Amiel Cayo, members of El Groupo Cultural Yuyachkani; the late Thomas Abercrombie; Miguel Gandert; Monica Rojas-Stewart; Max Harris; Zeca Ligiéro; Lowell Fiet; Rawle Gibbons; Raviji (Ravindranath Maharaj); David M. Guss; Rafael Salvatore; Benito Irady; Anita Gonzalez; Enrique R. Lamadrid; and Rachel Bowditch. The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics provided continual support (financial, intellectual, and personal), especially Diana Taylor, Director, and Marcial Godoy-Anativa. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui also advised the general Festive Devils project. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Diana Taylor's ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Duke University Press, 2020) examines what it means to be presente in the context of protest, theatre, and everyday life. Taylor pays particular attention to the performativity of protest politics and the politics of performance art in the Americas, including case studies of the Zapatistas, post-dictatorship historical memory in Chile and Argentina, and the leftist pranksters The Yes Men. ¡Presente! is a wide-ranging and entertaining work of scholarship that looks at how performance and performance studies can become useful tools in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism and in the creation of new modes of living. 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

How can we create a more equal media industry? In Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond, Marcus Ryder and Sir Lenny Henry, both founder members of the The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University, tell the story of their work to transform British television and set out an eight point manifesto for change. The book lays out the diversity crisis in the media industry, setting out the numerous barriers confronting those who are labelled as minorities (despite being the majority of the population!) and showing why previous efforts to address the problems have failed. By doing so, the book sets up its alternatives that will create a more just, and thus more diverse, television industry. The book, along with Marcus’ blog, is essential reading for academics and the public, both in the UK and beyond. 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

Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland (Oxford University Press, 2020) by Andrea Bohlman is a study of the music of dissent and protest during the Solidarity Movement in 1980s Poland. This book is not simply a re-telling of significant events in the fight against state socialism or an examination of important political anthems (although she does this as well). Instead, she grounds her study in the media networks and material culture by which music circulated throughout Poland and internationally. Through close readings of clandestine and state-sponsored recordings augmented by archival research and interviews with participants, Bohlman analyzes the hymns, art and popular music that made up the repertory of the Solidarity Movement. She argues that sound both unified and splintered the Polish opposition. She considers how different kinds of music contributed to the civil resilience of a country suffering under martial law, while at the same time narrating the Solidarity Movement and amplifying the political messages of its leaders. 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

For six years, anthropologist and artist Maya Stovall enacted a series of dance performances outside of liquor stores in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. Stovall conceptualized these performances as prompts for people that may pass by and as a means to open up space for conversation with Detroit residents.  These filmed performances and the interviews that followed make up Liquor Store Theatre (Duke University Press, 2020). In the book, Stovall probes the historic, economic, and political forces that constructed and shape the city of Detroit. Liquor Store Theatre attends closely to the methods of performance and interviews as they unfold in the author’s pursuit of this project. Stovall’s interlocuters share their perspectives on the changes in the city, the challenges the city faces, as well as their hopes for a future in which they can enjoy the benefits of the city. A native Detroiter herself, Stovall’s artistic ventures turn the lens back on the city itself and center the voices of Detroiters, whose awareness of the city’s challenges mixes with their pursuit of opportunity. Liquor Store Theatre videos have been screened at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and at the Cranbrook Art Museum. Stovall brings together ethnography, contemporary art and performance, and geography to offer an innovative method for troubling the relationship between the observed and the observer of city life. Maya Stovall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Stovall’s exhibition for 1526 appears at the Reyes Finn gallery. Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.  Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

On this episode, I interview Mario Telò, professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, about his new book, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, recently published by The Ohio State University Press. In the text, Telò examines how contemporary theorizations of the archive (especially Derrida’s Mal d’Archive) and the death drive (in Freud as well as Bersani, Butler, Edelman, Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, and Žižek) can help us understand the aesthetic experience of tragedy. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy locates the tragic genre's aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life and death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. In so doing, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

