Capital Entertainment: Stage Work and the Origins of the Creative Economy, 1843 - 1912

Abstract

We are told on a daily basis that the future of work is creative. The 4.7 million employees in the arts generate more than $698 billion annually for the U.S. economy, while creativity is celebrated far beyond the artist’s studio. At the same time, we hear that what once counted as creative labor—music, theater, journalism—no longer operate in a sustainable fashion. We are thus faced with an apparent contradiction: creativity as a psychological process or social status is valued, while the work itself is not. This condition has intensified in our alleged “post-industrial” moment, but culture workers have long labored in a world of large profits, fluctuating social value, and marginal working conditions. This dissertation makes sense of this incongruity by excavating a labor history of the creative economy out of the origins of the U.S. entertainment industry. In historicizing and politicizing this early creative class, I demonstrate how labor struggles in the first era of continuous entertainment shaped enduring conceptions of artistry and work, while also establishing the foundational infrastructure that undergirds contemporary media and entertainment industries. While most histories of the culture industries begin in 1900, it was in the prior century that commercial performance was transformed from an artisanal or folk practice into a staple product of global, export-oriented capitalism. Despite the glossy sheen of stardom that shapes our understanding of stage work, most performers were contingent staffers whose efforts generated exponential profits. I employ a range of archival materials and methods to identify the diverse sites—the Italian opera, theater orchestra, agent’s office, African American tent company, and vaudeville circuit—that generated extensive debate over the value and categorization of stage labor. As performance was drawn more closely into the mechanisms of capital circulation and growth, the new reality of artists as modern laborers was increasingly deployed by managers and commentators as a conceptual impossibility, and to the non-star performer’s detriment. It is no coincidence that this era produced the first culture industry labor organizations, the first systematized African American-owned touring operations, and the first promising path to success (through the world of cheap amusements) for performers outside of the Anglo-European theatrical establishment. Each of these were attempts by performers to exert greater control over the fruits of their effort, and to reform an industry that epitomized the modernizing workplace in its strict rules, managerial techniques, and pursuit of capital accumulation. Unlike more familiar test cases for modern capitalism, stage work’s unusual qualities—particularly its visibility and its relationship to alienation—make it an ideal test case for labor history. Moving across the disciplinary boundaries that divide the evaluation of aesthetics from the analysis of production, I not only make art visible as labor, but explain why this remains a challenge and why this challenge should be met.