Open AccessWork, Play, and Performance in the Southern Tobacco Warehouse
Author(s) -
Elijah Gaddis
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
material culture review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1927-9264
pISSN - 1718-1259
DOI - 10.7202/1076795ar
Subject(s) - performative utterance , variety (cybernetics) , documentation , narrative , pleasure , vernacular , resistance (ecology) , visual arts , aesthetics , sociology , history , art , literature , computer science , psychology , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , programming language , ecology , biology
This paper examines tobacco warehouses in the southern United States as sites of both work and play. Using a performative approach in the study of architecture that is rooted in folklife methodology, the essay claims these quotidian working structures as places of celebratory potential amid the strictures of Jim Crow spatial segregation. In particular, it focuses on a series of massive dances held in the elaborately decorated warehouses during the early-to-mid-20th century. During these dances, Black celebrants turned the restrictive social and economic working spaces of the tobacco warehouse into places of radical potential and pleasure. The claims of this essay are supported by both conventional architectural documentation and the oral testimonies of a variety of tobacco workers, musicians, and dancers, who made use of the warehouses for a variety of often conflicting purposes. Told together, their narratives emphasize both spatialized resistance to segregation, and the importance of the ephemeral archives of individual stories and memories to the study of vernacular architectural history.