Theatre Journal Summer Reading List

“As I wrote honestly in a blurb for the book, Between the Layers is a detailed, impassioned account of the storyweaving process, work, and legacies of Spiderwoman Theater. But it's much more than that. It's a model of engaged, ethical, meticulous scholarship, itself carefully layered and woven together to make a compelling case for the life and vibrancy of Indigenous communities beyond mere survival.”

--Recommend by Ric Knowles. Ric Knowles is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph specializing in intercultural performance and dramaturgy.

Beyond the Political Spider: Critical Issues in African Humanities. By Kwesi Yankah. (AHA; 2021)

“This book validates Afrocentric knowledge production. Very readable, combining biographical details with academic rigor and expertise.  For anyone interested in the critique of global politics of knowledge production and the amplification of African voices in the humanities.”

--Recommended by Awo Mana Asiedu. Awo Mana Asiedu is Associate Professor and Acting Dean of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Ghana.

Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. By Dylan Robinson. (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)  

“Robinson seamlessly weaves together Indigenous Studies, Sound Studies, and Musicology to argue for approaching sound in a way that refuses settler colonial logics. It is an aesthetically and intellectually beautiful book that pushes the boundaries of form for academic works and demonstrates what excellence in interdisciplinary work can look like.”

-- Recommended by Bethany Hughes, Assistant Profession American Culture University of Michigan, Native American representation and contemporary Indigenous performance

Jill Johnston in Motion. By Clare Croft. (Duke University Press, 2024)

“Croft's Jill Johnston in Motion is a book that blends artistic biography, dance and performance history, a queer history, and the history of dance criticism. What I loved the most was the last of these--this book is in part about the embodied aspects of being a reader and writer of and about performance. It is so easy today to dismiss the role of newspaper critics of art, and to decry the fate of said reviewers. This book reminds us why being an incisive witness of performance is so vital in the critics present and for the future life of the writing.  The book is also a fun read about lesbian life in the 1970s, about pissing people off as a form of change and being unashamedly oneself in public. This could certainly be a beach read for the Lesbian/Lesbian Adjacent scholar!”

--Recommended by Patricia Ybarra. Patricia Ybarra is Professor, Brown-Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Latine and Latin American Theatre, Theatre Historiography

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold. By Carmo Herman et al. (Los Angeles: J Paul Getty Museum, 2023)

 An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières. By Roxana Marcoci et al. (New York: the Museum of Modern Art, 2023)

"I’ve been returning to two texts as I ponder writing the conclusion of my own book on refugees; they are both exhibition catalogues each featuring a retrospective of the art, film, and performance of a woman of color in her mid-60s. As collaborative publications, they reproduce something of the curatorial sensibility that structure the shows themselves.

They also point to the limits of those monographs that serve disciplinary concerns more than larger knowledge projects. In that regard, they push me, as I tried to push Theatre Journal during my tenure as editor, to engage in interdisciplinary conversations using aesthetic and socio-cultural analyses that translate perceptions from the larger sensorium to print media."

--Recommended by Sean Metzger. Sean Metzger is a professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television who works at the intersections of visual culture, Asian American, Caribbean, Chinese, film, performance, and sexuality studies.

Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. By Ben Spatz. (Northwestern University Press, 2024.)

“This book is notable for so many reasons, including Spatz's provocative and rich readings of several sites of theoretical/artistic praxis from Dorinne Kondo's radical dramaturgies to Grotowski to audiovisuality as research method. One of the reasons that continues to stick with me, particularly as a white researcher of minoritarian performance, is Spatz's crystal-clear articulation of their ‘apprenticeship to black studies’ (3) and the unfolding of that methodology throughout the volume. Taking up the whiteness of the university and of artistic research as understood therein, Spatz models curiosity and accountability, refusing what they term ‘white writing" and offering instead "counterwhiteness as everyday technique, a daily practice of disidentification’ (84).”

--Recommended by Ariel Nereson. Ariel Nereson is Coeditor of Theatre Journal and Associate Professor of Dance Studies at the University at Buffalo - SUNY. Her research focuses on movement-based performance, racialization, and reparation.

The Rediscovery of George ‘Nash’ Walker: The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America. By Daniel E. Atkinson.  (SUNY Press, 2025).

 “Bert Williams was undeniably the bigger star. Aida Overton Walker’s ‘cakewalk’ was the crowd pleaser. Amidst these figures, George Walker, vaudeville partner to Bert and husband to Aida as well as an immensely talented actor-producer, has remained in the shadows. Atkinson’s biography reconstructs Walker’s and reveals a whole new dimension to American theatre history.” 

--Recommended by Harvey Young. Harvey Young is Professor of Theatre and English at Boston University, specializes in African American theatre and performance culture.

Theater as Data. By Miguel Escobar Varela (University of Michigan Press, 2021; available open access online)

 “This book is a terrific overview of how theatre has engaged and does and can continue to engage with data in multiple contexts. It is very readable, and provides examples from global performance contexts. It provides readers with a way in to understanding new ways to understand, interpret, and historicise theatre and performance.”  

-- Recommended by Joanna Tompkins. In addition to being a consultant on research grants and strategy, Professor Emerita Joanne Tompkins researches how our discipline can be enhanced by exploring virtual reality models of theatres that no longer exist.