New Books in Performing Arts

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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Over the past twenty-five years, design practice has expanded from making objects to shaping experiences that unfold in-time. As this expansion has accelerated, designers have gained powerful new tools – but often without a shared language for shaping embodied experience. Somaesthetic Design: The Experiencing Body and the Dynamics of Time responds by focusing on the experiencing body as a key source of design knowledge. Drawing from embodied practices and performance traditions, Michael Arnold Mages and Stephen Neely give designers a shared vocabulary and framework for understanding, crafting, and evaluating lived experience as it is felt and sustained in time.

Michael Arnold Mages (PhD) is a designer, strategist, and musician. He teaches in the Information Design and Data Visualization and Experience Design programs at Northeastern University, where he is an assistant professor of design in the Department of Art & Design, and director of the Health and Wellness Design Lab.

Stephen Neely (PhD) is a teacher, conductor, theorist, and clinician who lectures and presents workshops in the fields of design, music, architecture, and pedagogy. He is the Milton and Cynthia Friedman associate professor of music and director of graduate studies for the Carnegie Mellon University School of Music.

Kelvin Vu is a designer and dancer interested in the intersection of the performing arts, public space, and public knowledge.

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Orson Welles is a foundational work of Welles criticism. First published by Joseph McBride in the British Film Institute's Cinema One series in 1972 when the author was twenty-four, it now has been extensively revised and updated to reflect the ongoing developments in the work of this great filmmaker. McBride—who, as Martin Scorsese has written, "has a clearer understanding of Welles and his films than almost anyone"—studied Welles at work for more than five years while playing an earnest young film critic and historian in The Other Side of the Wind. Among the new material in this third edition, Orson Welles: Revised and Expanded is McBride's first extended analysis of that film as well as an essay on Welles's acting career and revisions of the other chapters on his adventurous, multifaceted body of work, illuminating and setting the record straight on this often misunderstood director.

Joseph McBride has written or edited twenty-six books, also including two other books on Welles; biographies of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and John Ford; the interview book Hawks on Hawks; critical studies of Ford (with Michael Wilmington), Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, the Coen Bros., and George Cukor; and I Loved Movies, But... In 2026, Sticking Place Books reprinted his long-lost edited collection Persistence of Vision, with an extensive new introduction. McBride covered the film industry for many years as a reporter and reviewer for Daily Variety. He is an emeritus professor of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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