New Books In Dance

Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 2022) provides the first comprehensive history of film experiments at the Bauhaus, the famous art school that operated between 1919 and 1933 and was located in Weimar, before moving to Dessau and later to Berlin. While the Bauhaus is commonly associated with the development of modern architecture and industrial design, Design in Motion focuses on film, and demonstrates how the cinematic medium became a proving ground for some of the school’s most innovative work. Laura Frahm is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Frahm's work explores film and media through the lens of architecture, design, spatial theory, ecological thought, and process philosophy. In addition to her latest book Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the Bauhaus (2022), she is the author of Beyond Space: Cinematic Topologies of the Urban (2010), Moving Spaces: Spatial Configurations in Music Vi

We couldn’t do a season on the Cold War without talking about Bond . . . James Bond. He was there from the beginning and has of course survived into the post-Cold War era. So many films, so many Bonds. We’ve talked about nuclear warfare, espionage and intrigue, evil deep state corporations and corrupt national security institutions, and human stories of love and loss behind the Iron Curtain. Bond’s been through it all. Our films cover four Bonds - Sean Connery’s From Russia With Love (1963), Roger Moore’s For Your Eyes Only (1981), and Pierce Brosnan’s Goldeneye (1995). We end with a discussion of the post-9/11 Bond, Daniel Craig, especially 2012’s Skyfall. We demonstrate how Bond transcends the Cold War, acts as an avatar for a Britain that no longer exists, and, despite a number of cosmetic changes after 9/11, demonstrates surprising continuity over 60 years. Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Li

In The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (U California Press, 2021), Ross Cole revisits the remarkable upswell of interest in folk songs in fin de siècle Britain and America. While the work of folk collectors such as John Lomax, Cecil Sharp and Hubert Parry seems primarily about the preservation of premodern musical cultures, Cole suggests that the anxieties about the disappearance of these traditions were inseparable from – and constitutive of – a critique of industrial modernity. That is, the preoccupation with folk culture in this period was as much about discontent with the present and imagining new visions for the future as it was motivated by a socio-historical interest in the vernacular musics of the past. Cole shows how the desire for ‘folk culture’ actually occluded the messy, hybrid reality of vernacular music making, and the lives of those who made it, as a result. Cole makes the compelling case that what he calls the ‘folkloric imagination’ is shot through with a twinned politi

The Coen Bros. have attracted a wide following and have been rewarded with Oscars and other honors. Some of their films such as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men are cult favorites and box office hits. Yet this team of filmmaking brothers remains misunderstood in some critical circles, partly because, like John Ford, they mischievously refuse to explain themselves to interviewers, preferring to let their work speak for itself. Ethan and Joel Coen also delight in unsettling cinematic conventions and confounding audiences while raising disturbing questions about human nature. Mixing film genres and styles, playing with narrative in postmodernist ways, the Coens' films display shocking tonal shifts as they blend comedy and drama and, most controversially, comedy and violence. This potent mélange of themes and stylistic approaches makes the Coens' films adventurous, unpredictable probes into social anxieties and reflections on the omnipresence of evil in the modern world. In their trenchant sati

Remember Khrushchev-Nixon Kitchen Debate? America recognized its consumer culture was a Cold War weapon. By the early 80s, the home computer in the hands of teenagers further demonstrated American dominance on the economic and cultural fronts. But what happens when teenagers check out of real life and responsibilities too much? We look at films that can be taken as cautionary tales about the dangers of teenagers (or young adults) who don’t take the Cold War seriously. The focus is on the seemingly apolitical, irresponsible and anti-social nature of the modern, video game playing white, affluent American youth. Our more serious films are Wargames, from 1983, and The Falcon and the Snowman, from 1985. But we also throw in a little bit of The Last Starfighter (1984) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) just to spice things up. Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more ab

Two decades after Lewis and Lamb Chop last graced television with their presence, Lewis' daughter Mallory and author Nat Segaloff have set the record straight about the iconic pair in Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop: The Team that Changed Children's Television (University of Kentucky Press, 2022). For almost half a century, celebrated ventriloquist and entertainer Shari Lewis delighted generations of children and adults with the help of her trusted sock puppet sidekick Lamb Chop. For decades, the beloved pair were synonymous with children's television, educating and entrancing their young audience with their symbiotic personalities and their proclivity for song, dance, and the joy of silliness. But as iconic as their television personas were, relatively little inside knowledge has been revealed about Lewis herself and the life-changing moments that led her to the entertainment industry and perhaps, most importantly, to Lamb Chop.  Renowned for her skills as a performer, Lewis was an equally skilled businesswoman. O

