Denzin, N K, 2003, The Call to Performance

Symbolic Interaction, Volume 26, Number 1, pages 187–207, ISSN 0195-6086; online ISSN 1533-8665.© 2003 by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. All rights reserved.Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

Direct all correspondence to Norman K. Denzin, Institute of Communications Research, University ofIllinois–Urbana, 228 Gregory Hall, 810 South Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801; e-mail: [email protected].

The Call to Performance

Norman K. DenzinUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This article presents a performance-based approach to doing symbolicinteractionist inquiry. After a discussion of the vocabulary of performance, Iexamine the relationship among performance, pedagogy, aesthetics, andpolitics, including the move to performance (auto)ethnography.

Educated hope . . . registers politics as a pedagogical and performative act.—Henry Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives

This essay, in the form of a manifesto, invites symbolic interactionists to thinkthrough the practical, progressive politics of a performative cultural studies;1 anemancipatory discourse connecting critical pedagogy with new ways of writing andperforming culture (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000:285).2 I believe performance-based human disciplines can contribute to radical social change, to economic jus-tice, to a cultural politics that extends critical race theory and “the principles of aradical democracy to all aspects of society” (Giroux 2000a:x, 25) and to change that“envisions a democracy founded in a social justice that is ‘not yet’” (Weems 2002:3).I believe that symbolic interactionists should be part of this project (see Denzin1992, 1995, 1997, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c).3

Shaped by the sociological imagination (Mills 1959), building on Perinbanaya-gam (1991:113, 171) and George Herbert Mead’s discursive, performative model ofthe act (1938:460; see also Dunn 1998), this way of doing symbolic interactionismattempts to show how terms such as “biography,” “history,” “gender,” “race,” “eth-nicity,” “family,” and “history” have always been performative and interactive.

Building on Perinbanayagam and Mead, this framework imagines and exploresmultiple ways in which we can understand performance, including as imitation, ormimesis; as poiesis, or construction; as kinesis, motion, or movement (Conquergood1998:31). The interactionist moves from a view of performance as imitation, ordramaturgical staging (Goffman 1959), to an emphasis on performance as liminalityand construction (Turner 1986), to a view of performance as struggle, as an inter-

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vention, as breaking and remaking, as kinesis, as a sociopolitical act (Conquergood1998:32). Viewed as struggle, and intervention, performance and performanceevents become transgressive achievements, political accomplishments that breakthrough “sedimented meanings and normative traditions” (Conquergood 1998:32).

My argument unfolds in four parts. I begin by de�ning terms and the call to per-formance. I then examine the relationship among performance, pedagogy, and poli-tics, including the move to performance in ethnography. Next, I outline performativecriteria and performance art in the seventh moment.4 I conclude with a discussionof performance aesthetics and performative cultural politics.

In the spirit of Mead and Dewey I intend to create a dialogue within the inter-actionist community, and thus move our discourse more fully into the spaces of a pro-gressive interactionism. I want to extend those political impulses within the inter-actionist tradition that imagine a radical, democratic philosophy (Lyman and Vidich1988:xi). Following Dewey, Mills, Blumer, and Du Bois, these impulses constantlyinterrogate the relevance of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism for race rela-tions and inequality in the capitalist democractic state (Reynolds 2000:12).

THE CALL TO PERFORMANCE

Many interactionists are in the seventh moment, performing culture as they write it,understanding that the dividing line between performativity (doing) and perfor-mance (done) has disappeared (Conquergood 1998:25). But even as this disappear-ance occurs, matters of racial injustice remain.

On this, W. E. B. Du Bois ([1901] 1978:281, 288) reminds us that “the problem ofthe twenty-�rst century will be the problem of the color line. . . . [M]odern democ-racy cannot succeed unless peoples of different races and religions are also inte-grated into the democractic whole.” Du Bois addressed race from a performancestandpoint. He understood that “from the arrival of the �rst African slaves onAmerican soil . . . the de�nitions and meanings of blackness have been intricatelylinked to issues of theatre and performance” (Elam 2001:4).5

In his manifesto for an all-black theater, Du Bois (1926) imagined a site for ped-agogical performances that articulate positive black “social and cultural agency”(Elam 2001:6). His radical theater (1926:134), like that of Amiri Baraka’s (1979),Anna Deavere Smith’s (1993, 2000) and August Wilson’s (1996), is a political the-ater about blacks, written by blacks and for blacks, and performed by blacks in localtheaters. Radical theater wields a weapon to �ght racism and white privilege.

bell hooks elaborates the need for a black political performance aesthetic. As achild, she and her sisters learned about race in America by watching “the Ed Sulli-van show on Sunday nights.”

