Acts of commitment : prefigurative politics on the agitprop stage
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- "Acts of Commitment" examines the purposeful conflation of theatrical and political acts in agitprop performance: a genre of anti-fascist street theater popular in the final years of the Weimar Republic (ca. 1926-1933). Using largely unpublished archival materials—production ephemera, performer memoirs, and police reports—I reconstruct the performance scenarios of this amateur theater movement, while also locating its trajectory within larger cultural debates about the social function of art. Although agitprop has long been dismissed as an overly simplistic aesthetic practice defined solely by its capacity to convey party doctrine (that is, as "propaganda"), my research dismantles the presumed unidirectionality between political conviction and artistic form. My findings demonstrate that agitprop's political import stemmed less from its (usually pro-Communist) discursive content than from the performative acts of the players, spectators, and police who co-produced the theatrical events. As a transient space that enticed participants to perform political commitments in the face of increasingly fascist state forces, the agitprop stage allowed urban workers to prefigure their own political identities, modes of discourse, and, most significantly, strategies of resistance. At stake in this research is a concrete understanding of how theater has functioned as a vital site for disenfranchised communities to negotiate theoretical models of revolutionary action and their embodied realization.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Piggott, Jessica Christina | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Smith, Matthew Wilson | |
| Thesis advisor | Smith, Matthew Wilson | |
| Thesis advisor | Hill, Leslie, 1967- | |
| Thesis advisor | Phelan, Peggy | |
| Degree committee member | Hill, Leslie, 1967- | |
| Degree committee member | Phelan, Peggy | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jessica Piggott. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Jessica Christina Piggott
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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