Consuming Crises: Migrant Labor, Spectacle, and Precarity in the 20th Century

Charlson, Doria Erin

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Year:: 2020
Contributor:: Charlson, Doria Erin (creator); Ybarra, Patricia (Advisor); Schneider, Rebecca (Reader); Johnson, Jasmine (Reader); Brown University. Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: performance; Air--Pollution; Photography; South Africa; Progressive Era; Dance; Spectacle; Migrant labor; 20th century; California; Dust Bowl Era, 1931-1939; square dance; Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire (1911); New York (State)--New York--Coney Island; Disaster Spectacles; extractive capitalism; industrial capitalism; gold dust; Silicosis; fire
Extent:: 13, 253 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/813j-5f50

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Abstract:: This dissertation focuses on crises of extractive capitalism as they relate to the migrant, laboring body. Roughly spanning the first three-quarters of the 20th century, each of the three chapters in this study center on specific crises of extractive capitalism– events that irrupt or disturb the status quo and require society to recalibrate in its aftermath – and consider how spectacle operates as an embodied mode of managing these crises. Residing at the intersection of performance studies, history, and dance studies, this project creates a cultural history of extractive capital and migrant labor in the 20th century through an investigation into the ways in which said labor comes to bear on bodies, both individual and collective, by studying how it is that people move under capitalism. Additionally, the project explores how performance – specifically spectacle, dance, and spectacularized dance – functions as both a conduit for, and a site of struggle against, the social reproduction of capital. The connective tissue of this dissertation lies in the material and physical traces of labor in the body and in the environment. In this way, this study is invested in how laborers consume crises and how workers are consumed by crises. Here, to "consume" something could be to ingest, or absorb something; to take something on, or in, to the body. This dissertation is equally invested in how bodies are consumed, or used up, depleted, and exhausted due to extractive capitalism. This project links these understandings of consumption by sifting through and amongst dust, ash, and smoke. By tracing the movement and impact of dust (and smoke) – often an overlooked byproduct of industrial expansion, environmental devastation, tragedy abandonment, and neglect – this project excavates histories of toxic labor practices that impact bodily performance and shape cultural work(s), rendering certain populations in constant states of precarity.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020

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Charlson, Doria Erin, "Consuming Crises: Migrant Labor, Spectacle, and Precarity in the 20th Century" (2020). Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/813j-5f50

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Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Theatre Arts and Performance Studies department.
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