Bryant Keith Alexander

Performing culture in the classroom: An instructional (auto) ethnography

The notion of performing culture in the classroom is both a paradigmatic description of a phenomenon as well as a theoretical position. This research is poised at the productive intersection of critical pedagogy and the increasing focus on autobiography and autoethnography in Performance Studies. The essay seeks to contribute to the development of education as well as performance theory.

Fading, Twisting, and Weaving: An Interpretive Ethnography of the Black Barbershop as Cultural Space

Barbershops in the Black community are discursive spaces in which the confluence of Black hair care, for and by Black people, and small talk establish a context for cultural exchange. This interpretive ethnography describes the barbershop in a Black community as a cultural site for ethnographic exploration and description. The article defines a cultural site not only as the chosen geo-social locale of the ethnographic gaze but also as a centralized occasion within a cultural community that serves at the confluence of banal ritualized activity and the exchange of cultural currency. It is the social experience of being in the barbershop that the article focuses on, knowing that social experience meets at the intersection of culture and performance, and at the confluence of reflection and remembrance.

Skin flint (or, the garbage man's kid): A generative autobiographical performance based on Tami Spry's tattoo stories

This essay capitalizes on the hope that autobiographical performances aesthetic of incarnation may become an aesthetic ofreincamation. Explicating the construction of “generative autobiographical performance,” the essay continues the retheorizing of the personal narrator in autobiographical performance as something other than a heroic autonomous subject. It documents the essentially interdependent and collaborative effort evidenced between two autobiographical performances. In the process, the essay also continues to explore autobiographical performance as a form of cultural critique.

Black Skin/White Masks: The Performative Sustainability of Whiteness (With Apologies to Frantz Fanon)

This article uses the iconic text Black Skin/White Masks by Frantz Fanon as a metonymic trope to examine the nature of White Studies through the autobiographical frame of a Black critic. The article is structured around three components. First, the socially constructed identity of “Whiteness” as embedded in, emergent from, and critiqued by those in (and of) the project of White Studies. Second, it addresses the question of how White Studies serves as a project for “sustaining Whiteness,” in light of increasing social and cultural critique of Whiteness. Third, the article initiates an argument for the performative nature of Whiteness that crosses borders of race and ethnicity. The article also address issues of authenticity embedded in the politics and intersections of performing race and culture while extending the notion of Whiteness, like Blackness, as a performative accomplishment.

The materiality of bodies: Critical reflections on pedagogy, politics and positionality

This aesthetic essay is concerned with the notion of democratization and the ways in which policies and “practiced orientations “ to inclusiveness and diversity, effect colorized and racialized bodies in traditional educational spaces. The essay uses the critical autopoietic narratives of a Black male scholar and a White male scholar set within a dialogue as a communicative and intercultural approach of influence and cooperation. The authors suggest that this method is the sin quo non of the democratic ideal and resides at the core of collaborative research.

Passing, Cultural Performance, and Individual Agency: Performative Reflections on Black Masculine Identity:

This performative article uses the trope of “passing” as reference to crossing racial identity borders as well as to intra/interracial issues of identity and authenticity. Passing is constructed as a performative accomplishment and assessment by both the group claimed and the group denied. This article is structured around three divisions—passing as cultural performance, the social construction of identity, and the quest for self-definition of socially mediated expectations. All issues are centered within the specific concerns of Black masculine identity. In the process, the essay also seeks to establish the notion of an integrative ethnography of performance that envelops the critique of a performance as a part of the overall textual presentation of experience.

Resisting (Resistance) Stories A Tri-autoethnographic Exploration of Father Narratives Across Shades of Difference

This is a triple autoethnographic text written by three men of differing racial and cultural backgrounds with the purpose of exploring the nature of their relationships with their fathers. The authors reflect on experiences with their fathers seeking to find answers that might help them resist the replication of pain in their own parenting as well as (in one instance) the resistance to parenting altogether. In each intersecting movement the voices are both singular and plural, featuring experiences that press against each other in ways that are simultaneously familiar and strange, building a case study of how the critical practice of autoethnography provides an opportunity for a personal scrutiny that is both private and public, and individual and communal.

Standing in the Wake: A Critical Auto/Ethnographic Exercise on Reflexivity in Three Movements

Using the metaphor of “standing in the wake” to represent a time after experience for critical reflection, this performative and autoethnographic text uses reflexivity as both the subject and the method of engagement, to explore the nature of reflexivity in ethnographic research; as well as the idiosyncratic and diverse ways in which ethnographers enact reflexivity in relation to definitional orientations and intents of ethnography itself. The essay is structured around three movements: “In the Wake of the Preconference: Per Se,” “In the Wake of Silence: Eulogies in/as Reflective Methodologies,” and “In the Wake of What’s Next: An Afterward in/ as/on Reflexivity.”

Racializing Identity: Performance, Pedagogy, and Regret

This performative article/script serves as an extended functional definition and a practical exploration of the notion of ”racializing identity.” Through a series of individually labeled autopoetic movements, the performative article/script creates a typology that compares and analyzes the foci of each form, facilitating the definition and exposing the socially constructed intersection between race and Black queer identity. The performative article/script begins to question the limitations of race as a specified method of categorizing bodies and more specifically questions the conceptualization of “performing race” as a sign of racial authenticity.

(Re) Visioning the Ethnographic Site: Interpretive Ethnography as a Method of Pedagogical Reflexivity and Scholarly Production

This article uses and advocates the use of interpretive ethnography as a method of pedagogical reflexivity and scholarly production. Specifically, it seeks to further the discussion of the classroom as a cultural site that places the teacher as both participant and observer in the intense cultural negotiation of lived experience, curriculum, and politics of education. Using the constructive metaphor of pedagogy as drag, the project also suggests that similar to drag (and the performance of gender), pedagogy is about what teachers reveal and what they conceal in the classroom and why. To that extent, the article uses a series of reflective poetic excursions on the nature and experience of viewing and discussing the performance of drag. These excursions take the author away from the formal construct of the classroom but always bring him back to the constructed nature of pedagogy as drag, blurring the boundaries between place and space.