What can the theatrical use of food accomplish in performances which assert cultural, legal, or moral rights to food production and consumption in a food insecure society? Case studies comprising the USDA's 1933-34 World's Fair exhibits, the May 1933 Wisconsin Cooperative Milk Pool protest, the 1936 Federal Theatre Project living newspaper Triple-A Plowed Under, and the 1939 Missouri Bootheel sharecroppers' demonstration illustrate foods' potency in disparate performance genres and the experiential difference of real or mimetic hunger, food destruction, and plenty for spectators. The "paradox of want amid plenty," a Great Depression-era colloquialism that referred to US citizens' perception of a contradiction between the country's visible food supply and pervasive hunger, is both the context and rhetoric framing these performances and their responses to the Agricultural Adjustment Acts as an economic program with moral implications. This dissertation theorizes that food use and its marked absence in food rights performances can stimulate spectators' sense of physical investment in moral, economic, and political debates. The national debate about US citizens' mutual obligations and the federal government's responsibility to all citizens restructures studies of New Deal-era culture, theatre, and politics. Through composite descriptions of the performances, this study shows how performative elements of non-theatrical events (protests and exhibition) and mimetic representation of such incidents (living newspaper drama) revealed the politics of food rights to spectators. Tracy C. Davis's method of historical sign restoration is applied to the case studies in combination with anthropological theories regarding culturally constructed meanings of food and phenomenologically-based theories of food as a communication medium. This approach generates hypotheses about reception and spectatorship, demonstrating the ways in which performances prompted spectators' visceral engagement. Food served as these performances' touchstone; spectators' first-hand, commonsense, bodily knowledge about the foods used (or the absence of necessary foods) made the ultimate effects of socio-economic exclusion undeniable and brought consumer-producer-government interdependence to the fore. Exploring dysfunction in the US food system during the New Deal era pinpoints the perceived conflicts between government obligations, citizens' cultural rights, and capitalist imperatives toward the fundamental human right to eat.

Last modified

• 05/30/2018

Creator

• Ann Eleanor Folino White

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2MM7Z

Subject

• Theatre and Drama

Keyword

• History
• United States

Date created

• 2007-05-08

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright