Dwight Conquergood

Performing as a moral act: 1 Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance

(1985). Performing as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Literature in Performance: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 1-13.

Ethnography, rhetoric, and performance

Books reviewed DOMINATION AND THE ARTS OF RESISTANCE: HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS. By James C. Scott. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990; pp. 251.

Health Theatre in a Hmong Refugee Camp: Performance, Communication, and Culture

29.95. THE POETICS OF MILITARY OCCUPATION: MZEINA ALLEGORIES OF IDENTITY UNDER ISRAELI AND EGYPTIAN RULE. By Smadar Lavie. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990; pp. 398.

Rethinking elocution: The trope of the talking book and other figures of speech

30.00. POWER AND PERFORMANCE: ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATIONS THROUGH PROVERBIAL WISDOM AND THEATER IN SHABA, ZAIRE. By Johannes Fabian: Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990; pp. 314.

Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics

49.50; paper 19.95.

Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research

A Hmong widow walks to a crossroad in Camp Ban Vinai, surveys the scene, and then settles herself on a bench outside the corner hut. Bracing her back against the split-bamboo wall, she begins to sing. At first softly, as if to herself, she sings a Hmong khy txhiaj (folksong). Aware of a gathering audience, she raises her voice to fill the space around her. She sings a lamentation, carving her personal anguish into a traditional expressive form. With exquisitely timed gestures, she strips and peels with one hand the branch of firewood she holds in the other. Tears stream down her

Beyond the text: Toward a performative cultural politics

This essay reexamines the eighteenth and nineteenth century elocutionary movement from the perspective of those “others” against whom it erected its protocols of taste, civility, gentility. Elocution, “the just and graceful management of the voice, countenance, and gesture,” is redefined as the performativity of whiteness naturalized. Moving from a history of ideas approach in which the major theorists and exemplary practitioners are overwhelmingly white and privileged, elocution is relocated within a wider socio‐historical context of racial tension and class struggle. Approaching elocution from below, from the angle of working‐class and enslaved people who were excluded from this bourgeois tradition, brings into sharp focus the complex performative cultural politics of this speech tradition.