Despite changes in the media landscape, film remains a vital force in contemporary culture, as do our ideas of what "a movie" or "the cinematic" are. Indeed, we might say that the category of film now only exists in theory. Whereas film-theoretical discussion at the turn of the 21st century was preoccupied, understandably, by digital technology's permeation of virtually all aspects of the film object, this volume moves the conversation away from a focus on film's materiality towards timely questions concerning the ethics, politics, and even aesthetics of thinking about the medium of cinema. To put it another way, The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory (Oxford UP, 2022), edited by Kyle Stevens, narrows in on the subject of film, not with a nostalgic sensibility, but with the recognition that what constitutes a film is historically contingent, in dialogue with the vicissitudes of entertainment, art, and empire. The volume is divided into six sections: Meta-Theory; Film Theory's Project of Emancipation; Apparatus an

Dame Zandra Rhodes is an English fashion and textile designer who has designed garments for Diana, Princess of Wales and numerous celebrities such as rock stars Freddie Mercury and Marc Bolan. In 2003, she founded the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. Her signature, recognizable design aesthetic has left an indelible mark on the history of fashion. In 2019, Rhodes celebrated her 50th year as a legendary figurehead of British fashion with a retrospective exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum titled “Zandra Rhodes: 50 Years of Fabulous,” and a book published by Yale University Press. Over the course of her groundbreaking career she has won numerous awards including a 1979 Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in the Performing Arts – Costume Design. Who better than this provocative, towering artist to take the Proust Questionnaire and share with us where she draws her motivation and creativity, how she discovered that mortality holds no fear for her, and how she views the world. Ulrich Baer is

In this episode, our host Mariela Morales Suárez discusses the book Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (UNC Press, 2022) by Dr. Larisa Kingston Mann. You’ll hear about: Dr. Mann’s intellectual trajectory and how she became interested in the topic of copyright in Jamaican popular music; The concept of “rude citizenship” through the Jamaican music world; What it means to be “original” from the perspective of copyrights, language, and diverse modes of cultural production in Jamaica; Dr. Mann’s writing process as a form of translation from fieldwork notes, archival materials, and music contents into ethnography; How to make the classroom a meaningful pedagogical space by learning from marginal voices and practices; What constitutes the exilic spaces, namely, the reimagining of marginalized spaces as sites of agency and sovereignty through music and cultural production; The transnational networks of the local music production in Jamaica and global f

Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that broke box office records. Yet it wasn’t just a movie led by and starring Black artists. It grappled with ideas and conflicts central to Black life in America and helped redress the racial dynamics of the Hollywood blockbuster. Scott Bukatman, one of the foremost scholars of superheroes and cinematic spectacle, brings his impeccable pedigree to this lively and accessible study, finding in the utopianism of Black Panther (University of Texas Press, 2022) a way of re-envisioning what a superhero movie can and should be while centering the Black creators, performers, and issues behind it. He considers the superheroic Black body; the Pan-African fantasy, feminism, and Afrofuturism of Wakanda; the African American relationship to Africa; the political influence of director Ryan Coogler’s earlier movies; and the entwined performances of Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger

This episode and the next look back at films that came out in the 1980s, a decade when Hollywood seemed to cater to teenage audiences like never before. So it makes sense that the geo-political structure that shaped and influenced so much of global political action - the Cold War - would show up in movies targeting teen audiences. In the broader media landscape, the question was being asked: Could these post-Vietnam teenagers hack the reality of conflict like their dads and granddads had to? We break down two films about teenagers as soldiers - Taps, released in 1981, and Red Dawn, released in 1984. In both cases, what we see is a conversation about American military culture, whether it can still be counted on when times get tough. And if it can’t, if America’s youth reject it, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Lia Paradis is a professor of history at Slippery Rock University. Brian Crim is a professor of history at the University of Lynchburg. For more on Lies Agreed Upon, go here. Learn more about your

For many, the Beatles offered a delightful alternative to the dull and the staid, while for others, the mop-top haircuts, the unsettling music, and the hysterical girls that greeted the British imports wherever they went were a symbol of unwelcome social and cultural change. This opposition to the group--more widespread and deeper rooted in Chicago than in any other major American city--increased as the decade wore on, especially when the Beatles adopted more extreme countercultural values. At the center of this book is a cast of characters engulfed by the whirlwind of Beatlemania, including the unyielding figure of Mayor Richard J. Daley who deemed the Beatles a threat to the well-being of his city; the Chicago Tribune editor who first warned the nation about the Beatle menace; George Harrison's sister, Louise, who became a regular presence on Chicago radio; the socialist revolutionary who staged all of the Beatles' concerts in the city and used much of the profits from the shows to fund left-wing causes; th