Seeing on that show the great Louis Armstrong, Daddy who was usually silent,would talk about the music, the way Armstrong was being treated, and the politi-cal implications of his appearance. . . . [R]esponding to televised cultural produc-tion, black people could express rage about racism. . . . [U]nfortunately . . . black

The Call to Performance 189

folks were not engaged in writing a body of critical cultural analysis. (hooks1990:3–4)

I fold my project into Du Bois’s and bell hooks’s, by asking how a radical perfor-mative social science can confront and transcend the problems surrounding thecolor line in the twenty-�rst century. Such a project will write and perform culture innew ways. It will connect re�exive autoethnography with critical pedagogy and criticalrace theory (see Ladson-Billings 2000). It will necessarily treat political acts as peda-gogical and performative, as acts that open new spaces for social citizenship and demo-cratic dialogue—acts that create critical race consciousness (Giroux 2001a:9). A per-formative, pedagogical politics of hope imagines a radically free democratic society, asociety where ideals of the feminist, queer, environmental, green, civil rights, and labormovements are realized (Giroux 2001a:9; McChesney 1999:290).6

In their utopian forms, these movements offer “alternative models of radicaldemocratic culture rooted in social relations that take seriously the democratic ide-als of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Giroux 2001a:9). Excerptsfrom Mary Weems’s poem “This evolution will not be televised” (2002) clarify myproject. Weems, like hooks, shows how the media and white culture shape AfricanAmerican experience:

“This evolution will not be televised”

Our image, our braids, our music, our mistakes,our asses, our rhythms are played on TVlike a long 78 album in commercial after commercial

The Colonel in plantation-dress raps and moonwalksselling a black woman’s stolen fried chicken, black kidssnap their �ngers, think that’s so cool, bug their mamasfor extra-crispy

This is a never-ending story, that won’t be televised. . .

(Weems 2002:4)

Performance and Performativity

The following terms should be examined in greater detail: “performance,” “perfor-mance text,” “performer,” “performing,” “performativity,” “originals,” and “imitations.”An interpretive event, a performance involves actors, purposes, scripts, stories,stages, and interactions (Burke 1969). The act of performing “intervenes betweenexperience and the story told” (Langellier 1999:128). A performance text can takeseveral forms: dramatic texts, such as a poem or play; natural texts, or transcriptionsof everyday conversations; ethnodramas (Mienczakowski 2001); dramatic, staged,and improvised readings.

Performances are embedded in language. That is, certain words do accomplishthings, and what they do, performatively, refers back to meanings embedded in lan-guage and culture (Austin 1962;7 Butler 1993a, 1993b, 1997; Derrida 1973, 1988).


For Butler, performativity refers to “the reiterative power of discourse to reproduce thephenomenona that it regulates and constrains” (1993a:2). Hence, in performative utter-ances the speaking subject is already spoken for, by, and in language (Pollock 1998b:39).

Schechner contends that we inhabit a world where cultures, texts, and perfor-mances collide. Such collisions require a distinction between “‘as’ and ‘is’” (Schech-ner 1998:361). As �uid ongoing events, performances “mark and bend identities, re-make time and adorn and reshape the body, tell stories and allow people to playwith behavior that is restored, or ‘twice-behaved’” (Schechner 1998:361). The way aperformance is enacted describes performative behavior, “how people play gender,heightening their constructed identity, performing slightly or radically differentselves in different situations” (Schechner 1998:361).8 This view of the performativemakes it “increasingly dif�cult to sustain any distinction between appearances andfacts, surfaces and depths, illusions and substances. Appearances are actualities”(Schechner 1998:362).

Performance and performativity intersect in a speaking subject with a genderedand racialized body. Performativity “situates performance narrative within theforces of discourse” (Langellier 1999:129), for example, the discourses of race andgender. In transgressive performances, performing bodies contest gendered identi-ties, creating spaces for a queer politics of resistance (Butler 1993a:12; Pollock1998b:42; see also Garoian 1999:5).

Butler reminds us that there are no original performances, no “preexisting iden-tity by which an act or attribute might be measured” (1993a:141). Every perfor-mance is an imitation, a form of mimesis: “if heterosexuality is an impossible imita-tion of itself, an imitation that performatively constitutes itself as the original, thenthe imitative parody of ‘heterosexuality’ . . . is always and only an imitation, a copyof a copy, for which there is no original” (1993b:644). Every performance is an orig-inal and an imitation.

Clearly performativity and performance exist in a tension with one another, in atension between doing, or performing, and the done, the text, the performance. Per-formance is sensuous, and contingent. Performativity “becomes the everyday prac-tice of doing what’s done” (Pollock 1998b:43; emphasis in original). Performativityis “what happens when history/textuality sees itself in the mirror—and suddenlysees double; it is the disorienting, [the] disruptive” (Pollock 1998b:43). Performativ-ity derives its power and prerogative in the breaking and remaking of the very tex-tual frameworks that give it meaning in the �rst place (Pollock 1998b:44).

