Beginning in the late 1970's Frida Kahlo achieved cult heroine status less for her richly surrealist self-portraits than by the popularization of the events of her tumultuous life. Her images were spl
"Insightful study of Afro-Caribbean salsa music among Puerto Ricans relates different meanings in salsa lyrics to issues of gender, race, class, and national identities, both in Puerto Rico and Latino
Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize for History, Great River was hailed as a literary masterpiece and enduring classic when it first appeared in 1954. It is an epic history of four
David Hays, elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in 2014, created an exciting and successful career designing scenery and lighting for plays and musicals on Broadway, in London, and in Japan. Told with
This innovative book and CD, assembled by the editors of the renowned periodical Terra Nova, is the first anthology published on the subject of music and nature. Lush and evocative, yoking together
Women have been involved with jazz since its inception, but all too often their achievements were not as well known as those of their male counterparts. Some Liked It Hot looks at all-girl bands and
A group of ritual musicians and former slaves brought from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, the Gnawa heal those they believe to be possessed, using incense, music, and trance. But their practice is har
One of the most famous dancers of the early 1900s, Loie Fuller created an extraordinary sensation in Paris with her manipulations of hundreds of yards of silk, swirling high above her and lit dramatic
During its seven-year run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer attracted a wide range of viewers and almost unprecedented academic interest. Sex and the Slayer explores one of the most talked-about topics in re
Of the Presence of the Body gathers nine original essays by eminent scholars in the fields of dance and performance studies. Its focus is the historical, cultural and political contexts that inform ch
Opening a window onto a fascinating new world for English-speaking readers, this anthology offers popular and influential stories from over ten countries, chronologically ranging from 1862 to the pres
In this insightful new book, Mark Franko explores the many genres of theatrical dancing during the radical decade of the 1930s and their relationship to labor movements, including Fordist and unionis
In 1967 Egypt and the Arab world suffered a devastating defeat by Israel in the Six Day War. Though long past the age at which most singers would have retired, the sexagenarian Egyptian singer Umm Kul
Why does music move us? How do the immediate situation and larger social contexts influence the meanings that people find in stories, rituals, or films? How do people engage with the images and sound
In 1883, wearing a 60-pound suit sewn from leather boot-tops, a wanderer known only as the Leather Man began to walk a never-changing 365-mile loop between the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers which he w
Nearly four decades after his death, Charles Mingus Jr. remains one of the least understood and most recognized jazz composers and musicians of our time. Mingus’s ideas about music, racial identity, a
Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M
This entertaining anthology delivers great reading and an overview of German-language science fiction, including works by the "German father of science fiction" Kurd Lasswitz, the Austrian writer Lud
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha are major choreographers of the 20th century whose work will leave the dance field with a legacy as important and strong as that of Martha Graham and Doris Hum
New definitions of American femininity were formed in the pivotal 1920s, an era that vastly expanded the "market" for sexually explicit displays by women. Angela J. Latham shows how quarrels over and
Henry p kaha ia (ca. 1792–1818), Native Hawaiian, and Itankusun Wanbli (ca. 1879–1900), Oglala Lakota, lived almost a century apart. Yet the cultural circumstances that led them to leave their homel
