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La India María—a humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican woman—is one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by María Elena Velasco, La India María has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India María films as exploitation cinema unworthy of serious attention. By contrast, La India María builds a convincing case for María Elena Velasco as an artist whose work as a director and producer—rare for women in Mexican cinema—has been widely and unjustly overlooked.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Velasco, her family, and film industry professionals, as well as on archival research, Seraina Rohrer offers the first full account of Velasco’s life; her portrayal of La India María in vaudeville, television, and sixteen feature film comedies, including Ni de aquí, ni de allá [Neither here, nor there]; and her controversial reception in Mexico and the United States. Rohrer traces the films’ financing, production, and distribution, as well as censorship practices of the period, and compares them to other Mexploitation films produced at the same time. Adding a new chapter to the history of a much-understudied period of Mexican cinema commonly referred to as “la crisis,” this pioneering research enriches our appreciation of Mexploitation films.

Le Capital de Sergueï Eisenstein (1927-1928) est un fantôme à plus d’un titre: bien que le film n’ait jamais été réalisé, il a néanmoins hanté l'imagination de nombreux cinéastes, historiens et écrivains jusqu’à aujourd’hui et même récemment avec les Nouvelles de l’Antiquité idéologique : Marx – Eisenstein – Le Capital d’Alexander Kluge. De plus, sa première matérialisation publique – un fragment d’une dizaine de pages issu des carnets du réalisateur – était marquée par ce qui demeurait absent : les images et le matériau de travail d’Eisenstein.

La Danse des valeurs ambitionne d’invoquer à nouveaux frais le fantôme du Capital mais en se fondant cette fois-ci sur l’ensemble de son corps d’archives. Cette « instruction visuelle à la méthode dialectique », selon les mots-mêmes d’Eisenstein, comprend plus de 500 pages de notes, de dessins, de coupures de presse, de diagrammes d’expression, de plans d’articles, de négatifs d’Octobre, de réflexions théoriques et de longues citations. La Danse des valeurs explore la nécessité formelle qui sous-tend les choix d’Eisenstein dans le Capital. Sa lecture fait valoir que sa complexité visuelle ainsi que son efficacité épistémique résident précisément dans l’état de son matériau : une danse de thèmes hétérogènes et de fragments disparates, un flux non-linéaire, provisoire et inarticulé.

Les séquences visuelles d’archives, publiées ici pour la première fois en France, ne sont pas bâties à titre de simples illustrations, mais en tant qu’arguments à part entière, donnant à voir ce qui se joue pour Eisenstein dans le Capital : une théorisation visuelle de la valeur. Une lecture des archives d’Eisenstein, dans leur logique interne, permet non seulement de reconstituer des éléments morphologiques présents dans le concept de valeur chez Marx, mais également de théoriser une crise plus fondamentale de la représentation politique, un présent qui s’étend de son contexte contemporain jusqu’à nos jours. Mettant en œuvre un procédé morphologique sans équivoque, les séquences de montage d’Eisenstein produisent une sorte de plus-value qui leur est propre, un excès sémiotique qui brasse les matériaux et présente les corps dans une danse analogue à la « danse » des « conditions pétrifiées » de Marx. C’est dans ce langage polymorphe et « diffus » – associé au stream of consciousness de l’Ulysse de Joyce – qu’Eisenstein perçoit le potentiel critique et affectif d’un cinéma à venir.

Cavernosa, usualmente fría, siempre oscura, con un ligero olor a palomitas de maíz en el aire: la experiencia de ir al cine es universal. No es menos intensa en México, donde la experiencia ha evolucionado de formas complejas en años recientes. Películas como Y tu mamá también, El Mariachi, Amores perros y las obras de los paradigmáticos Guillermo del Toro y Salma Hayek, reflejan mucho más un renovado interés por el cine en México. En La proyección del neoliberalismo, Ignacio Sánchez Prado explora precisamente los eventos que tuvieron lugar en la industria del cine mexicano durante las últimas décadas. Lejos de ser una simple historia del periodo, La proyección del neoliberalismo examina cuatro aspectos esenciales de las transformaciones ocurridas en la industria del cine mexicano: la caída del nacionalismo, un nuevo enfoque en audiencias de clase media, la redefinición del concepto de cine político y el impacto de la globalización. Este análisis incluye a directores y películas que han alcanzado notoriedad internacional o relevancia en la construcción de un mercado nacional. La proyección del neoliberalismo expone las consecuencias de una industria del cine forzada a encontrar nuevas audiencias entre la clase media mexicana para poder alcanzar el ansiado éxito económico y la aprobación cultural.

