Dr. Ann Folino White
Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies, Michigan State University
Friday, Feb. 14, 2014 at 3:00
2038 Drake
The New Deal was an era during which not only the basis of contemporary federal farm subsidies was installed as an entitlement, but also the cultural scripts used to galvanize twenty-first century food and anti-hunger activists were put forward and tested. Contradictory images of widespread hunger and agricultural plenty visually defined the 1930s economic crisis, and the New Deal administration’s plans for agriculture occupied intense national interest. The solution to this “paradox of want amid plenty”: the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was not only front-page news, it was a flashpoint for U.S. citizens because its program to curtail food production lay at the impasse between citizens’ perceived rights to food and the economic imperative to treat food like any other commodity. Farmers, consumers, and agricultural laborers challenged the AAA’s morality by staging food’s powerful symbolic relationship to American identity in their protests. The federal government also turned to the theatre of food in its artistic representations of the AAA’s effects on American life. This talk explores the theatrical strategies used by anti-AAA activists in their protests, those employed by the federal government at the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair and in the Federal Theatre Project “living newspaper” play Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), and the recurrence of these strategies in contemporary food politics performances. Comparative analysis of these events shows just how ideologically problematic the commodification of food is for Americans. And that citizens and the government (continue to) negotiate the moral tensions between food as a biological necessity and as a vital commercial product by linking the right to food to the discourse of producerism and the performance of “good” citizenship.
Dr. Ann Folino White, Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies, is a scholar and theatre artist. She received her B.A. in Theatre from Michigan State University, M.A. in Theatre from Northwestern University, and Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama along with a Gender Studies Certificate from Northwestern University. Dr. Folino White’s teaching interests include stage directing, performance theory, and American theatrical and popular performance from the late-nineteenth century to the early-twentieth century. Ann is currently at work on a book project, tentatively titled Sacred Commodities: Staging Citizenship and Competing Rights to Food during the New Deal. This study of protests, theatre, and performance explores the significance of theatrical strategies to shaping public discourse about the morality of New Deal agricultural policy. Dr. Folino White’s scholarship on American drama, protest, and performances about rights to food has appeared in American Drama, Text and Performance Quarterly, Performing Arts Resources, and TDR: The Drama Review. In 2007, Ann co-curated, directed, and performed in Ground to Plate, an innovative “dinner theatre” event in Chicago comprised of short plays, poems, and performance art concerned with ethical food production and consumption practices. Ann has also served as a dramaturg for Appletree Theatre and Writers’ Theatre in the Chicago-area, and as a new play reader for Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Most recently, Ann directed her own adaptation of the book The Lady Victory about a home for unwed mothers in 1960s Oklahoma.
Sponsored by the Performance/Politics Working Group.
