Performance Autoethnography

Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture

Norman K. Denzin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138066298
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351659079
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a manifesto. It is about rethinking performance autoethnography, about the formation of a critical performative cultural politics, about what happens when everything is already performative, when the dividing line between performativity and performance disappears. This is a book about the writing called autoethnography. It is also about what this form of writing means for writers who want to perform work that leads to social justice. Denzin's goal is to take the reader through the history, major terms, forms, criticisms and issues confronting performance autoethnography and critical interpretive. To that end many of the chapters are written as performance texts, as ethnodramas.

A single thesis organizes this book: the performance turn has been taken in the human disciplines and it must be taken seriously. Multiple informative performance models are discussed: Goffman's dramaturgy; Turner's performance anthropology; performance ethnographies by A. D. Smith, Conquergood, and Madison; Saldana's ethnodramas; Schechter's social theatre; Norris's playacting; Boal's theatre of the oppressed; and Freire's pedagogies of the oppressed. They represent different ways of staging and hence performing ethnography, resistance and critical pedagogy. They represent different ways of "imagining, and inventing and hence performing alternative imaginaries, alternative counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire" (Schechner 2015).

This book provides a systematic treatment of the origins, goals, concepts, genres, methods, aesthetics, ethics and truth conditions of critical performance autoethnography. Denzin uses the performance text as a vehicle for taking up the hard questions about reading, writing, performing and doing critical work that makes a difference.

Part I

Performance autoethnography

1 Autoethnography as research redux¹

Part One

Memory

Begin in the autobiographical present, a moment frozen in the past. My brother and I in our cowboy outfits sitting on sway-backed Sonny, our deaf and partially blind pony. We are 5 and 9 at the time, Grandpa and Grandma are watching us from behind the corral fence. We have toy pistols. We are wearing little leather vests, chaps, cowboy boots, cowboy hats. We are smiling. We think we are cowboys in the corral, just like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.

Willie Nelson cautions:

Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.²

Mark and I thought we had it both ways. An Indian one day, a cowboy the next day. Maybe we did. As little white boys in our grandparents’ Iowa farm playground we had the power to be white or red, cowboy or Indian. Our grandparents gave us the costumes, and showed us how to enact a minstrel show, how to play the cowboy-Indian game, how to do the masquerade. White face, Red face. Little white boys thoughtlessly playing the race game, all in the name of fun. Or was it? All innocence?

Mark and I always seemed alone. A lonely white boy playing cowboy to his brother’s Indian. We knew it was all pretend, make-believe. But underneath we were running away from the fear of loneliness, would our divorced parents ever get back together again? Were we destined to hide our fears behind these imaginary wild west identities? Once you retreat into the cowboy or Indian identity there is nowhere else to go. We were trapped in an imaginary world.

***

My heroes are no longer cowboys.

***

I seek ethnographic texts turned into performance events, into ethnodramas, into ethnotheatre, into narrative poems, scripts, short stories, texts with narrators, action, shifting points of view; dramaturgical productions co-performed with audiences; life, narrative and melodrama under the auspices of late neo-liberal capitalism. I seek stories of love, loss, pain, resistance, stories of hope, stories that dig deep beneath ideology, stories that contest how history goes on behind our backs.

***

auto: self-reflection

ethno: to explore people’s experiences

graph: to write, to make an image,

to perform a script that I (or you) create;

autoethnography: bending the past to the present;

I write my way into and through my experiences;

I treat myself as an universal singular;

I devise a script and play myself.

***

Willie’s cowboy, my nemesis – always alone, never stays home, don’t let your baby grow up to be cowboys.

Cowboy songs, country western swing, Bob Wills is still the King.

My mind drifts, July 1981, country-Western bar, Macomb, Illinois, Willie is on the juke box. I look into the mirror over the bar. My haggard face stares back at me, Willie is singing:

“Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”

Merle Haggard. Where are you now?

***

I seek a new genealogy. A new language. A new beginning. But where to begin? Who am I? What is performance? What is theatre? What is research? What is autoethnography? How did I get lost?

No home on the range?

You lost your faith in a meaningful world

It’s a journey, stuck in a nightmare.

Betrayed by yourself,

Madness, torture chambers

More madness, no way home.

***

The essence of theatre, Boal reminds us, is the human being observing itself. The human being not only “makes” theatre: it is theatre (Boal 1995, p. 13, italics in original) What does performing mean? Is all of social life a performance? Are we all performers presenting and performing selves to one another in everyday life, putting on first one mask and then another, engaging in endless rounds of impression management (Goffman 1959)? Are we only the characters we play? Are we actors following a script devised by others? Are we performers following our own script, playing ourselves (Schechner 2017, p. 8)?

actor/performer/actor/performer/performer/actor/

are actors performers

are performers actors

do we create ourselves through performance?

Is Donald Trump an actor or a performer?

Was Ronald Reagan a performer or an actor

(Schechner 2017, p. 8).

Autoethnographers are performers

Ethnography is a performance

We became human when we invented theatre (Boal 1995, p. 14).

Is there only fiction?

Fake News?

Fake people

Can facts trump fiction?

Trump’s performances

an actor playing himself

trumps reality fiction

***

Today an Indian, tomorrow a lonely cowboy. Is everything an illusion, pretense. Are we confined to studying the metaphysics, the fundamental nature of performance itself. But performance is a contested concept, no single definition can contain it.

Still, Madison reminds us,

if we accept the notion of human beings as homo performans and therefore as a performing species, performance becomes necessary for our survival. That is we recognize and create ourselves as Others through performance … in this process culture and performance become inextricably interconnected and performance is a constant presence in our daily lives.

(Madison 2012, p. 166, paraphrase)

***

There is only performance.

There is only performance.

There is only performance.

There is only performance.

What is performance?

Performance matters.

***

Boal says we became human when we invented theatre (1995, p; 14).

I became human when I became a cowboy.

Then I invented theatre.

I called it the wild west show.

As homo performan I engage the world as a performative-I, as an embodied, moving reflective being. I establish my presence as a universal singular, an embodied self interacting with culture/history/society in the lived present (Spry 2011, p. 53).

Sway-backed blind Sonny,

Horses, toy guns, vests, western hats,

pretend Indian warriors, Gay Bucks,

Red Skin squaws

Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, cowboy songs,

Hi Ho Silver

Ghost Rider in the Sky

Yippee-Ki-Yay Cowboy

Gay Cowboy Bregade

LGBT Chorus

Dodging, moving, hiding, on the run,

whose history? I’ve lost my hold on the past.

Whiskey River, let me be.

Whiskey River, don’t ever leave.

You’re all I’ve got.³

Who am I running from? What am I running from? Does it even matter?

I look in the mirror. The looking-glass

I see Sartre’s universal singular

A broken down Vladimir,

waiting for Beckett’s

Godot who never shows.

A sometimes sad pathetic figure, universal by the

singular universality of human history.

Performer, moral agent, actor, everybody is an universal singular, known only through her performances. The autoethnographer is a dramatist. I’m a dramatist! I’m a performer.

I’m drowning in whiskey river.

Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

Don’t let ’em pick guitars or drive them old trucks.

Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and such.

Whiskey River, take my mind.

Whiskey River, don’t run dry.

You’re all I’ve got, take care of me.⁴

Who is the autoethnographer running from?

No home on the range

be careful desperato, mr

Boy Named Sue

Country Road, Take Me Home

No way

Autoethnographer as performer

Performance matters for ethnography. Conquergood (2006):

with renewed appreciation for boundaries, border-crossings, process, improvisation, contingency, multiple identities, and the embodied nature of fieldwork practice, many ethnographers have turned to a performance-inflected vocabulary.

(p. 358)

Ethnographers become methodological actors who creatively play, improvise, interpret, re-present roles and enact scripts in concrete field settings. The [auto]ethnographer is a co-performer in a social drama, a participant in rhetorically framed cultural performances, enacting rituals, writing fieldnotes, recording interviews, videotaping, observing, talking, doing the things ethhnographers do, turning research into performative inquiry (Conquergood 2006, p. 360).

Ride that horse cowgirl, lasso that steer

Performance matters. You can be my Indian, if I can be your cowboy.

You can be in my dream,

if I can be in your dream.⁵

After all, performance matters.

***

Schechner clarifies. The “relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral. One performs fieldwork, which is subject to the ‘rehearsal process’ of improvising, testing and revising and no position is neutral. The performance scholar is actively involved in advocacy” (Schechner 2013, p. 4, paraphrase).

Ride that horse cowgirl, lasso that steer^***

Cowboys ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold.

They’d rather give you a song than diamonds or gold.

Lonestar belt buckles and old faded levis.

Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain

Faded Love

Cry Baby

***

Interpretive aside: fieldwork as performance

Conquergood again, describing a moment in his fieldwork in Big Red, a dilapidated polyethnic tenement in Chicago where he lived for 20 months, starting in December 1987. Here Dwight gets caught up between being Dwight and being Dwight the ethnographer:

At 10:00 A.M. on August 16, 1988, Bao Xiang, a Hmong woman from Laos, stepped out the back door of her top-floor Big Red apartment and the rotting porch collapsed beneath her feet. All summer long I had swept away slivers of wood that had fallen from the Xiong’s decrepit porch onto mine, one floor below. Six families were intimately affected by Bao Xiong’s calamity. We shared the same front entrance and stairwell. Our back porches were structurally interlocked within a shaky wooden framework of open landings and sagging staircases that cling precariously to the red-brick exterior of the Chicago tenement. Within minutes of arriving home on that day, I heard multiple versions of the story.

(Conquergood 1992b, in Johnson 2013, pp. 170–171)

Rubbing shoulders with his neighbors, participating in their lives on a daily basis, Conquergood became known as “Mr. Dwight” the white man who lived in Big Red, and his neighbors shared stories about their lives with him, and he with them. Mr. Dwight was also known as the white man who read books, helped people, took pictures, let persons use his camera, worked on a research project.

Where is the dividing line?

Performer, ethnographer,

performance as fieldwork,

fieldwork as performance

research as performance

A performance-centered ethnographic approach is participatory, intimate, precarious, embodied, grounded in circumstance, situational identities and historical process. The [auto] ethnographer’ body is anchored in time and place. The ethnographer engages in face-work that is “part of the intricate and nuanced dramaturgy of everyday life” (Conquergood 2006, p. 359; Goffman 1959). The power dynamic of inquiry moves from the gaze of the detached observer, to the interactions, the give-and-take between situated actors. Performance-sensitive ethnography strains to produce situated understandings, ethnodramas, performance events that make the injustices in the world socially visible. Through cultural performances persons participate in public life, in vital discussions central to their communities (Conquergood 2006, p. 360). The performance autoethnographer works in those dialogic spaces where bodies, selves and emotions interact.

Ride that horse cowgirl, lasso that steer

The performance autoethnographer is not studying the other. She is reflexively writing herself into her performance text, into those spaces where she intersects with the other. Her primary interests are showing, not telling, social justice, critical reflexivity, interpretation and ethically responsible inquiry (Madison 2012, p. x). She makes this world visible through her performative acts. Little boys ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Performance autoethnography
• PART II: An uneasy alliance: ethnography, performance, theatre
• PART III: Toward a performative social science
• PART IV: Performance texts: bone deep in landscapes
• PART V: Pedagogy, politics and ethics
• Appendix: A genealogy of terms, moments and texts
• Bibliography
• Index