In early twentieth-century U.S. culture, sex sold.  While known mainly for its social reforms, the Progressive Era was also obsessed with prostitution, sexuality, and the staging of women’s changing roles in the modern era. By the 1910s, plays about prostitution (or “brothel dramas”) had inundated Broadway, where they sometimes became long-running hits and other times sparked fiery obscenity debates. In Sex for Sale, Katie N. Johnson recovers six of these plays, presenting them with astute cultural analysis, photographs, and production histories. The result is a new history of U.S. theatre that reveals the brothel drama’s crucial role in shaping attitudes toward sexuality, birth control, immigration, urbanization, and women’s work.

The volume includes the work of major figures including Eugene O’Neill, John Reed, Rachel Crothers, and Elizabeth Robins. Now largely forgotten and some previously unpublished, these plays were among the most celebrated and debated productions of their day.  Together, their portrayals of commercialized vice, drug addiction, poverty, white slavery, and interracial desire reveal the Progressive Era’s fascination with the underworld and the theatre’s power to regulate sexuality.  Additional plays, commentary, and teaching materials are available at brotheldrama.lib.miamioh.edu.
 
Plays included:
Ourselves (1913) by Rachel Crothers
The Web (1913) by Eugene O’Neill
My Little Sister (1913) by Elizabeth Robins
Moondown (1915) by John Reed
Cocaine (1916) by Pendleton King
A Shanghai Cinderella (renamed East is West, 1918) by Samuel Shipman and John B. Hymer

Set against the backdrop of anthropology’s recent focus on various “turns” (whether ontological, ethical, or otherwise), this pathbreaking volume returns to the question of knowledge and the role of translation as a theoretical and ethnographic guide for twenty-first century anthropology, gathering together contributions from leading thinkers in the field.

Since Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation nearly impossible. And still others have viewed translation between languages as principally indeterminate. The contributors here argue that the challenge posed by the constant confrontation between incommensurable worlds and systems may be the most fertile ground for state-of-the-art ethnographic theory and practice. Ranging from tourism in New Guinea to shamanism in the Amazon to the globally ubiquitous restaurant menu, the contributors mix philosophy and ethnography to redefine translation not only as a key technique for understanding ethnography but as a larger principle in epistemology.