André Gregory's not-memoir This Is Not My Memoir (FSG, 2020) is a fascinating trip through theatre history as seen through the eyes of one of its greatest directors. The André we encounter in this book will be familiar to fans of his theatre work or of his celebrated performance in My Dinner with André: curious, ebullient, searching, passionate, funny, and inspiring. This book also includes reflections on André's collaborations and friendships with some of theatre's greatest artists, including Jerzy Grotowski, Wallace Shawn, and Helene Weigel. This book belongs on a shelf next to great autobiographies of the theatre like Harold Clurman's The Fervent Years and Tennessee Williams' Memoirs. 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

The “diva” is a common trope when we talk about culture. We normally think of the diva as a Western construction: the opera singer, the Broadway actress, the movie star. A woman of outstanding talent, whose personality and ability are both larger-than-life. But the truth is throughout history, many cultures have featured spaces for strong female artists, whose talent allows them to break free of the gender roles that pervaded their societies. In Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press: 2020) David Chaffetz briefly explores how these “Asian divas” could be seen as some of the first recognizably “modern women''. In this interview, David and I talk about the three different cultures of Three Asian Divas: Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou. We discuss what it meant to be a diva in these historical contexts, and what they say about gender roles in these historic Asian societies. After studying Persian, Turkish and Arabic in college, David Chaffetz worked on the publication of the Encyclopedia Iranica and is also the author of A Journey through Afghanistan, a study of its varied people, social classes and religious sects. He has lived in Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, and travelled extensively in Asia. After a forty-year break working in the technology industry, he returned to writing with “Three Asian Divas.” You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Much is known about the Qing sartorial regulations and how the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. But what happened on the stage? What did Qing performers wear, not only when they performed as characters in the Han past, but also when they appeared as subjects in the Manchu present? Reading dramatic works against Qing sartorial regulations, Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores a two-sided question: how did the Ming-Qing transition influence costuming as theatrical practices and how, in turn, did costuming enable the production of different types of personhood in early Qing China? With readings of several early Qing theatrical works, from the canonical Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan) to the lesser-known A Ten-Thousand-Li Reunion (Wanli yuan), combined with visual and performance records and historical documents, Staging Personhood provides a new and interdisciplinary perspective on the cultural dynamics of early Qing China. Not only does this book turn an interdisciplinary lens to the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule, it contains a plethora of fascinating moments from early Qing plays—from double-cross-dressers to fake queues—touching on issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and conceptions of time. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. 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 Mike Anthony moved to New York City to become an actor, he’d imagined being under the bright lights of Broadway, living a life full of fame and fortune. Instead, he took a job not on stage for a Broadway show, but behind its bar, and found a life full of meaning. In Life at Hamilton: Sometimes You Throw Away Your Shot, Only to Find Your Story (Waterside, 2020), Mike takes us along on his journey, recounting his extraordinary experiences as Hamilton rocketed into Broadway history, from its unparalleled opening night, through the 2016 election, to its COVID-19 intermission. On display along the way are Mike’s heartfelt and often humorous encounters with the show’s patrons, including some of the most famous celebrities in the world, and its biggest (and littlest) Hamilfans. Mike’s story is a testament to the potent power of theater to connect, to inspire, and to heal. For as long as there have been people, they have put on plays. Life At Hamilton reminds us why. Alexandra Salkin is currently a student at University of California, Santa Cruz. 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 story of the Passion of Christ has lived through the ages in the Netherlands despite secularism growing in the popular narrative of the nation. In this episode, Dr. Mirella Klomp, of the Protestant Theological University, the Netherlands, discusses her book “Playing On: Re-staging the Passion after the Death of God,” published by Brill, and talks about how the Passion has seeped out from the liturgy to the wider cultural domain, why its story remains so popular today, whether depicting Christ in conjunction with popular music and pursuits is disrespectful, and whose story the Passion really is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas (University of Washington Press, 2020) by performer and scholar Gerry Smyth includes lyrics and commentary for dozens of sea shanties, as well as a brief history of the genre. The world that emerges in these 19th century sailor songs is surprisingly multi-cultural; in a sense, sea shanties were the first sonic products of globalization, combining African-American work songs, Irish ballads, and English folk tunes. This book is designed to be used by performers and ensembles looking for singable versions of these ribald and entertaining songs. 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