The Garment Workers’ Union’s Pageant of Unity (1940) as manifestation of transnational working-class culture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10836282 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Małgorzata Drwal (0000-0003-4871-1170, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 75-87 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Tydskrif vir letterkunde (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0041-476X • E-ISSN: 2309-9070 |
| Publisher | Academy of Science of South Africa (PUBLISHER • ZA) |
| DOI | 10.17159/tl.v59i1.8842 |
| OpenAlex | W4225976518 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
In this article, I examine the Garment Workers’ Union’s theatre as a manifestation of transnational working-class culture in the 1940s. Analysing Pageant of Unity (1940), a play in which Afrikaans and English alternate to express the equality of Afrikaans- and English-speaking workers in the face of exploitation, I offer an attempt to escape the confines of a national literature as linked to a single language. I demonstrate how the political pageant—a genre typical of socialist propaganda and international trade unionism—was adapted to a South African context. This drama is, therefore, viewed as a product of cultural mobility between Europe, the United States, and South Africa. Assuming the ‘follow the actor’ approach of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, I identify a network of interconnections between the nodes formed by human (drama practitioners and theoreticians, socialist organisers) and nonhuman actors (texts representing socialist drama conventions, in particular agitprop techniques). Tracing the inspirations and adaptations of conventions, I argue that Pageant of Unity most evidently realises the prescriptions outlined by the Russian drama theoretician Vsevolod Meyerhold whose approach influenced Guy Routh, one of the pageant’s creators. Thus, I focus on how this propaganda production utilises certain features of the Soviet avant-garde theatre, which testifies to the transnational character of South African working-class culture
Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Drama · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Working class · African history and culture studies · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Law · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
Introduction
The Montage Rhetoric of Nordahl Grieg’s Interwar Drama
Reassembling the Social
Yours for Socialism”
Socialist in content, national in form
Cultural Mobility
Comparison and Translation
Afrikaans Working-Class Drama in the Early 1940s
Proletarian Drama
Masques, Monuments and Masons
Separation for unity
Does the Working Class Have a Culture in the Anthropological Sense
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |