This paper examines the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Propaganda's investigation into un-American activities in the Federal Theatre Project. In particular it examines the performances of committee chairman Martin Dies and his Republican colleague J. Parnell Thomas, who led the interrogation of Federal Theatre witnesses. Relying on so-called “friendly witnesses,” usually disaffected former Federal Theatre employees or former communists, Dies and Thomas devoted three days to the testimony of Hazel Huffman, a WPA mail clerk, who never worked on the FTP, while allowing Hallie Flanagan and Ellen Woodward, the two women who directed the national theatre programme, just a few hours each. While Huffman gushed and flirted, Flanagan and Woodward refused to perform the version of femininity the committee demanded. The reordering of gendered roles that resulted was startling. The Dies Committee took to presenting itself as emasculated, a victim of masculine women and New Deal–communist conspirators, who were stripping not only them, but also America, of manhood. This paper suggests that it is only by analysing the powerful gendered performances of the key characters in this unfolding drama of un-Americana that we can understand how and why un-Americanism gained so strong a foothold in mid-century America.

This article examines the marketing strategies of A'Lelia Walker, daughter and coworker of Madam C. J. Walker who manufactured beauty and hair products and built up the extremely successful Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in the early decades of the twentieth century. Whereas the mother was and still is widely admired as a hardworking "race woman," her daughter is frequently dismissed as a spoiled and frivolous heiress whose conspicuous consumption ultimately undermined the Walker brand. By placing A'Lelia's work for the company within the context of recent scholarship on black labor and consumption, this article suggests that we understand A'Lelia's consumer strategies as a savvy response to the new demands of mass marketing. Furthermore, an analysis of the changing and gendered ideas of consumption in early-twentieth century America reveals that A'Lelia's lifestyle challenged both black and white elites' gendered expectations of respectable consumption and helped to reshape the politics of black women's labor.

No abstract

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated “Negro Units” set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged Black versions of “white” classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the Black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade Black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of Black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider Black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of Black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

The introduction explores the significance of Black theatre manuscripts for histories of the Federal Theatre Project, Black literary heritage and the Radical Black tradition. Black theatre manuscripts developed on the Federal Theatre Project were not always staged or published, but they document Black creativity and theatrical innovation in the 1930s and constitute a crucial if overlooked part of American cultural history. Theatre histories that only include plays staged or published will invariably be histories of what was interesting or acceptable to whites. This book examines what was important and necessary to African Americans. It develops the idea of the Black Performance Community, a temporary community which performance creates among spectators, performers, directors, writers and others whose backstage roles shape manuscripts and performance. It argues that histories of Black theatre need to consider variant manuscripts, the communities of unacknowledged collaborators that shaped them over time, and the role of the archives and anthologies in shaping knowledge production about Black theatre.