D. Soyini Madison

The Dialogic Performative in Critical Ethnography

The most difficult, the most risky, the most awe-inspiring gift of performance and what holds the ethical imperative in its nervous embrace is what some have referred to as the dialogic performative . Fighting this word ‘‘dialogue’’ against overuse and cliché*because the stakes are high and getting higher*I am invested in the labor and love of performance that seeks and worries about the act of dialogue and the politics of the performative. This kind of searching and worrying that inheres in levels of urgency and commitment is not without its moments of joy and playfulness. The dialogic performative is charged by a desire for a generative and embodied reciprocity, sometimes with pleasure and sometimes with pain. It is a mutual creation of something different and something more from the meeting of bodies in their contexts. The dialogic performative evokes and erupts within the layers of daily living, but under the rubric of performance ethnography it becomes the antithesis of what it means to be alone and fearing the absence of a response, echoing Bakhtin’s famous dictum: ‘‘Nothing is more frightening than the absence of an answer’’ (111). I am asking that we reinvigorate our thinking about Otherness relative to ethnography in what feels like a sea of autoethnography mania. I’m feeling the Other (at least in Dwight Conquergood’s ideal of coperformance) slipping in murky shadows upstaged by a contrived poetics of the self. Please, let me pause and clarify: I want to make a distinction between autoethnography and autobiographical performance. I am inspired by autobiographical performances that enact ecologies of the self and speak in the multiple tongues of their own worlds, where the self is a composite of interpenetrating and polyvocal experiences, intents, and desires within itself and with Others. In these performances, I have witnessed how the self can be Other to itself, as well as Othered in the order of the social. These performances deeply touch and excavate momentous details that tell an existential and sublime truth we would otherwise never know. While autobiography and personal narrative*read and performed*have always inspired and interested me, once the

Performing theory/embodied writing

This essay performatively expresses specific theoretical ruminations on class, language, and race. This writing is a performance, while it is or is not necessarily for the “stage.” The performance seeks a felt‐sensing meeting between theory, writing, and performing. The performer claims an uneasy possession of performance as a means of both subjectivity and freedom. Theory becomes another way to know performance better; and performance becomes the desired illuminator of theory. From the burlesque to the sublime, the performer conjures four different encounters with her theoretical fathers: Karl Marx, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, and Frantz Fanon. Needing useful theory‐from the ‘high’ ground of scholarship to the ‘low’ ground of ancient re/tellings‐for useful purposes, the performer must first remember where theories begin.

“That was my occupation”: Oral narrative, performance, and black feminist thought

Black feminist thought supports the interdependence of what are called “theories of the flesh” and “specialized knowledge.” Theories of the flesh reflect the distinctive interpretations of the world carved out of the material realities of a groups life experiences. Specialized knowledge infuses elements and themes of black womens culture and traditions with critical interventionist thinking to provide black women with new tools of resistance. The oral narrative of Mrs. Alma Kapper, who worked as a domestic and sharecropper in the black belt of Mississippi, is illuminated through the joining of black feminist thought and the performance paradigm. As a result, black feminist thought and the performance paradigm augment each other as analytical constructs in unveiling the many ways people “lettered” and “unlettered” theorize themselves.

The Labor of Reflexivity

Reflexivity is examined as an act of labor. Employing Tami Spry and Della Pollock’s discretely different articulations of the “performative” and the “I,” reflexivity becomes a particular quality of labor that works to leave something behind, something that lingers, something that will remain long after our reflexive work takes form. What labor as reflexivity leaves behind both embraces and jettisons notions of hauntings and memories, because it contemplates its own contemplations within past and future contingencies of self and Other that are boundlessly committed to an enlivening present. Labor as reflexivity is enumerated as being constituted by materiality, futurity, and performative temporality.Reflexivity is examined as an act of labor. Employing Tami Spry and Della Pollock’s discretely different articulations of the “performative” and the “I,” reflexivity becomes a particular quality of labor that works to leave something behind, something that lingers, something that will remain long after our reflexive work takes form. What labor as reflexivity leaves behind both embraces and jettisons notions of hauntings and memories, because it contemplates its own contemplations within past and future contingencies of self and Other that are boundlessly committed to an enlivening present. Labor as reflexivity is enumerated as being constituted by materiality, futurity, and performative temporality.

Co-performative witnessing

It was a summer evening, 23 July 2003. Dwight and I were taking a slow stroll down Church Street in downtown Evanston after a luscious and delightfully relaxing dinner at Wolfgang-Puck Grand Cafe. It was the end of the second day of the Summer Institute we co-directed on ‘Diaspora Performance: Theory, History, Praxis’ initiated by the Center for Global Culture and Communication in the School of Communication at Northwestern. The sessions were going very well and we were relieved and thrilled with the high level of participation. Our dinner conversation continued and flowed into our evening walk. At the restaurant, we began talking about various topics and responses expressed over the past two days at the Institute, and by dessert we moved to more personal news about family and friends, and then by the time we stepped outside to begin our stroll Dwight ventured to the subject of Performance Studies and what he felt must be the next phase of his work. With heartfelt urgency he said he wanted to ‘delve more fully and in greater detail into the praxis of co-performative witnessing and what it means to be radically engaged and committed, body-to-body, in the field . . . a politics of the body deeply in action with Others’. He went on to express that participant-observation does not capture the active, risky, and intimate engagement with Others that is the expectation of performance. It seems a maddening and gross injustice when important work is forced to a halt. On that summer evening in Evanston, I realized more than ever before how completely committed Dwight was to the theory and praxis of coperformative witnessing. It was of absolute importance to him. He was adamant on our walk and spoke intensely about wanting the time to ‘focus’ on co-performative witnessing because there was so much more to theorize, to offer. That July afternoon was a bittersweet memory because Dwight expressed what he wanted time to do; yet, time was taken away. It was a bittersweet memory because we will never know what new insights, what new paradigm shifting ways of knowing, we all would have gained from his continued work. For some time after Dwight’s passing, the memory of that July evening accompanied angry feelings of time not granted and important work stopped. But, I have come to slowly realize this is not true. Dwight’s work has not truly stopped; time has not truly disrupted our conversations with the brilliance and generosity of his mind. As we enter and respond to Dwight’s work, as we narrate, critique, describe, theorize, reflect, and perform the many, many layers of his ideas and living examples, his work lives. Dwight left us with much to do, to think, and to write about. I have come to realize that the irony

