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Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda. By Deborah R. Vargas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012; 288 pp.; illustrations. $67.50 cloth, $22.50 paper.

Deborah R. Vargas’s work considers women whose “dissonant” musical presence lies at the limits of la onda — the sonic wave of Tejano or Tex-Mex music — from the advent of radio broadcasting and recording until today. Though their music was widely circulated, influential, or [End Page 192] both, their performances nevertheless placed them at odds with the masculine, heteronormative sonic imagery of the borderlands. Vargas’s initial chapter examines the discordance San Antonio singer Rosita Fernandez sounded (and embodied) around calls to remember (or forget) the Alamo; a chapter on singer Eva Garza also considers narratives of nationality, as Garza’s borderland migrations from the US to Cuba and Mexico did not follow a traditional south-north pattern. Through singer Chelo Silva, Vargas considers soundings of female sexuality and the musical form of the bolero as a gendered counterpoint to that of the corrido or “border ballad.” The theme of queerness runs through Vargas’s chapter on female accordion players in conjunto music, as well as her chapter on Selena’s disco-inflected and “brown” cumbia sound. An epilogue on indie rock band Girl in a Coma brings women’s dissonant soundings to the present day. Sounding less of Tex-Mex music than through it, Girl in a Coma’s music lies at the limit of Tejano sound.

Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto. Edited and introduced by Lisa Peschel. New York: Seagull Books, 2014; 446 pp.; illustrations. $25.00 paper.

From November 1941 to May 1945, tens of thousands of Czech and Austrian Jews lived in, perished at, or passed through Terezín/Theresienstadt. As Lisa Peschel’s introduction explains, Terezín/Theresienstadt was a camp of great brutality that Nazis nevertheless promoted as a “model ghetto” to the international community. Prisoners of this singular ghetto succeeded in cultivating a rich cultural life in spite of their privations, as surviving dramatic works show. Peschel’s edited collection of these works includes texts translated from Czech and German, ranging from plays and puppet shows to the songs, skits, and poems of cabarets. Peschel contextualizes the works with the inclusions of records and survivor testimony, making appreciable both the number of prisoners involved in theatrical life and the powerful presence of a few recurrent figures. Through the prisoners’ words and Peschel’s introduction, readers come to understand resistance as a far more nuanced project than one of simple defiance. This also resonates in the book’s many illustrations, which include sketches, sheet music, dramatic posters, and photographs.

In Motion, At Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body. By Grant Farred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014; 192 pp. $67.50 cloth, $22.50 paper.

Grant Farred considers the nature of the event through the idioms of its occurrences in sport. In so doing, Farred is careful to distinguish sport’s event — its moment of unscripted irruption — from the “pseudo-event” of the sports calendar. Methodologically, Farred pairs memorable irruptions with philosophers: chapter 1 uses Alain Badiou to think through basketball player Ron Artest’s actions — especially lying supine on the scorer’s table — during Detroit’s “Palace Brawl”; chapter 2 uses Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on movement and time to consider French footballer Eric Cantona’s “kung-fu kick” into a figure in the stands; chapter 3 revisits Zinedine Zidane’s Coup de Boule in the last moments of the 2006 World Cup final through an engagement with Jacques Derrida and the figure of the voyou. Though Farred is concerned with the philosophy of the event, his winning passages deal with the problems of transgressive embodiment. His chapter on Artest, for example, is a valuable contribution to scholarship on black stillness, theorizing how the situation of an unmoving black body gathers into an event, and how such gathering hails past occurrences of spectacular black stillness. [End Page 193]

Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts. By C.L.R...

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