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Life of the Party
  • Published: 26 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9781635902013
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 136
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Life of the Party

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An archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, produced alongside Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, Black Backstage.

An archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, produced alongside Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, Black Backstage.

Life of the Party is an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture—its poetics and its realities and its ruins, both seen and unseen. Produced concurrent with Black Backstage, Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, the book acts as a blueprint, a script, and a ledger for this exhibition as well as a stand-alone record of the territory it covers. Holiday assembles artifacts from this tradition, especially found photographs taken of artists backstage, to tell the story of the culture within the culture, retrieving a secret history of the gestures, murmurs, shouts, and reversals that occur offstage and off the record. Colliding image, text, and even audio (in an album accompaniment to the book that Holiday will also produce as part of this series of works), Life of the Party reveals the backstage as by turns mundane, vulgar, and glorious: a site of sacred ritual behind the spectacle of performance.
  • Published: 26 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9781635902013
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 136
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Praise for Life of the Party

“Harmony is incredible. Period. On the page, her voice sings in multiple registers. No matter the form, her prose is rich and authoritative, muscular, and yet nimble. She brings a deep amount of research and institutional knowledge to everything she writes. I first encountered her work as a reader—and immediately became a fan. Her words hold you close. Sentence to sentence, she makes you excited for what will come next. She’ll lure you in with brilliant insights and observations and then, in an instant, take even the smallest detail—a melodic note, a clothing accessory, a forgotten biographical anecdote—and show you why it matters, transforming the world you thought you knew into something worth looking at with fresh eyes.”
—Ian F. Blair, Los Angeles Times

“Harmony is incredible. Period. On the page, her voice sings in multiple registers. No matter the form, her prose is rich and authoritative, muscular, and yet nimble. She brings a deep amount of research and institutional knowledge to everything she writes. I first encountered her work as a reader—and immediately became a fan. Her words hold you close. Sentence to sentence, she makes you excited for what will come next. She’ll lure you in with brilliant insights and observations and then, in an instant, take even the smallest detail—a melodic note, a clothing accessory, a forgotten biographical anecdote—and show you why it matters, transforming the world you thought you knew into something worth looking at with fresh eyes.”
—Ian F. Blair, Los Angeles Times

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