David P. Terry

[Organizational (Performance] of Race): The Co-Constitutive Performance of Race and School Board in Durham, NC

This essay addresses the co-constitutive performance of race and organization through a close reading of two racially divided Durham, NC school board meetings that took place in 2005. The analysis is grounded in an analytical framework that treats performance as organizing and organization as performance. We demonstrate how conflict over the “proper” performance of a school board, as either a business emphasizing efficiency or a public service emphasizing efficacy, is simultaneously a negotiation of racialized subject positions. Our analysis illustrates how racial identities are made meaningful in a contemporary context, as racial identities are taken up, mapped onto, and resisted by individuals and their bodies.

Once Blind, Now Seeing: Problematics of Confessional Performance

This essay traces some problematics of confessional discourse in which the performative self (doing the confessing) claims to have transcended the constative self (being confessed about) in literary, religious, forensic, and therapeutic contexts. These speech acts cast their audiences as voyeurs or absolute others, allow for the transference of guilt between confessor and confessant, and give the illusion of self-overcoming while leaving broader social structures fundamentally unchallenged and unchanged. Despite the promise of intersubjectivity they can, by their reliance on ontological individualism, hinder a more fruitful, answerable dialogue between performer and audience. The essay illustrates some of these limitations of confessional agency via a reading of Spalding Grays monologue, Its a Slippery Slope.

Presenting Juche: Audiencing North Korea's 2012 Arirang Mass Games

This essay describes an in-person audiencing of North Korea’s 2012 Arirang Mass Games, a massive spectacle featuring the synchronized movement of more than 80,000 performers, which celebrates the birth of the North Korean nation and its continued resistance to foreign incursion. The authors argue that audiencing across cultures must take into account not only the “meaning effects” of propaganda and other cultural productions, but also the “presence effects” through which culture is materialized. These presence effects give material specificity to otherwise abstract claims to common humanity across cultures, which is particularly important when trying to understand those who one’s own culture views as radically Other.

Alone but Together: Eminent Performance on the Appalachian Trail

This is an ethnographic account of long-distance hikers on the Appalachian Trail. The essay argues that, like much performance art, long-distance hiking is best viewed as an eminent performance that does not seek to point to something beyond itself as much as it points to the material conditions of its own making. The insights gained from experiences on the trail reframe ongoing questions of presence and absence in performance scholarship as questions about transcendent and eminent performance aesthetics.

Global Co-incidence: “Ontos” Poetics of the Worldwide

Based on ethnographic research at the Areopagos (Mars Hill) in Athens, Greece, this essay seeks to enact a performative poetics of global intersubjectivity. Emphasizing the spatiality of social being and the materiality of discourse, I argue that heterogeneous encounters at charged heterotopic spaces such as the Areopagos offer ways of theorizing belonging that do not assume their interdependent parts have any one necessary thing in common. The simultaneous heterogeneity of the rock offers a way to rethink globalization as producing and being produced by what I call “co-incidences”: events of coming together in space about which the question of causality must remain suspended. In so doing, the essay supplements theories of performances as twice behaved in time with a theory of performances as once behaved in space.

“The Only Dominator and Remaker of the World”: , , and the Rhetoric of North Korean Juche

This essay examines the constitutive rhetoric of monuments, tourist sites, and spectacles encountered while visiting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 2012. Expanding ideographic analysis, the essay adds an axis of performativity to extant axes of synchronic pairs and diachronic temporality. Key sites for analysis include the Monument to Party Foundation, the Mansudae Grand Monument, and the USS Pueblo exhibit, sites that reflect an evolution and interplay of and to provide insights on a place too often dismissed as the “Hermit Kingdom.”