Description
Book SynopsisProvides an account of the theatrical strategies used by consumers, farmers, agricultural laborers, and the federal government to negotiate competing rights to food and the moral contradictions of capitalist society in times of economic crisis.
Trade ReviewPlowed Under provides a fertile field for future research on New Deal agiculture and social activism. . . . White's merging of performance studies and history will also offer a useful model to analyze the theatrical and cultural strategies that inform public protest in America.
* Register of the Kentucky Historical Society *
Plowed Under is thoroughly researched and skilfully conceived. Its performance-oriented approach illuminates genuine tensions and disagreements between the administration and many of the nation's citizens and provides intriguing insights into New Deal culture.
* Modern Drama *
[A] stimulating study of New Deal America
* The Annals of Iowa *
White's study makes an invaluable contribution to history, theater history, cultural studies, American studies, and other fields.
* Journal of American History *
Plowed Under will prove useful for scholars of agriculture, public policy, political culture, and the New Deal, and it presents an invaluable perspective for any historian of the twentieth century.
* Indiana Magazine of History *
[White's] book offers an insightful examination of how performance, and particularly food in performance, defines and questions the ethics of food production, sale, and consumption. Plowed Under contributes significantly to ongoing studies of the performance of food and the performativity of protests, and also serves as an important history of the Great Depression itself.
* Theatre Journal *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. The New Deal Vision for Agriculture: USDA Exhibits at the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair
2. Milk Dumping Across America's Dairyland: The May 1933 Wisconsin Dairymen's Strike
3. Playing "Housewife" in an Urban Polonia: The Hamtramck (Mich.) Women's 1935 Meat Boycott
4. Hunger on the Highway in the Cotton South: The 1939 Missouri Sharecroppers' Demonstration
5. Staging the Agricultural Adjustment Act: The Federal Theatre Project's Triple-A Plowed Under (1936)
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