Read out loud the following lines from Stephen Hartnett’s investigative poem,“Visiting Mario.” Performing and performativity interact in these lines.

“Somewhere Near Salinas, Lord” Kristofferson/Joplin

ten-thousand sprinklers spin slowlyin overlapping circles . . .

drinking water from plastic jugshats propped on knees leathery

hands scarred from lifetimes


of harvesting gloryof Californiafor �ve dollars a day . . .

choking the old Mexican woman sobsher boy is cuffed and taken back to hell

the Vietnamese couple whispers to their sonwho looks over their hunched shoulders . . .

(2002:2, 7)

TOWARD A PERFORMATIVE CULTURAL POLITICS9

With terms in place, the call to performance within the interactionist communityconcerns �ve questions, each of which pairs performance with another term (Con-quergood 1991:190, 1998; Schechner 1998:360). Each pair is predicated on the prop-osition that if the world is a performance, not a text, then today we need a model ofsocial science which is performative. This means it is necessary to rethink the rela-tionship between

· performance and cultural process;· performance and ethnographic praxis;· performance and hermeneutics;· performance and the act of scholarly representation;· performance and the politics of culture (Conquergood 1991:190).

All interactionists concur with the �rst pair: culture is a verb, a process, an ongoingperformance, not a noun or a product or a static thing. Performances and their rep-resentations reside in the center of lived experience. We cannot study experiencedirectly. We study it through and in its performative representations. So conceived,culture turns performance into a site where memory, emotion, fantasy, and desirefuel one another (Madison 1998:277).

The second cluster brings performance and ethnographic praxis into play, high-lighting the methodological implications of thinking about �eldwork as a collabora-tive process, or coperformance (Conquergood 1991:190). Autoethnographers inserttheir experiences into the cultural performances being studied.

Stacey Holman Jones (2002:45) writes of herself and her love of unrequited love.Speaking of love, she �nds herself crying as she watches the �nal scene in The WayWe Were:

I am crying. I cry each time I see the �nal scene betweenKatie and Hubbell in The Way We Were. I have to see onlythat last scene, hear only those last sounds, “Memories . . .”

I cry for Katie and Hubbell, for the way they tried, but just couldn’tmake their relationship work.

Consider now this poem by Jones. It speaks of her relationship to torch singerslike Billie Holiday. Jones begins her poem by �rst referencing Peggy Phelan


(1993:16), who states: “All seeing is hooded by loss. . . . [I]n looking at the other . . .the subject seeks to see” herself. Jones writes:

I feel the slipping away, welcome it.Turn over the memory of a long, lostother . . . Your eyes, green like mine, on me, Steadilywatching myself re�ected in your gaze. Lookat you seeing me. . .I want to live the torch song I think, write, dream about.

(2002:49)

The third pair connects performances to hermeneutics, and privileges performedexperience as a way of knowing, as a method of critical inquiry, and as a mode ofunderstanding. Reading Jones’s poem out loud allows me to hear her voice, andthrough my voice connect with Holiday, through Peggy Phelan. In these soundsand feelings I feel closer to her desire to live the torch song. Similarly, reading thelines from Hartnett’s poem takes me back to Janis Joplin, to “Me and Bobbie Mc-Gee,” to Kris Kristofferson, and to Mexican laborers in the Salinas Valley, tangledup memories, California prisons, violence, injustice, and the Vietnam War.

Hermeneutics is the work of interpretation and understanding. Knowing refersto those embodied, sensuous experiences that create the conditions for understand-ing (Denzin 1984:282). Through performance I experience Jones’s feelings that arepresent in her performance text. Thus performed experiences are sites where feltemotion, memory, desire, and understanding come together.

The fourth and �fth pair of questions speak to the unbreakable link betweenhermeneutics, politics, pedagogy, ethics, and scholarly representation. Conquer-good (1991:190) remains �rm on this point. We should treat performances as a com-plementary form of research publication, an alternative method or way of inter-preting and presenting the results of one’s ethnographic work.

Performances deconstruct, or at least challenge the scholarly article as the pre-ferred form of presentation (and representation). A performance authorizes itself,not through the citation of scholarly texts, but through its ability to evoke and invokeshared emotional experience and understanding between performer and audience.

Performances become a critical site of power, and politics in the �fth pair. A rad-ical pedagogy underlies this notion of performative cultural politics. Foucault re-minds us that power always elicits resistance. The performative becomes an act ofdoing, an act of resistance, a way of connecting the biographical, the pedagogical,and the political (Giroux 2000a:134–35).