What is the Role of the Communication Discipline in Social Justice, Community Engagement, and Public Scholarship? A Visit to the CM Café

In early December of 2010, the virtual doors of the CM Cafe were swung open. Seven scholars were invited to the opening*Sarah Dempsey (University of North Carolina), Mohan Dutta (Purdue University), Larry Frey (Trinity University, University of Colorado at Boulder), Bud Goodall (Arizona State University), Soyini Madison (Northwestern University), Jennifer Mercieca (Texas A&M University), and Tom Nakayama (Northeastern University). These scholars were invited to the Cafe to join in a discussion about social justice, community engagement, and public scholarship in the communication discipline, and all were excited to bring their experiences from various areas of the discipline*organizational communication, performance studies, applied communication, communication and culture, rhetoric, health communication*to the table in a wide-ranging conversation. The CM Cafe was facilitated through a private group on Facebook and remained open for about two weeks. As scholars arrived at this virtual Cafe, they often joined the conversation with brief introductions structured by questions posted on the chalkboard overhead. But through the days, new issues were introduced, old ones revisited, and scholars, media personalities, and others outside the Cafe walls were called forth in argument and support. The invited scholars popped in and out of the Cafe as their busy schedules allowed*some were able to linger over many cups of coffee, though others just stopped by for a quick bite and some conversation. Shelly Blair and I stood behind the counter and listened, throwing in only an occasional question or comment. I think it is safe to say that we were all challenged and enlightened by our time in the Cafe*the conversations managed to strike that precarious balance of cordiality and challenge that we strive for in academic debates. In the following pages, you will be privy to some of the comments and conversations that emerged during the December 2010 opening of the CM Cafe.

Crazy Patriotism and Angry (Post)Black Women

The OED describes a ‘‘patriot’’ as ‘‘one who loves his or her country and gives it loyal support.’’ Patriotism for some in the United States, during the 2008 Presidential Campaign, exemplified something beyond love and loyalty of one’s country, but was more akin to a sacred belief, a fundamentalist nationalism, a divine calling that was intensified into an ideology of ‘‘us’’ against ‘‘them,’’ the righteous and faithful against the blasphemous and ungodly. This brand of patriotism turns loyalty and love for country into blind excess and sinister chauvinism, what I prefer to call crazy patriotism. Crazy patriotism is the unhealthy condition*a pathology of limitations*that impairs the ability to both love and critique, to both honor and re-imagine, to both recognize the noble possibilities of this country while interrogating its wrongs, e.g., its history of obstructionism to transnational freedom movements across the globe, its perpetuation of imperious global profit, and its dubious support of torture and clandestine policies of coercion, to name a few. As crazy patriotism’s divisive ideology*blind to its own self-serving tautologies*gained momentum, it became the primary weapon waged against the possibility of an Obama presidency, casting Obama as a threat to ‘‘American’’ greatness. But it was Michelle Obama who was the most vociferously attacked in its crazy excess and sanctimony. Michelle Obama was cast as the darker, contentious, and hidden side of her husband. She was what many feared about Barack Obama*‘‘a symbol of her husband’s Otherness.’’

OEDIPUS REX AT EVE'S BAYOU OR THE LITTLE BLACK GIRL WHO LEFT SIGMUND FREUD IN THE SWAMP

This writing ‘performs’ theory and ‘embodies’ writing as it questions specific psychoanalytic theories of the phallus, the mirror and jouissance in the context of ruminations of what it means to make art and judge it. Art, theory, and blackness are at once essentialized and fragmented in the pull between Lacanian notions of phallic power and the notions of a black woman needing to respond to the changing demands of truth and creation. Noir, a woman, troubled by resentments of the popular and of cultural critics, writes letters to her friend and next door neighbour, Oedipus Rex, in her search for the truth of affective/effective creation. Oedipus Rex as a prevailing taboo, a universal symbol, and a cornerstone of the psychoanalytic is recast into a‘silent’ respondent as Noir contemplates desire, the phallus, and the alchemy of black women in the gothic film Eves Bayou. That Oedipus is ‘not read’ through his own letters, but only through the letters of this black woman is an oblique repositioning of subjectivity and voice.

Lost in Translation: The Mirror or the Hammer

We celebrate the fact that performance enriches rhetoric through embodied purpose, heartfelt empathy, and symbolic action while rhetoric politicizes performance through contested assumptions, discu...

Ethnography Across Storytelling and the Senses

This essay will discuss the embodied praxis of ethnography and how the felt sensing experiences of fieldwork research are enacted and translated both within the intimate, ethnographic spaces of those everyday moments in the field that are all at once filled with pleasure, politics, and beauty.