2024 Best Edited Collection, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association (MPCA/ACA)

How work and capitalism inspire horror in modern film.

American ideals position work as a source of pride, opportunity, and meaning. Yet the ravages of labor are constant grist for horror films. Going back decades to the mad scientists of classic cinema, the menial motel job that prepares Norman Bates for his crimes in Psycho, and the unemployed slaughterhouse workers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, horror movies have made the case that work is not so much a point of pride as a source of monstrosity.

Editors Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton assemble the first study of horror’s critique of labor. In the 1970s and 1980s, films such as The Shining and Dawn of the Dead responded to deindustrialization, automation, globalization, and rising numbers of women in the workforce. Labors of Fear explores these critical issues and extends them in discussions of recent works such as The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Midsommar, Survival of the Dead, It Follows, Get Out, and Us. Covering films ranging from the 1970s onward, these essays address novel and newly recognized modes and conditions of labor: reproductive labor, emotion work and emotional labor, social media and self-branding, intellectual labor, service work, precarity, and underemployment. In its singular way, horror continues to make spine-tingling sense of what is most destructive in the wider sociopolitical context of US capitalism.

"A rich and detailed picture of a particular historical moment that has now passed . . . I found myself immersed in the world of the East Village theatre scene and its connections to the larger world of feminism, theatre, and politics. Davy's long-standing association with this world pays off handsomely---it is impossible to imagine that anyone could write a more informative portrait."
---Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin

 "After hosting two annual international women's performance festivals in 1980 and '81, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and comrades put on such extravaganzas as the Freudian Slip party and the Debutante Ball (a coming-out party if ever there was one) to raise the first several months' rent for a narrow vestibule on East 11th Street, where they could keep the creativity going year-round. There, on a stage no bigger than a queen-sized mattress, . . . artists honed their craft, giving birth to a celebratory feminist-and-tinsel-tinged queer aesthetic. By the mid '80s . . . the rent quadrupled, and WOW moved to a city-owned building on East 4th Street, where it has flourished ever since, presenting hundreds---if not thousands---of plays, solo shows, concerts, dance pieces, cabarets, and sundry performances that defy classification."
---Alisa Solomon, Village Voice

Out of a small, hand-to-mouth, women's theater collective called the WOW Café located on the lower east side of Manhattan, there emerged some of the most important theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. The WOW (Women's One World) Café Theatre appeared on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, putting a witty, hilarious, gender-bending and erotically charged aesthetic on the stage for women in general and lesbians in particular.

The storefront that became the WOW Café Theatre saw dozens of excitingly original and enormously funny performances created, performed, and turned over at lightning speed---a kind of "hit and run" theater. As the demands on the space increased, the women behind WOW organized as a collective and moved their theater to an abandoned doll factory where it continues to operate today. For three decades the WOW Café has nurtured fledgling women writers, designers, and performers who continue to create important performance work.

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers provides a critical history of this avant-garde venture whose ongoing "system of anarchy" has been largely responsible for its thirty-year staying power, after dozens of other women's theaters have collapsed. WOW artists were creating a wholly original cultural landscape across which women could represent themselves on their own terms. Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and an unbridled eroticism are hallmarks of WOW's aesthetic, combined---importantly and powerfully---with a presumptive address to the audience as if everyone onstage, in the audience, and in the world is lesbian. Author Kate Davy's extensive research included in-depth interviews with WOW veterans; newspaper reviews of the earliest productions; and rare, unpublished photographs. The book also includes a chronology of productions that have highlighted WOW's performance schedule since the early '80s. 

