No description available.

No description available.

Bread and Puppet Theater's use of performing objects offers an aperture to contemplate complex assemblages that blur lines between the human and the nonhuman. Drawing upon cultural studies, feminist materialism, circus studies, and puppetry studies, I consider both the bread and the puppets as they intersect with various assemblages and fields of interpretation. These configurations demonstrate how the objects embody (non)human, material, and conceptual aspects. Because of this ability to exist within the meshes of binaries, performing objects are well suited to challenge and expose other binaries and hierarchies through three categories of analysis — movement, difference, and intra-action — based on Karan Barad's work on matter. In addition to the theoretical framework, I conducted ethnographic interviews and rely on my own experience as an apprentice at Bread and Puppet in 2004, considering myself as co-constitutive actant within the scope of analysis. I examine the way the theater uses sourdough bread and puppets as performing objects to create meaning, express ideology, apply tension within constructs of power, and demonstrate a model for co-dependent living between humans and objects / Doctor of Philosophy / Objects, despite their connections to daily life, which includes times of celebration and insurgency, remain overlooked as political actants. Bread and Puppet Theater, through performances, protests, and everyday living, places bread and puppetry as central to home and public live for puppeteers and performers. This dissertation asserts that bread and puppetry at Bread and Puppet Theater exemplify a co-creative relationship between people and things. This partnership creates tension in places of power, literal locations and within modes of thinking; simplifies and makes more accessible ideological messages; and evokes solidarity through performance. By considering bread in relation to Bread and Puppet Theater, we can see how bread becomes a fulcrum balancing between those with the most wealth and those with the least. Bread, as a symbol, is used to articulate demands. Its presence alone at protests suggests a list of demands regarding redistribution of wealth, fair wages, and food. As a symbol that touches the lives of all, it becomes an object that can evoke solidarity as a symbol but also as a product that is consumed and shared. Puppetry is exemplary of shared creation between people and objects. The rod puppets used at Bread and Puppet are especially suited to blurring demarcations between these two actants. Embodying this in-between space allows puppets to interrogate and blur other sets of binaries — the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular, rich and the poor, state power and people, war and peace, and so on. This liminal, blurred space primes puppetry to challenge structures of power during political performances and protests. Ultimately this project considers how objects become central to political action and how, if thoughtfully mobilized, could operate as counter actants within times of turmoil.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Scholars of American Jewish history have long debated the complicity of the American Jewish community in the loss of six million Jewish lives in Europe during the Holocaust. After Hitler took power in 1933, American Jewish leaders took to the streets to protest the Nazi Party’s abuse of German Jews. Two central figures in this history are Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise and Revisionist Zionist Ben Hecht because of their wide-reaching protest movements that operated in competition with each other. Although the historiography presents Wise and Hecht's inability to unite as the product of difference, my examination of their protest performances presents a novel picture of similarity. Despite their ideological antagonism, Wise and Hecht's shared cultural identities, as both Americans and Jews, produced pageants with decidedly similar elements. The three productions studied here – The Case of Civilization Against Hitler (1934), Stop Hitler Now (1943), and We Will Never Die (1943) – were reflective of these identities. Appealing to their Americanness, they performed rituals of democratic justice. Appealing to their Jewishness, they presented Jewish prayer, iconography, and ritual related to divine justice. In highlighting the parallels in the performances, I read their actions as successful insofar as they appealed to a diverse American Jewish audience.

Activism has the potential for reform (Howard, 1976). Unlike previous studies on high school activism this study places a primary focus on underground newspapers and argues that underground newspapers allowed high school students to function as activists as well as educational reformers. In order to make this argument, this study examined over 150 underground newspapers and other primary source publications. The goals and tactics of high school activists evolved from the 1950s to the 1970s. During this time there were some shifts in ideologies, strategies, and priorities that were influenced by both an ever increasing student frustration with school leaders and by outside historical events. Underground newspapers captured the shift that occurred in the objectives and tactics of student activists. As a result, the contents of underground newspapers were the primary focus of this study. My study reveals that there were three types of student activists: "incidental" activists who simply wanted to change individual school policies, "intentional" activists who wanted high school students to have greater authority and autonomy in schools, and lastly, "radical" activists who desired an end to oppression of people based on race, class, sex, and age. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that for the most part incidental, intentional, and radical student activists were all working towards improving their high schools. This common goal was pivotal in the development of a Youth Empowerment social movement, which would be born out of the actions of all three types of high school activists. . Incidental activists were the focal point of attention for school administrators in the 1950s, however; intentional and radical activists would take center stage by the late 1960s. Throughout the 1970s intentional and radical activists would overshadow incidental activists and dominate the high school activism scene. / Urban Education

Einzelbesprechung