Today I talked to Diane Negra about Shadow of a Doubt (Auteur, 2021). Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock's fifth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favourite and his best. This scrupulously organized film operates as a masterclass on principles of narrative design while generating resonant commentary on the nature of family life.  Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. Analysing the film's narrative system, issues of genre, authorship, social history, homesickness and 'family values', Negra shows how the film's impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content, linking the film's terrors to the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Finally it understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centred Hitchcock text and a mile

Hollywood fantasy cinema is responsible for some of the most lucrative franchises produced over the past two decades, yet it remains difficult to find popular or critical consensus on what the experience of watching fantasy cinema actually entails. What makes something a fantasy film, and what unique pleasures does the genre offer?  In Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021) Alexander Sergeant solves the riddle of the fantasy film by theorizing the underlying experience of imagination alluded to in scholarly discussions of the genre. Drawing principally on the psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, Sergeant considers the way in which fantasy cinema rejects Hollywood's typically naturalistic mode of address to generate an alternative experience that Sergeant refers to as the fantastic, a way of approaching cinema that embraces the illusory nature of the medium as part of the pleasure of the experience. Analyzing such canonical Hollywood fantasy fi

Want to take a trip with the king of the Blues? As B.B. King’s photographer and original biographer, Charlie Sawyer was along for the ride. In B.B. King from Indianola to Icon: A Personal Odyssey with the King of the Blues (Schiffer, 2022), journalist and photographer Charles Sawyer discusses his many years working with and near the greatest of Blues icons, from the early years as King was transitioning to the “Chitlin Circuit” to mainstream audiences to the founding of the B. B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center, Sawyer was there for it all, and shares it with us—along with more than 100 photographs. 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

Ramzi Fawaz, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that weaves together the more contemporary history of feminism and women’s liberation, the gay liberation movement, feminist and queer theory, and iconic popular culture artifacts in order to understand gendered and sexual forms in context of gender and sexual fluidity. This is a brilliant book, interdisciplinary in scope and approach, taking the reader on a journey through theoretical frameworks and interpretive understandings of where we often see queer forms, and what we think about those forms. Fawaz notes that he is working to tell a story, interpreting cultural artifacts to forefront the ideas from feminist and queer theory, knitting these approaches together to guide us through a fascinating understanding of what we see when we watch films, or television, or read comics, or enjoy Broadway performances. These interpretations provide us with ways of seeing identity and shape within narrative forms and creative storyt

What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, violent disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the Culture Wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions. Does a concern with race, gender, and sexuality, with unacknowledged power and privilege, with identity, give present critics the right to criticize the great works of the past? If we have learned to see those works in terms of historical differences rather than universal truths, how is it that they speak to us at all? In the study of the world's cultures, there is more than one way to avoid being Eurocentric; which way should we choose?  Re-examining key thinkers since 1970, including Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Edward Said, Hortense Spillers, Fredric Jameson, and Stuart Hall, Bruce Robbins' book Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford UP, 2022) offers both a non-specialist introdu

Watching our favorite TV shows and movies today, it’s easy to take the relatable characters and familiar settings for granted. But when Henrik Ibsen debuted his play A Doll’s House, realism was a shocking, new approach. Professor Derek Miller discusses what realism can teach us about our reality and how A Doll’s House rocked the 19th century theatre scene. Derek Miller is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He teaches in the English department as well as courses in theater, dance, and media. He is the author of Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 and is currently working on a project titled Visualizing Broadway. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. 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 does the state support writers? In State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (Oxford UP, 2020), Asha Rogers, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the University of Birmingham, explores the history of authors, institutions, and governments approach to literature in a changing, imperial and post-imperial, Britain. The book uses a wealth of examples, from key organisations such as the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain, through case studies of key authors such as Salman Rushdie, to concepts such as multiculturalism and cultural diversity. Making a significant contribution to English literature and cultural policy, the book will be essential reading across the arts and humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the relationship between governments and literature. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice

Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (Routledge, 2022) examines the multiplicity of books, films, TV shows, and merchandise that make up the transmedia Gidget universe from the late 1950s to the 1980s. The book examines the Gidget phenomenon as an early and unique teen girl franchise that expands understanding of both teen girlhood and transmedia storytelling. It locates the film as existing at the historical intersection of numerous discourses and events, including the emergence of surf culture and surf films; the rise of California as signifier of modernity and as the epicentre of white American middle-class teen culture; the annexation of Hawaii; the invention of Barbie; and Hollywood’s reluctant acceptance of teen culture and teen audiences. Each chapter places the Gidget text in context, looking at production and reception circumstances and intertexts such as the novels of Françoise Sagan, the Tammy series, La Dolce Vita, and The Patty Duke Show, to better understand Gidget’s meaning at di