Kate Davy is currently Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her previous books include Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos and Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

Winner of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Media Industries Scholarly Interest Group Outstanding Book Award

The slogan “Lagos shall not spoil,” found in print media, political campaigns, and common conversation, represents a shared expression of the optimism the city embodies. However, on city streets the phrase also appears scrawled in irreverent variations—“Lagos cannot spoil more than this!”—that meet the frustrations of city life with irony. In both cases, the slogan captures the resilience and persistence with which residents of Lagos live on, despite it all. This book examines the circumstances that make it possible for residents to persist in pursuing their various projects and for the city to remain a platform that supports these projects and creates space for even more to emerge. Author Connor Ryan argues that residents continually work to combine contingency and endurance in opportunistic ways that make the city work for them, and as such, Lagos never spoils: it endures.

What makes Lagos remarkable is what residents have made of it, and Nollywood—the industry and the body of films—both embodies and represents this continual urban transformation. Lagos Never Spoils traces how Nollywood arose from the social milieu of Lagos and, in turn, generates a repertoire of stories, images, styles, and sentiments with which audiences come to grips with city life. The book traces the evolution of the screen media industry in Lagos and explores how this corresponds with historical phases in the city’s representation onscreen. It discusses important urban spaces of production and consumption, including historic movie halls, video marketplaces, film sets, and multiplex cinemas. Across six chapters, it attends to celluloid films about oil-boom wealth, television sitcoms about urban tricksters, video melodramas about urban crisis, glossy romantic comedies about young professionals, and dark thrillers on streaming platforms about the pleasure of moral transgression. In this fashion, the book offers new approaches to the interpretation of screen texts produced in and about Lagos, a place that is today the most influential image of West African city life.

A major collection of performance works by artist and agitator Anthony Hudson

Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances collects nearly a decade of work by Anthony Hudson, a queer Indigenous artist and agitator also known as Portland, Oregon’s premier drag clown, Carla Rossi. Whether fumbling with a lamp in a satirical takedown of land acknowledgments or confronting the history of redface in pop culture, Hudson alternates between Rossi’s cackling “ghost of white privilege” and more earnest, vulnerable confessionals as himself—all with a deep commitment to bitter humor and brutal honesty. In these performance works, a mixed-race Native boy plays a pilgrim in his kindergarten Thanksgiving pageant. A young artist recounts the racism in their favorite musical and the larger American theater system. A drag queen storytime goes disastrously wrong and calls for an exorcism with a plunger. Kate Bredeson’s unflinching introduction speaks to Hudson’s work through a cultural and historical lens and illuminates the importance of his project to filet the American Empire.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski have redefined the technically and topically possible while joyfully defying audience expectations. Visionary films like The Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas have made them the world's most influential transgender media producers, and their coming out retroactively put trans* aesthetics at the very center of popular American culture.

Cáel M. Keegan views the Wachowskis' films as an approach to trans* experience that maps a transgender journey and the promise we might learn "to sense beyond the limits of the given world." Keegan reveals how the filmmakers take up the relationship between identity and coding (be it computers or genes), inheritance and belonging, and how transgender becoming connects to a utopian vision of a post-racial order. Along the way, he theorizes a trans* aesthetic that explores the plasticity of cinema to create new social worlds, new temporalities, and new sensory inputs and outputs. Film comes to disrupt, rearrange, and evolve the cinematic exchange with the senses in the same manner that trans* disrupts, rearranges, and evolves discrete genders and sexes.

Before Lanford Wilson became a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, with such celebrated productions as The Hot l Baltimore, Fifth of July, Talley’s Folly, and Burn This, he wrote dozens of short stories and poems, many of which take place in the 1950s, small-town Missouri where he grew up. This selection of Wilson’s early work, written between 1955 and 1967 when he was between the ages of 18 and 30, provides a rare look at a young writer developing his style. The stories explore many of the themes Wilson later took up in the theater, such as sexual identity and the rupture of societies and families. These never-before-published works—part of the manuscript collection donated by Wilson to the University of Missouri—shed light on the roots of some of America’s best-loved plays and are accomplished and evocative works in their own right.

Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging represents the first comprehensive anthology to critically interrogate the intersection of age studies with theater and performance studies. Undoing the notion of a singular, continuous self as we age—an assumption that negatively positions old age in opposition to youth—this volume challenges biological imperatives imposed by essentialist views of aging. Late Stage reconceptualizes age as an additional dimension of identity constituted through the sociocultural systems that shape the material body over time. The collection portrays aging as a dynamic and evolving process, countering ageist narratives of decline and stereotypes that homogenize later life as a fixed, undesirable state. By exploring themes such as intergenerational dialogue, elder sexualities, late style, casting practices, age-related caregiving, and artistic longevity, contributors reposition later life into complex narratives that resist normative age scripts. Drawing on gender studies, queer and feminist theory, and disability studies, the collection bridges performance analysis with theoretical frameworks and collectively addresses how aging is experienced, represented, and resisted across time and cultures. Late Stage explores key works by canonical and contemporary figures such as Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Caryl Churchill, Clare Barron, Naomi Iizuka, Tracy Letts, David Lindsay-Abaire, Judith Malina, Robbie McCauley, Florian Zeller, and Peggy Shaw. With its innovative approach, Late Stage serves not only as a critical text for courses on performance and age, but as a call to action for expanding conversations around age in theater and society.

How Star Trek’s twenty-first-century reinventions illuminate the unique challenges and opportunities of franchise-style corporate storytelling

Late Star Trek explores the beloved science fiction franchise’s repeated attempts to reinvent itself after the end of its 1990s golden age. Beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity—including authorized books, the three “Kelvin Timeline” films, and the streaming series Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds—along with fan discourse, to reflect on the perils and promise of the franchise as a unique form of storytelling.

Significantly including the licensed novels and comic books that fill out the Star Trek universe for its fans, Kotsko brings the multiple productions of the early twenty-first century together as a unified whole rather than analyzing them in their current stratified view. He argues that the variety of styles and approaches in this tumultuous era of Star Trek history provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the nature of the franchise storyworlds that now dominate popular culture. By taking the spin-offs and tie-ins seriously as creative attempts to tell a new story within an established universe, Late Star Trek highlights creative triumphs as well as the tendency for franchise faithfulness to get in the way of creating engaging characters and ideas.

Arguing forcefully against the prevailing consensus that franchises are a sign of cultural decay, Kotsko contends that the Star Trek universe exemplifies an approach to storytelling that has been perennial across cultures. Instead, he finds that what limits creativity within franchises is not their reliance on the familiar but their status as modern myths, held not as common cultural heritage but rather owned as corporate intellectual property.

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This book explores the role film and television stardom has played in establishing, reinforcing, and challenging popular ethnic notions of Latina/os in the United States since the silent film era of the 1920s. In addition to documenting the importance of Latina and Latino stars to American film and television history, Mary C. Beltrán focuses on key moments in the construction of "Hollywood Latinidad" by analyzing the public images of these stars as promoted by Hollywood film studios, television networks, producers, and the performers themselves. Critically surveying the careers of such film and television stars as Dolores Del Rio, Desi Arnaz, Rita Moreno, Freddie Prinze, Edward James Olmos, Jessica Alba, and Jennifer Lopez, Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes also addresses the impact of the rise in Latina and Latino media producers and the current status of Latina/o stardom.

The bandido, the harlot, the male buffoon, the female clown, the Latin lover, and the dark lady—these have been the defining, and demeaning, images of Latinos in U.S. cinema for more than a century. In this book, Charles Ramírez Berg develops an innovative theory of stereotyping that accounts for the persistence of such images in U.S. popular culture. He also explores how Latino actors and filmmakers have actively subverted and resisted such stereotyping.

In the first part of the book, Berg sets forth his theory of stereotyping, defines the classic stereotypes, and investigates how actors such as Raúl Julia, Rosie Pérez, José Ferrer, Lupe Vélez, and Gilbert Roland have subverted stereotypical roles. In the second part, he analyzes Hollywood's portrayal of Latinos in three genres: social problem films, John Ford westerns, and science fiction films. In the concluding section, Berg looks at Latino self-representation and anti-stereotyping in Mexican American border documentaries and in the feature films of Robert Rodríguez. He also presents an exclusive interview in which Rodríguez talks about his entire career, from Bedhead to Spy Kids, and comments on the role of a Latino filmmaker in Hollywood and how he tries to subvert the system.

2024 American Society for Theatre Research Barnard Hewitt Award Finalist

• 2023 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Award Finalist
• Best Academic-Themed Book, College-Level - English at the International Latino Book Awards Honorable Mention

Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years—a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s—the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright’s canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language.

The book’s focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism.

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume is comprehensive in its coverage while diving into detailed and specific examples as it navigates the complex and ever-changing world of Latinx representation and creation in television.

In this volume, editor Frederick Luis Aldama brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward. TV narratives by and about Latinx people exist across all genres. In this century, we see Latinx people in sitcoms, sci-fi, noir, soap operas, rom-coms, food shows, dramas, action-adventure, and more. Latinx people appear in television across all formats, from quick webisodes, to serialized big-arc narratives, to animation and everything in between. The diverse array of contributors to this volume delve into this rich landscape of Latinx TV from 2000 to today, spanning the ever-widening range of genres and platforms.

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century argues that Latinx TV is not just television—it’s an entire movement. Digital spaces and streaming platforms today have allowed for Latinx representation on TV that speaks to Latinx people and non-Latinx people alike, bringing rich and varied Latinx cultures into mainstream television and addressing urbanization, immigration, family life, language, politics, gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.

Once heavily underrepresented and harmfully stereotypical, Latinx representation on TV is beginning to give careful nuance to regional, communal, and familial experiences among U.S. Latinx people. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, recognizing that television has come a long way, but there is still a lot of important work to do for truly diverse and inclusive representation.
 

From Sister Wives and Big Love to The Book of Mormon on Broadway, Mormons and Mormonism are pervasive throughout American popular media. In Latter-day Screens, Brenda R. Weber argues that mediated Mormonism contests and reconfigures collective notions of gender, sexuality, race, spirituality, capitalism, justice, and individualism. Focusing on Mormonism as both a meme and an analytic, Weber analyzes a wide range of contemporary media produced by those within and those outside of the mainstream and fundamentalist Mormon churches, from reality television to feature films, from blogs to YouTube videos, and from novels to memoirs by people who struggle to find agency and personhood in the shadow of the church's teachings. The broad archive of mediated Mormonism contains socially conservative values, often expressed through neoliberal strategies tied to egalitarianism, meritocracy, and self-actualization, but it also offers a passionate voice of contrast on behalf of plurality and inclusion. In this, mediated Mormonism and the conversations on social justice that it fosters create the pathway toward an inclusive, feminist-friendly, and queer-positive future for a broader culture that uses Mormonism as a gauge to calibrate its own values.

Emma Gad (1852–1921) was a prolific Danish playwright at the turn of the twentieth century. With sparkling prose and witty dialogue, Gad’s ambitious and sophisticated theatrical productions raised important and still pressing questions about sexuality and morality—including the status of women in marriage, divorce, same‐sex desire, and marital infidelity. Through her plays she engaged with contemporaries like Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw, yet she is primarily remembered for her etiquette book, Takt og Tone.

Laughter and Civility, the first biographical and scholarly volume to examine and contextualize her dramas, deeply explores how and why influential women are so often excluded from the canon. Lynn R. Wilkinson provides insightful readings into all twenty-five of Gad’s plays and demonstrates how writers and intellectuals of the time, including Georg and Edvard Brandes, took her critically acclaimed work seriously. This volume rightfully reinstates Emma Gad’s work into the repertory of European drama and is crucial for scholars interested in turn‐of‐the‐century Scandinavian drama, literature, culture, and politics.

The first academic study dedicated to Please Sir!, a program that provides valuable insights into British society, television culture, education, and youth culture during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The situation comedy Please Sir! was televised from 1968 to 1972. This book explores its background, comedic style, cast of characters, its depictions of contemporary issues, and the impact of crises faced by its production company. It argues that Please Sir! reveals much about the social, cultural, and televisual era in which it was produced.

An exploration of how comedy has shaped civil society—and become a form of subtle political resistance—in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. 

Leagues of Laughter traces the evolution of a Soviet-created youth game called KVN (Klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh or Club of the Cheerful and Clever) over sixty years as students’ nation-states collapsed, competed, and eventually went to war. Through cross-border narratives, the book shows how humor persists—and transforms—amid authoritarianism, censorship, and conflict. With insight and compassion, author A. Austin Garey reveals how laughter became a mode of resistance, identity, and cultural continuity in the long cultural context of the war in Ukraine. In addition to introducing a novel theory of “tradition as stance” to explain how traditions are reproduced and reinterpreted over time, the book offers a compelling comparative analysis of cultural production under political pressure. 

