Striking Performances, Performing Strikes

Community and contestation are viewed as opposing social forces. For many, community denotes sharing, similarity, cohesion, and camaraderie. Contestation denotes conflict, difference, divisiveness, and enmity. In Striking Performances/ Performing Strikes, Kirk W. Fuoss demonstrates the ironic circumstances that unite these seemingly opposing forces. First, he shows that community and contestation stand in an interdependent rather than oppositional relationship and, second, he explains how cultural performances play a central role in simultaneously fostering community and fomenting conflict. He develops these arguments by presenting two extended case studies: the Workers Alliance of America's 1936 takeover of the New Jersey State Assembly and the General Motors sitdown strike of 1936-37.During the thirties, when millions of unemployed Americans depended on their state governments for economic relief, New Jersey had spent all relief appropriation for 1936 by the month of April and left the unemployed to fend for themselves. As a result, the state branch of the Workers Alliance of America seized the State Assembly and for ten days staged a pauper's parliament in which they alternately performed roles of ideal legislators and parodied the actual legislators.In 1936 and 1937 a similar cultural performance was staged during the General Motors sitdown strike. Because the local media maintained an antistrike stance, union forces frequently deployed cultural performances in simulation of an alternative press. To achieve their ends, they also staged kangaroo court sessions, dancing pickets, daily concerts by strikers' orchestras, auto parades, mock funerals, games of labor charades, andskits written and performed by the strikers themselves.These two case studies show how the theatrical stagings by protesters threw the spotlight of public attention on their causes. Also, Fuoss shows how such politics of performance unite the seemingly opposing forces of community and contestation.