New Books in Performing Arts

From nineteenth-century antislavery pamphleteering to accounts of ecological catastrophe in twenty-first-century fiction, Haitian literature has resounded across the globe since the nation's revolutionaries declared independence in 1804. Starting with pre-revolutionary writing, including the emergence of Haitian Creole letters, extending to the long, largely francophone nineteenth century, and concluding with present-day Haitian writing in the English language, A History of Haitian Literature (Cambridge, 2024/2026) presents the political, cultural, and historical frameworks necessary to comprehend Haiti's vast literary output. Whether writing in Haiti or its wide-ranging diasporas, Haitian authors have boldly contributed to pressing conversations in global letters while reflecting Haiti's unique cultural and historical experiences. Considering an expansive array of poets, playwrights, and novelists - such as Baron de Vastey, Juste Chanlatte, Demesvar Delorme, Edwidge Danticat, René Depestre, Kettly Mars, Dany Laferrière, and Évelyne Trouillot - the contributors to this volume offer a fresh examination of a richly polyglot, transnational literary tradition that spans more than two centuries.

Guest Marlene Daut is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is a literary and intellectual historian of the Caribbean, with a focus on the history of the Haitian Revolution, literary cultures of the greater Caribbean, and racial politics in global media. Her prize-winning biography, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), explores the fascinating life of Haiti’s only king while delving into the complex history of a 19th-century Caribbean monarchy. Daut’s other books include Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool, 2015), and Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017).

Guest Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, and is completing a biography, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” and an essay collection, “‘Blackness’ in French: Race Matters in Translation.” She is an award-winning translator of francophone literature, founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis, and founding co-director of In the Same Boats, an Afro-Atlantic digital cartography. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the NYPL Cullman Center.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press

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In this Episode, current Editor of 19th-Century Music  and the outgoing Editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society offer an inside look into publishing shorter research articles under the rubric “Object Lessons” which take an innovative approach to extending the study of music beyond score and performance to objects involved in the creation and reception of music. They discuss how this genre of scholarly writing as well as its materials and methods may contribute to a disciplinary intervention, 

Nineteenth-Century Music  and the Journal of the American Musicological Society are published three times a year by the University of California Press. For more information about the journals, including subscription and submission information, please visit the NCM and JAMS websites. If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation.

To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit here. 

Articles mentioned: 

1. “Touching Music, Making Musicology” JAMS Vol. 79 (2026) Issue Supplement 
2. Object Lesson: Samsung/Schubert NCM 49.1 (2025)
3. Object Lesson: Four-Hand Nietzsche NCM 49.2  (2025)
4. Object Lesson: Mel Bonis’s Hand NCM 49.3 (2026)
5. Object Lesson: Chopin’s Last Pleyel Piano NCM 50.1  (2026)

Hosted by Berthold Hoeckner in conversation with Jake Johnson 

Berthold Hoeckner is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music at the University of Notre Dame and Professor Emeritus of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Jake Johnson serves as Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Musicology at the Wanda L. Bass School of Music

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Writing in a time of heightened political anxiety–and when accusations of nationalism, authoritarianism, and proto-fascism have increasingly divided Americans into factions– the authors use their influential performance studies-based 'tourist as actor' framework to unpack the ways that Disney parks and their guests co-create performance of implicit Americanness in the 21st century. Disney Parks and the Construction of American Identity: Tourism, Performance, Anxiety (Lexington Books, 2024) argues that the roles that guests choose to perform-- accepting, declining, negotiating, or overwriting scripts offered to them by the Disney theme park experience-- ultimately reveals much about the nature of the contemporary United States. Focusing primarily on Walt Disney World in Florida, and using case studies on music, geography and ecology, sports, families, and politics, these chapters illuminate the always complicated and often contradictory presentations and performances of America within Disney parks in the deeply contested twenty-first century.

Jennifer A. Kokai is director of the School of Theatre and Dance and the Endowed Chair of the Holloway and the Brit at the University of South Florida.

Tom Robson is assistant teaching professor in Purdue University's Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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If you’re interested in experimental film, there’s a good chance that you’ve read the criticism of Erika Balsom. There’s also a good chance that you’re a fan of her work, since it offers an uncommonly sensitive and insightful account of how contemporary filmmakers are reimagining the world at a moment of crisis and opportunity.

A scholar, writer, and curator, Erika is Reader in Film and Media Studies at King's College London and the author of five books, including TEN SKIES (2021) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017). Her remarkable body of criticism has been published in venues such as Cinema Scope, New Left Review, 4Columns, and Artforum.

A selection of this criticism has just been published by Columbia University Press as The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture (2026). The book is a rich feast, exploring an idiosyncratic selection of films and a wide range of issues in contemporary film cultures: from the stakes of observation to the effects of digital technologies, from the slowness of “slow cinema” to the renaissance of repertory cinema, and much more beside.

In this episode of New Books in Film, Alix Beeston chats with Erika about The Edges of Cinema's case for the provocations and pleasures of experimental film, as well as the aims and ethos of Erika’s wider critical project. Alix and Erika also discuss their shared fascination with questions of feminist history and their investment in practicing—and championing—inventive, daring writing both in and beyond the academy.

Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023).

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The Rediscovery of George "Nash" Walker: : The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America (SUNY Press, 2025) is the first biography dedicated to the life and cultural contributions of this actor, writer, and producer who revolutionized Black American theatre during the early twentieth century. In 1892, Walker left his hometown with a medicine show and quickly formed a partnership with comedian Bert Williams that would last nearly eighteen years. Under the moniker of “The Two Real Coons,” Williams and Walker used their comedy to erode the stereotyped White image of minstrel-style “cooning.” Their theatrical company produced many popular plays, including Clorindy/A Lucky Coon (1899–1900), Policy Players (1900–1901), Sons of Ham (1901–1902), In Dahomey (1902–1905), Abyssinia (1905–1906), Bandanna Land (1907–1909), and Mr. Lode of Koal (1909–1910), even performing on Broadway and abroad. An activist at heart, Walker insisted that audiences receive carefully curated Black entertainment, told from a uniquely Afro-American perspective. Unfortunately, Walker contracted syphilis and was forced to retire in 1909, marking the end of the first golden age of Black theatre. Despite his landmark contributions, Walker’s story has been largely forgotten. Drawing on archival resources, newspaper accounts, memoirs, oral histories, and manifestos written by Walker, this book celebrates the accomplishments of the vanguard generation of Black artists who were active between the close of the Civil War and the start of World War I.

Daniel Atkinson’s research and commitment to the legacy of George Walker and his generation is deep and authentic. Listen in on this fantastic conversation and check out also previous episodes with Dr. Cheryl Thompson and Es-pranza Humphry, both scholars of this era. And when you’re finished, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack where we continued our conversation.

Daniel E. Atkinson is an independent scholar who earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington where he specialized in Afro-American music and culture. You can find Daniel on Instagram and LinkedIn.

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