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LABOR, PERFORMANCE, AND THEATRE:
STRIKE CULTURE AND THE EMERGENCE OF
ORGANIZED LABOR IN THE 1930’S
by
Tiffany Knight Raymond
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
December 2009
Copyright 2009 Tiffany Knight Raymond
Object Description
| Title | Labor, performance, and theatre: Strike culture and the emergence of organized labor in the 1930's |
| Author | Raymond, Tiffany Knight |
| Author email | tiffanyknight1@yahoo.com; tiffanyraymond@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2009-10-28 |
| Date submitted | 2009 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2009-11-22 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Roman, David |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Boone, Joseph Allen Cheng, Meiling |
| Abstract | This dissertation focuses on how industrial workers of the late 1930's used theatre and performance to help achieve collective bargaining and improve working conditions. Organized labor is connected to performance via the sit-down strike, a labor resistance strategy of the late 1930's in which workers continuously occupied their worksites in a performance of grievance to prevent the importation of scab labor. Serving as the primary case study is the United Automobile Workers' (UAW) sit-down strike of 1936-37. This strike had nexus in Flint, Michigan and was the first major sit-down and the first to receive national and international news coverage. The UAW's ultimate, and unanticipated, success over General Motors in early February 1937 spurred an imitative wave of nearly 5,000 sit-downs across the nation that same year. Educational institutions like Brookwood Labor College, which had a student population of workers, theatrically restaged Flint's sit-down and toured nationally, sharing the autoworkers' tactics with other laborers and forestalling cultural memory loss of labor struggles.; Industrial labor strikes of the Great Depression have been traditionally read through the lens of labor history. Reframing such unmined narratives of working class history as performance and theatre offers an alternate dramatic history for the 1930's, and more broadly, twentieth century American drama. The UAW sit-down strike of 1936-37 presents a position from which to argue that the sit-down predates, and anticipates, the academic burgeoning of both performance studies and working class studies. Worker-driven performances both resonated with, and helped shaped, a larger working class culture. |
| Keyword | Brookwood; UAW; labor theatre; working class studies; Flint; Michigan; sit-down strike; sit down strike; women and strikes; labor college; workers' theatre; workers theatre; 1930s; Great Depression |
| Coverage date | circa 1936/1939 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2757 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Raymond, Tiffany Knight |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Raymond-3372 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume26/etd-Raymond-3372.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | LABOR, PERFORMANCE, AND THEATRE: STRIKE CULTURE AND THE EMERGENCE OF ORGANIZED LABOR IN THE 1930’S by Tiffany Knight Raymond A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2009 Copyright 2009 Tiffany Knight Raymond |
