Tag archieven: Brandeis University Press

Drag, Queer boeken

Kareem Khubchandani – Lessons in Drag

Kareem Khubchandani Lessons in Drag review and information of the content of book and a Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties. Brandeis University Press will publish the new book by Kareem Khubchandani, on October 29, 2025. Here you can read information about the content of the novel, the author and the publication.

Kareem Khubchandani Lessons in Drag review

  • “Shrewdly defying the conventions that often keep academic texts dry and sequestered….Khubchandani and Vagistan model a way to integrate research and performance.” (Hyperallergic)
  • “Weaving together research, teaching and performance, “Lessons in Drag” is an intricate fashioning of theory and experience. Khubchandani and Ms. Vagistan invite us to consider drag beyond fabric and dress in order to showcase hopeful possibilities of better political and cultural futures.” (Martin F. Manalansan IV)
  • “A rollicking ride through performance and gender studies theory, “Lessons in Drag” is like the most virtuosic of drag performances: both erudite and wildly entertaining. At this perilous historical moment when both the queer nightclub and the university classroom are under siege, Khubchandani insists on the necessity of thinking these sites together. He shows how each can inform the other in ways that are theoretically rich, joyous, and life-affirming.” (Gayatri Gopinath)

Kareem Khubchandani Lessons in Drag

Lessons in Drag

A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties

  • Author: Kareem Khubchandani (United States)
  • Book type: drag queen book
  • Publisher: Brandeis University Press
  • Released: October 29, 2025
  • Length: 384 pages
  • Format: hardcover/ ebook
  • Prize: $ 29.95 / $ 28.95
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the book by Kareem Khubchandani about drag

Lessons in Drag brings to life a vibrant and thought-provoking dialogue between scholar Kareem Khubchandani and his drag persona LaWhore Vagistan. Beginning with an intimate interview, the book unfolds in alternating chapters where the two exchange insights, stories, and critiques.

Khubchandani delves into the lessons LaWhore’s drag practice offers about academia—shaping his approaches to research, teaching, and writing—while Vagistan reveals how Khubchandani’s scholarship influences her performances, inspiring her understanding of fashion, music, divas, and aunties. Together, their reflections and conversations weave a compelling tapestry of drag’s instructive power.

Witty, bold, and deeply personal, Lessons in Drag is both an invitation to explore drag as a practice and a celebration of its transformative potential.

Kareem Khubchandani is Associate Professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of two award-winning books, Decolonize Drag (OR Books, 2023) and Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020). He is also the co-editor of the Lambda Literary-nominated Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021). LaWhore Vagistan is your favorite aunty’s favorite aunty—always over-dressed, over-educated, and over-opinionated. Her music videos, including “Sari” and “There’s a Stranger in My House,” have been featured at film festivals in Mississauga, Hyderabad, Austin, and San Francisco. In 2009, she co-founded the queer South Asian party Jai Ho! in Chicago, and in 2023, she launched Dragistan, an annual South Asian drag showcase in New York.

Matching books

Amerikaanse geschiedenis, Jazzmuziek, Muziek

John Gennari – The Jazz Barn

John Gennari The Jazz Barn review, recensie en informatie boek over de Music Inn, de Berkshires en de plaats van jazz in het Amerikaanse leven. Op 15 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Brandeis University Press het boek van John Gennari over hoe Lenox een klein stadje in New England een thuishaven voor Amerikaanse jazz werd. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek beschikbaar.

John Gennari The Jazz Barn review en recensie

  • “A brilliant meditation on art, place, and the political imagination as they entwined to the sound of jazz in postwar New England. Dazzling cultural analysis slyly delivered as a lively untold story.” (David Hajdu)

John Gennari The Jazz Barn

The Jazz Barn

Music Inn, the Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life

  • Auteur: John Gennari (Verenigde Staten)
  • Foto’s: Clemens Kalischer
  • Taal: Engels
  • Uitgever: Brandeis University Press
  • Verschijnt: 15 oktober 2025
  • Omvang: 254 pagina’s
  • Uitgave: gebonden boek
  • Prijs: $ 35,00
  • Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van het boek over het thuis van de jazz in New England

How a small town in New England became a home for jazz, challenging conventional assumptions about the relationship between culture and landscape, art and geography, town and city, and race and place.

This is a book about what happened in the 1950s in a barn, an icehouse, and a greenhouse in the verdant Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Against the backdrop of McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the expansion of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and postwar cultural tourism, two New Yorkers bought part of a sprawling estate in Lenox, where they converted an old barn and other outbuildings into an inn that could host musical performances and seminars. The Berkshire Music Barn went on to host jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Billie Holiday, as well as jazz roundtables grounded in folkloric approaches to the music.

The Jazz Barn explores the cultural significance of venues like the Berkshire Music Barn and later the Lenox School of Jazz to tell a surprising story about race, culture, and place. John Gennari explores how a predominantly white New England town became a haven for African American musicians, and reveals the Berkshires as an important incubator not just of American literature and classical music but also of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Ornette Coleman’s “new thing.” The Berkshire Music Barn became a crucial space for the mainstreaming of jazz. By the late 1950s, the School of Jazz was an epicenter of the genre’s avant-garde.

Richly illustrated with the photographs of Clemens Kalischer among others, The Jazz Barn demonstrates that the locations where jazz is played and heard indelibly shape the music and its meanings.

John Gennari is professor of English and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge and Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics.

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