Teatri di massa del Novecento

The article explores a minor work by W.E.B. DuBois, “The Star of Ethiopia”, a pageant the African-American scholar and civil rights leader wrote and produced in the early 1910s. By looking at the idea of the “gifts” given by the “Negro” race to the world this pageant conveyed, the article explores DuBois’s intellectual connections to the broader pageant movement of the Progressive Era, the image of Africa he created as a source of liberation for the whole humanity, and the existing relationship between DuBois’s ideas on race and Franz Boas’s.

Art critic Linda Nochlin singles out the 1913 Paterson Strike Pageant as a significant episode in working-class experience and American culture. By staging their own struggle, the Paterson silk workers – led by Harvad-educated John Reed – showed how the pageant form could become a useful tool of organization and an instrument by which collective memory be kept alive. In so doing, they also creatively broke away from the chauvinistic biases of most turn-of-the century and Progressive- Era “pageant movement.”

The essay traces the origin and development of the Living Newspapers as part of the New Deal’s Federal Theater Project. The original idea of dramatizing news items and events in the form of an animated newspaper evolved gradually into a thematic presentation of current issues that gave rise to new and experimental forms of dramatic language. While criticized for their editorializing and open political commitment in favor of Left causes and the New Deal, thus departing from the editorial norm of separating facts and opinions, the Living Newspapers were widely praised for their formal originality and boldness and their effective communication. Rather than the printed newspaper, in fact, the most important influences were those of documentary cinema and radio. The concept of documentary as creative use of reality anticipates the contemporary form of the docudrama. On the other hand, the Living Newspapers were much clearer in their social and political commitments, and especially in what constituted reality, than contemporary documedramas that often blur the boundary between document and performance, with confusing effects on the viewers.

A ten-year joint project between Roadside Theater (an Appalachian theater group, part of the Appalshop media cooperative in Kentucky) and the Indiwanan An Chawe in Zuni, new Mexico resulted in the production of a dramatic performance in which the Appalachian and the Native American culture come together in dialogue. The project consisted of mutual visits and exchanges of stories and ideas over the years, involving the respective communities, based on the shared love for story-telling, music and performance in the two cultures.

The essay aims at assessing the legacy of deconstructive criticism ten years after his triumph in the light of most recent debate on literary studies. As a case in point, the essay discusses J. Hillis Miller Presidential Address, the speech he gave when elected chief of the Modern Language Association of America in 1986. Facing the question of the material base, Miller foretold the future of literary studies as depending upon the emprovement of that kind of rhetorical reading called “deconstruction”. Miller’s unattended prophecy is placed against the theoretical background of Paul de Man thought in a way to explain the move from textuality to materiality made by the most recent critical theory in terms of an anthropological turn. The question of the material base, unspeakable if yielding to deconstruction, turns out to be the unspoken question of violence itself.