An accessible introduction to dance literacy that includes practical examples and sample lesson plans.

This book presents the theory and purpose underpinning the approaches to dance literacy as explored by the Language of Dance community in the United States and the United Kingdom. Through their teacher training programs, the community is changing the face of dance-based dance literacy using the practice of motif notation.

Arts literacy can deepen dance craft and transfer arts knowledge, capacities, and skills to lifelong learning. Dance-based dance literacy practices using notation enhance learners’ flexibility, adaptability, self-direction, initiative, productivity, responsibility, leadership, and cross-cultural skills. This volume ushers in a new era for educating with dance notation that focuses on learners’ engagement by making connections between the learning domains using constructivist and constructionist learning approaches. Based on work by dance educator Ann Hutchinson Guest and expanded upon by her protégés, this is the first book of its kind to bring together theory, praxis, original research outcomes, taxonomies, model lesson plans, learning domain taxonomies of dance, and voices of dance teachers who have explored using dance notation literacy.

Lear’s Other Shadow: A Cultural History of Queen Lear offers a deep cultural analysis of the figure of Queen Lear, who shadows and eventually sometimes overshadows her royal husband across the nearly one-thousand-year life of this archetypal tale. What appears to be a deliberate strategy of suppression, even erasure in Shakespeare’s King Lear later inspired dozens of stage, page, and cinematic remakes and adaptations in which this figure is revived or remembered, often pointedly so. From Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish-language Miriele Efros (1898), through edgy stage remakes such as Gordon Bottomley’s King Lear’s Wife (1915) and the Women’s Theatre Group’s Lear’s Daughters (1987), to novelized retellings from Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) to Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (2018) and J. R. Thorp’s Learwife (2021), and even the television series Empire (2015–2020) and Succession (2018–2023), Queen Lear regularly emerges from her shadowy origins to challenge how we understand the ancient King Leir/King Lear story. These and many other examples reveal fascinating patterns of adaptation and reinterpretation that Lear's Other Shadow identifies and analyzes for the first time, showing how and why Queen Lear is at the center of this ancient story, whether she is heard from or not.

In the 1930s as the capitalist system faltered, many in the United States turned to the political Left. Hollywood, so deeply embedded in capitalism, was not immune to this shift. Left of Hollywood offers the first book-length study of Depression-era Left film theory and criticism in the United States. Robé studies the development of this theory and criticism over the course of the 1930s, as artists and intellectuals formed alliances in order to establish an engaged political film movement that aspired toward a popular cinema of social change. Combining extensive archival research with careful close analysis of films, Robé explores the origins of this radical social formation of U.S. Left film culture.

Grounding his arguments in the surrounding contexts and aesthetics of a few films in particular—Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!, Fritz Lang's Fury, William Dieterle's Juarez, and Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise—Robé focuses on how film theorists and critics sought to foster audiences who might push both film culture and larger social practices in more progressive directions. Turning at one point to anti-lynching films, Robé discusses how these movies united black and white film critics, forging an alliance of writers who championed not only critical spectatorship but also the public support of racial equality. Yet, despite a stated interest in forging more egalitarian social relations, gender bias was endemic in Left criticism of the era, and female-centered films were regularly discounted. Thus Robé provides an in-depth examination of this overlooked shortcoming of U.S. Left film criticism and theory.

In Life-Destroying Diagrams, Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky terrain: the ethical extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, she explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, orienting it away from entrenched models of feeling toward impersonal schemes and structures, Brinkema moves outward to consider the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. Replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions, Life-Destroying Diagrams is at once a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory.

Insight into the collaborative, multi-layered, and sometimes messy business of theater.

The artist-led theater company Lightwork specializes in collaborative multimedia performance. The company experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century including devised and improvisation-led approaches. This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by Lightwork and one play-text from Lightwork’s precursor company Academy Productions. The twelve-year span covered by the work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, and text and “non-text” were being radically rethought.