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Many professional theater artists attempt to use live performances in formal theater spaces to disrupt racism and create a more equitable society. Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy examines the impact of such projects, looking at how and why they do and do not intervene in white supremacy. In this incisive study, Dani Snyder-Young examines audience responses to a range of theatrical events that focus on race‑related conflict or racial identity in the contemporary United States. The audiences for these performances, produced at mainstream not‑for‑profit professional theaters in major American cities in 2013–18, reflect dominant patterns of theater attendance: the majority of spectators are older, affluent, white, and describe themselves as politically progressive. Snyder-Young studies the ways these audience members consume the stories of racialized others and analyzes how different artistic, organizational, and programmatic strategies can (or cannot) mitigate white privilege.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students of theater, performance studies, and critical ethnic studies and for theater practitioners interested in equity and inclusion.

Problem Solved! invites readers into the exhilarating, unpredictable artistic world of The Negro Problem, the genre-defying music and theater collective behind the Tony and Obie Award–winning Passing Strange. Blending previously unpublished song lyrics, playscripts, critical essays, intimate interviews, and performance texts, the collection charts more than three decades of daring experimentation across rock music, musical theater, avant-garde performance, and other interdisciplinary forms of social and artistic critique.

Equal parts archive, mixtape, and critical meditation, the book captures The Negro Problem’s unique ability to move between seriousness and satire, activism and irony, intellectual rigor and irresistible melody. In addition to theatrical texts written and composed by Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald, the volume features a contextual essay by historian Scott Kurashige, close readings of The Total Bent by performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o, dramaturgical analyses of Passing Strange by volume editor Brandon Woolf, and a long-form interview about the band’s origins from co-leader Heidi Rodewald. The volume explores how the band challenges conventional ideas about race, identity, authenticity, activism, and musical theater through humor, contradiction, experimentation, and joyful disruption. Problem Solved! invites general readers, music enthusiasts, scholars, and theater lovers alike to explore how song can boldly and beautifully rise to meet our fractious cultural moment.

Exploring how Indigenous media has flourished across Canada from the 1990s to the present

 

In the early 1990s, Indigenous media experienced a boom across Canada, resulting in a vast landscape of film, TV, and digital media. Coinciding with a resurgence of Indigenous political activism, Indigenous media highlighted issues around sovereignty and Indigenous rights to broader audiences in Canada. In Producing Sovereignty, Karrmen Crey considers the conditions—social movements, state policy, and evolutions in technology—that enabled this proliferation. 

Exploring the wide field of media culture institutions, Crey pays particular attention to those that Indigenous media makers engaged during this cultural moment, including state film agencies, arts organizations, provincial broadcasters, and more. Producing Sovereignty ranges from the formation of the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance in the early 1990s and its partnership with the Banff Centre for the Arts to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2016 production of Highway of Tears—an immersive 360-degree short film directed by Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson—highlighting works by Indigenous creators along the way and situating Indigenous media within contexts that pay close attention to the role of media-producing institutions.

Importantly, Crey focuses on institutions with limited scholarly attention, shifting beyond the work of the National Film Board of Canada to explore lesser-known institutions such as educational broadcasters and independent production companies that create programming for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. Through its refusal to treat Indigenous media simply as a set of cultural aesthetics, Producing Sovereignty offers a revealing media history of this cultural moment.

Programmed Viewership examines the concept of “program” in Japanese cinema as an organizing framework that links marketing and promotion, exhibition and distribution, and viewing practices in public and domestic spaces. Rea Amit defines “program” as the ideological infrastructure or platform that perpetuates habitual and ritualistic patterns in film production and reception. Amit takes a holistic approach to understanding more than a century of Japanese cinema through the analysis of material film ephemera, cinema theatre, film content, and viewership. This framework positions programming, rather than provenance, as the decisive factor that confers a film’s cultural and institutional identity. While earlier scholarship has gestured toward loosening the tie between cinematic identity and its nation of origin, Programmed Viewership extends this insight by emphasizing that production constitutes only one dimension of a broader programmatic system.

A stand-alone edition of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound taken from Chicago’s renowned translations of the Greek tragedies.

In the wake of the Olympian gods’ clash with the Titans, Zeus punishes his former ally and fellow deity, Prometheus, for having dared to bring knowledge to humankind. In this sole surviving play of Aeschylus’s Prometheus trilogy, we find Prometheus chained in a desolate landscape, suffering great cruelty at the hands of his fellow gods. 

Drawn from the authoritative third edition of the University of Chicago Press’s Complete Greek Tragedies series, David Grene’s searing translation of Prometheus Bound is presented here in a stand-alone edition. An introduction by Glenn W. Most and Mark Griffith provides essential information about the play’s first production, plot, and reception in antiquity.

Bridging landmark territory in film studies, Psycho-Sexual is the first book to apply Alfred Hitchcock’s legacy to three key directors of 1970s Hollywood—Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin—whose work suggests the pornographic male gaze that emerged in Hitchcock’s depiction of the voyeuristic, homoerotically inclined American man. Combining queer theory with a psychoanalytic perspective, David Greven begins with a reconsideration of Psycho and the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much to introduce the filmmaker’s evolutionary development of American masculinity.

Psycho-Sexual probes De Palma’s early Vietnam War draft-dodger comedies as well as his film Dressed to Kill, along with Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Friedkin’s Cruising as reactions to and inventive elaborations upon Hitchcock’s gendered themes and aesthetic approaches. Greven demonstrates how the significant political achievement of these films arises from a deeply disturbing, violent, even sorrowful psychological and social context. Engaging with contemporary theories of pornography while establishing pornography’s emergence during the classical Hollywood era, Greven argues that New Hollywood filmmakers seized upon Hitchcock’s radical decentering of heterosexual male dominance. The resulting images of heterosexual male ambivalence allowed for an investment in same-sex desire; an aura of homophobia became informed by a fascination with the homoerotic. Psycho-Sexual also explores the broader gender crisis and disorganization that permeated the Cold War and New Hollywood eras, reimagining the defining premises of Hitchcock criticism.

Punk Slash! Musicals is the first book to deal extensively with punk narrative films, specifically British and American punk rock musicals produced from roughly 1978 to 1986. Films such as Jubilee, Breaking Glass, Times Square, Smithereens, Starstruck, and Sid and Nancy represent a convergence between independent, subversive cinema and formulaic classical Hollywood and pop musical genres.

Guiding this project is the concept of "slip-sync." Riffing on the commonplace lip-sync phenomenon, "slip-sync" refers to moments in the films when the punk performer "slips" out of sync with the performance spectacle, and sometimes the sound track itself, engendering a provocative moment of tension. This tension frequently serves to illustrate other thematic and narrative conflicts, central among these being the punk negotiation between authenticity and inauthenticity.

Laderman emphasizes the strong female lead performer at the center of most of these films, as well as each film's engagement with gender and race issues. Additionally, he situates his analyses in relation to the broader cultural and political context of the neo-conservatism and new electronic audio-visual technologies of the 1980s, showing how punk's revolution against the mainstream actually depends upon a certain ironic embrace of pop culture.