New Books in Performing Arts

On February 29, 1940, African American actor Hattie McDaniel became the first person of color, and the first Black woman, to win an Academy Award. The moment marked the beginning of Hollywood's reluctant move toward diversity and inclusion. Since then, minorities and women have struggled to attain Academy Awards recognition within a system designed to discriminate against them. 
In Hollywood Blackout: The Battle for Inclusion at the Oscars (Octupus Publishing, 2025) author Ben Arogundade interweaves the experiences of Black actors and filmmakers with those of Asians, Latinos, South Asians, Indigenous peoples, and women throughout the decades, charting their progression to the Oscars podium, galvanized by defiant boycotts, civil rights protests, and social media activism. Through lenses of history, cinephelia, and social justice, Hollywood Blackout offers a backstage view for those seeking the real story of Hollywood, the Oscars, and the talents who fought to make change.
You can find and follow Ben at hollywoodblackout.com or arogundade.com. 
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In 1927, the Hollywood stars (and spouses), Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr stood outside their California home, arms raised in fascist salute. The photo’s caption, referencing the couple’s trip to Rome the previous year, informs fans that the couple “greet guests at their beach camp in true Italian style.” How did “America’s sweetheart” and her husband, a swashbuckler on and off screen, both patriots who had promoted Liberty bonds following the United States’ entry into World War I, come to normalize something like Italian Fascism in its first decade? How did the Italian-born divo, or star, of Hollywood’s silent cinema, Rudolph Valentino come to function as foil and counterpart to Benito Mussolini’s, the duce, in public opinion in American culture in the 1920s?
Winner of the 2019 award for best book in film/media from the American Association for Italian Studies, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America (University of California Press, 2019) tells the story of the relationship between celebrity culture, charismatic leadership and national sovereignty as it plays out on both sides of the Atlantic from roughly 1917 to the end of 1933.
Giorgio Bertellini asks how two racially othered foreigners, Valentino and Mussolini, became leading figures in America and how these two icons of chauvinist Latin masculinity became public opinion leaders in a nation undergoing a major democratic expansion in terms of gender, equality, social mobility, and political representation. In the post-WWI American climate of nativism, isolationism, consumerism, and the democratic expansion of civic rights and women’s suffrage, the divo and the duce became surprising paragons of both authoritarian male power as well as mass appeal. Bringing together star studies, screen studies, political science, Italian Studies, and American Studies Bertellini’s study teaches us to think in new ways about cinema, political authority, masculinity, and race in Italian cinema and beyond. Meticulously archived, the author pays especial attention to the mediators between screens and the polity, a vast cast of players including journalists, photographers, ambassadors and other functionaries of state, advertisers, sponsors, and publicity agents, all of whom, on concert, work to promote the “ballyhoo” of the day.
Thanks to the efforts of TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America is available free in an open access edition.
 
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Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort.
Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions between white, nationally recognized cultural productions and multicultural and/or regional cultural productions, as demonstrated by Misty Copeland’s ascension in American Ballet Theatre. Clout refers to Black fans’ realization of their own consumer spending power as an agent for industrial change, reducing the precarity of Blackness within historically white cultural apparatuses and facilitating the production of Black blockbusters like 2018’s Black Panther. Canon entails a communal fannish practice of sharing media objects, like the 1978 film The Wiz, which lead them to take on meanings outside of their original context. Comfort describes the nostalgic and sentimental affects associated with beloved fan objects such as the television show, Golden Girls, connected to notions of Black joy and signaling moments wherein Black people can just be themselves.
Through 75 in-depth interviews with Black fans, Fandom for Us, by Us argues not only for the importance of studying Black fandoms, but also demonstrates their complexities by both coupling and decoupling Black reception practices from the politics of representation. Martin highlights the nuanced ways Black fans interact with media representations, suggesting class, clout, canon, and comfort are universal to the study of all fandoms. Yet, for all the ways these fandoms are similar and reciprocal, Black fandoms are also their own set of practices, demanding their own study.
Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.
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How do corporations use theater to reconcile the crises of late capitalism? In our latest interview on Ethnographic Marginalia, we speak with Dr. Sarah Saddler about her new book Performing Corporate Bodies (Routledge, 2024), where she describes how corporations have borrowed techniques from activist theater to manage their workers in India and beyond. Sarah explains how she came to ethnographic techniques from a theater background, before discussing how she managed the challenges and misunderstandings caused by her identity as a western researcher. And finally, she describes how doing performance ethnography helped her understand how individuals play roles, not just in theater, but everyday life.
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Democracy, argues David Wiles, is actually a form of theatre. In making his case, the author deftly investigates orators at the foundational moments of ancient and modern democracy, demonstrating how their performative skills were used to try to create a better world. People often complain about demagogues, or wish that politicians might be more sincere. But to do good, politicians (paradoxically) must be hypocrites - or actors. 
Moving from Athens to Indian independence via three great revolutions – in Puritan England, republican France and liberal America – Democracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi (Cambridge UP, 2024) opens up larger questions about the nature of democracy. When in the classical past Plato condemned rhetoric, the only alternative he could offer was authoritarianism. Wiles' bold historical study has profound implications for our present: calls for personal authenticity, he suggests, are not an effective way to counter the rise of populism.

Brilliantly reveals the ways in which culture shapes politics, with apposite historical examples

Reframes politics as theatre, allowing politically-minded readers to reflect upon the way performance must always shape the democratic process and in turn allowing theatrically-oriented readers to look afresh at political processes

Proposes a novel and striking historical framing of contemporary issues – Brexit, Trump, political polarization – by using theatre as a tool to imaginatively unlock these issues

Deploys wide-ranging case studies to contrast the ancient Greek city-state with modern electoral democracy around the world

David Wiles is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. A British theatre historian, he specialises in classical and early modern theatre and has spent his career in departments of drama, where his teaching has always engaged with practice. His research interests include performance space and time, mask, acting and citizenship.

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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