New Books in Performing Arts

In Female Art and Agency in Yugoslavia, 1971–2001 (Bloomsbury, 2024), Anja Foerschner offers a compelling exploration of the women artists, curators, scholars, and activists who shaped the cultural landscape of Yugoslavia and its successor states. Drawing on both original research and existing scholarship, she traces the emergence of the New Art Practice of the late 1960s and 1970s, highlighting the pivotal role of Belgrade’s Student Cultural Centre, where women were instrumental in forging a progressive artistic and curatorial vision.

Through insightful examinations of performance art, video art, and the development of feminist thought in Yugoslavia, Foerschner reveals how the region carved out a distinctive place within the international postwar avant-garde. Situating Yugoslav feminism in dialogue with Western and neighbouring contexts, she sheds new light on the complex intersections of art, politics, and social change. By exploring artistic responses to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the enduring political dimensions of cultural production, this book invites readers to reconsider the legacies of activist art and their resonance in our present time.
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This panel discussion will explore the remarkable influence of Latin American music and dance on the culture of Yiddish speaking communities in the United States. Ronald Robboy will discuss Latin American musical influences upon Yiddish theater composers, including Sholom Secunda, Abraham Ellstein, and Alexander Olshanetsky; Sonia Gollance will discuss the popularity of dances like the Tango and Mambo in the Borscht Belt, as exemplified by movies like Dirty Dancing and Mamboniks; and Josh Kun will discuss the influence of Latin American music on post-war Jewish music and the influence of Jewish music on U.S. Latino/a artists.

This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s Nuestros sonidos festival.

This panel discussion originally took place on March 10, 2025.
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Today’s guest, Krzysztof Rowiński, is the author of Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film
(Routledge, 2026). This book focuses on the concept of non- redemptive
failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of
success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept
functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields.
Examining literature and film from mid- twentieth- century Poland,
Italy, and the United States, it traces productive effects of failure
which cannot survive into the future, yet have an important,
transformative impact in the moment in which they occur. The book
engages with the work of John Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bruno
Jasieński, proposing a theory of failure at the intersection of literary
study, performance theory, and political thought. In discussing these
examples, the book examines the place of failure in the broader context
of modern and contemporary US American, Italian, and Polish literary and
cultural traditions.

Because of its interdisciplinary potential, this study might appeal
to readers in art history, philosophy, political theory, and other
fields within the humanities and social sciences. Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption
offers a framework that could not only spotlight the contribution of
literary studies to the topic, in the form of narrative analysis but
also become part of the theoretical apparatus for further research in
these fields.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance.
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John Kapusta's Self-Realization Nation: How Artists of the Creative Counterculture Made a New America (U California Press, 2026) is the story of an unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history. After World War II, personal fulfillment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realization--the quest to become our authentic selves--remains a powerful part of American culture and arts today. In Self-Realization Nation, John Kapusta provides a lively cultural history of how an overlooked movement of musicians, dancers, and actors championed the ideal of self-realization. These performers, who spanned many backgrounds, identities, genres, and artistic styles, became what he calls the creative counterculture. Artists as varied as Sonny Rollins, John Cage, Anna Halprin, Alice and John Coltrane, and Pauline Oliveros shared an approach to creativity focused on letting go of limiting beliefs and subverting oppressive social norms. Through colorful vignettes, Kapusta reveals how these artists made their art and how their approach spread beyond the performing arts to influence such fields as psychology, education, and wellness. Ultimately, these creative counterculturists came to define a new vision of an America where everyone was free to be themselves, together.
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The premiere of Oklahoma! in 1943 is commonly called a
“turning point” in the history of the Broadway musical. Often
characterized as the first integrated musical―meaning that the songs and
other elements of the show are integrated into the story―James O’Leary
offers a different interpretation of Oklahoma! and other musicals at the beginning of Broadway’s Golden Age in The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America
(Oxford University Press, 2025). Contextualizing his discussion within
debates among US critics, O’Leary argues that the negotiation between
operatic and popular music, and between frothy comedy and more serious
themes mark the musicals he analyzes as examples of the middlebrow.
Through detailed archival work, O’Leary uncovers the crucial critical
networks that originally theorized a middlebrow approach to culture,
beginning in the literary circles of Van Wyck Brooks and Archibald
MacLeish, and radiating outward to major theater and music critics
including Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes. These writers believed
American culture had splintered into factions, which in turn divided
American audiences: highbrow art, which they regarded as obscure and
elitist; folk art, which they found provincial and alienating; and
popular culture, which they considered merely commercial. Blending these
kinds of art, they argued, could draw together a fractured society into
mutual understanding (if not necessarily agreement) by situating the
most sophisticated ideas within longstanding expressive traditions,
accessible to all. O’Leary finds in Oklahoma!, Beggar’s Holiday, and Street Scene a new kind of musical comedy that embraced American politics and weighty stories in ways not seen before 1943.
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