Circus World: Roustabouts, Animals, and the Work of Putting on the Big Show
Circus World: Roustabouts, Animals, and the Work of Putting on the Big Show
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Abstract
Circus World: Roustabouts, Animals, and the Work of Putting on the Big Show examines the circus as a workplace during its Golden Age, from the 1870s until the 1960s. It is not focused on one particular circus. Instead, it considers the entire circus world, the wider collection of traveling shows. This study investigates how circus workers—a group that comprised adults, children, and animals from around the world—understood their own labor and shaped their workplace. Behind the scenes, practices in the circus world resembled those of other companies in the corporate landscape. But as a workplace it also operated much like a mobile company town, with systems that financially tethered employees to their employer through paternalistic policies that offered room and board rather than pay. Workers also labored and lived in the same space, which blurred lines between work and home life. Circus World explores the performative labor of physical and emotional work that created the circus world, and the ways that identity affected how circus workers understood their own lives and labor. Despite their varied identities, workers often banded together under the circus world banner, helping create this workplace in the late nineteenth century and then dismantle it in the mid-twentieth century.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
The Circus World in the Golden Age
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Part I The Circus Migrant
Andrea Ringer -
Part II The Circus Lot
Andrea Ringer -
Part III The Circus World from the Outside
Andrea Ringer -
End Matter
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