More Books

Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. By Marlon M. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013; 296 pp.; illustrations. $85.00 cloth, $32.50 paper, e-book available.

In this immersive ethnographic study of Detroit’s Ballroom culture, Bailey situates contemporary everyday performance practices of Detroit’s black LGBT community within the context of the community’s earlier cultural practices, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and Detroit labor history. Bailey argues that members of the Ballroom community—often marginalized by high rates of under/unemployment—challenge traditional understandings of labor through the performance of a cultural labor that helps sustain their communities. In so doing, they not only revise ideas of how gender is to be performed, but how families and worlds are to be created: Ballroom culture is organized around a series of “houses” that serve as alternative kinship structures. Bailey weaves insights drawn from queer theory together with first-person ethnography and personal interviews. Chapters explore the gender and kinship systems of Detroit Ballroom culture, the ball events themselves, and the community’s response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Manifesto Now!: Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics. Edited by Laura Cull and Will Daddario. Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2013; 243 pp.; illustrations. $57.00 cloth, e-book available.

As Laura Cull and Will Daddario note in their introduction, the title Manifesto Now! is meant to do two things: draw attention to the contemporary status of the manifesto (a form otherwise associated with Modernism and the early 20th century), and function as a direct command that, in its brevity, performs a substantial amount of affective labor. For Cull and Daddario, the manifesto sits at the intersection of performance, philosophy, and politics, and possesses a complex relationship to temporality in its desire to bring the future into the present time of “now.” Like the manifesto, the book’s structure eschews the binary between thinking and doing: artists, activists, and scholars are brought together in five different “analogues.” Each of these analogues pairs one scholarly essay and one manifesto; while not in direct dialogue, each text speaks to the other, transforming the meaning of both in some way. These analogues cover topics such as performance protest, the Freee Art Collective, Dušan Makavejev, alternative pedagogies, immanence and transcendence, and the non-human.

The Anthropology of Performance: A Reader. Edited by Frank J. Korom. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013; 304 pp.; illustrations. $99.95 cloth, $49.95 paper, e-book available.

This carefully curated reader brings together 20 essays written over the past 50 years that explore the rich connections between anthropology and performance studies. In his introduction, editor Frank J. Korom provides a brief theoretical and historical overview of performance-focused anthropological research, which he situates at the nexus between the humanities and social sciences. Following J.E. Limón and M.J. Young, he delineates three distinct ways that scholars have approached the study of performance: through Marxist notions of praxis, communal and cultural display and enactment, and oral poetics. All three of these approaches are represented within the essays that comprise this volume, which includes contributions from Roger D. Abrahams, Rosemarie K. Bank, and Richard Bauman. The essays are divided into five sections: “Performance in Prehistory and Antiquity,” “Verbal Genres of Performance,” “Ritual, Drama, and Public Spectacle,” “Performance and Politics in the Making of Communities,” and “Tourist Performances and the Global Ecumene.”

STREB: How to Become an Extreme Action Hero. By Elizabeth Streb. New York: The Feminist Press, 2010; 144 pp.; illustrations. $18.95 paper.

Elizabeth Streb is a choreographer interested in extreme action—that is, action that tests the limits of the body in such a way that the audience, too, is never passive, but always surprised by the new ways the dancers move. Like her choreography—which marries art with science and dance with daredevilry—Streb’s book takes a hybrid form, combining personal memoir with company history and theoretical treatise. The book opens with a foreword by Anna Deavere Smith and an introduction by Peggy Phelan. In “In the Beginning,” Streb outlines her childhood interest in movement, her move to New York in the...