The concepts of militant utopianism and educated hope are realized in the mo-ment of resistance (Giroux 2001b:109) This utopianism and vision of hope movesfrom private to public, from biographical to institutional, and views personal trou-bles as public issues. This utopianism tells and performs stories of resistance, com-passion, justice, joy, community, and love (Hardt and Negri 2000:413).

As pedagogical practices, performances make sites of oppression visible. In theprocess, they af�rm an oppositional politics that reasserts the value of self-determi-


nation and mutual solidarity. This pedagogy of hope rescues radical democracyfrom the conservative politics of neoliberalism (Giroux 2001b:115). A militant uto-pianism offers a new language of resistance in the public and private spheres. Thusperformance pedagogy energizes a radical participatory democratic vision for thisnew century.

PERFORMANCE, PEDAGOGY, AND POLITICS

The current historical moment requires morally informed performance disciplinesthat will help people recover meaning in the face of senseless, brutal violence, vio-lence that produces voiceless screams of terror and insanity.10 Cynicism and despairreign (Giroux 2000a:110). Never have we had a greater need for a militant utopia-nism to help us imagine a world free of con�ict, terror, and death. We need an opposi-tional performative social science, performance disciplines that will enable us tocreate oppositional utopian spaces, discourses, and experiences within our publicinstitutions. In these spaces and places, in neighborhoods, in experimental commu-nity theaters, in independent coffee shops and bookstores, in local and nationalparks, on playing �elds, in wilderness areas, in experiences in nature, critical demo-cratic culture is nurtured (see Giroux 2001b:125; Stegner 1980:146).

Conquergood (1998:26) and Diawara (1996) are correct. We must �nd a spacefor a cultural studies that moves from textual ethnography to performative autoeth-nography. “Performance-sensitive ways of knowing” (Conquergood 1998:26) con-tribute to an epistemological and political pluralism that challenges existing ways ofknowing and representing the world. Such formations are more inclusionary andbetter suited for thinking about postcolonial or “subalteran cultural practices”(Conquergood 1998:26). Performance approaches to knowing insist on immediacyand involvement. They consist of partial, plural, incomplete, and contingent under-standings—not analytic distance or detachment, the hallmarks of the textual andpositivistic paradigms (Conquergood 1998:26; Pelias 1999:ix, xi).

Building on Diawara (1996:304), our performative approach will create a multi-racial cultural studies. Consistent with the interactionist tradition, performance eth-nography studies the ways in which people, “through communicative action, createand continue to create themselves with the American experience” (Diawara1996:304). This performative approach puts culture into motion. It examines, nar-rates, and performs the complex ways in which persons experience themselveswithin the shifting ethnoscapes of today’s global world economy (McCall 2001:50).

The Move to Performance Ethnography

A shift in the meaning of ethnography and ethnographic writing has accompa-nied the move to performance. Richardson (2000:929) observes that the narrativegenres connected to ethnographic writing have “been blurred, enlarged, altered toinclude poetry [and] drama” (see also Richardson 2001). She uses the term “cre-


ative analytic practice” (CAP) to describe these many different re�exive perfor-mance narrative forms.

These forms include not only performance autoethnography but also short stories,conversations, �ction, creative non�ction, photographic essays, personal essays, per-sonal narratives of the self, writing stories, self stories, fragmented, layered texts,critical autobiography, memoirs, personal histories, cultural criticism, co-constructedperformance narratives, and performance writing,11 which blur the edges betweentext, representation, and criticism.

In each of these forms the writer-as-performer is self-consciously present, morallyand politically self-aware. She uses her own experiences in a culture “re�exively tobend back on self and look more deeply at self-other interactions” (Ellis and Boch-ner 2000:740; see also Alexander 1999:300; Kincheloe and McLaren 2000:301). Thetask of autoethnography is now apparent: it helps the writer “make sense of theautobiographic past” (Alexander 1999:309). Autoethnography becomes a way of“recreating and re-writing . . . the biographic past, a way of making the past a partof the biographic present” (Pinar 1994:22).

Life in America after 11 September 2001

After the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September2001, a number of interpretive social scientists wrote about this event and its meaningsin their lives. They located their statements with this violent experience in the present.

Michelle Fine’s (2002:137–38) narrative text opens thus:

“The Mourning After”

12.SeptemberYou can tell who’s dead or missing by their smiles. Their photos dot the sub-

ways, ferries, trains and Port Authority Terminal, shockingly alive with joy, com-fort and pleasure. They died before they could know what we now know.

The not-dead travel on subways and trains �lled with hollow eyes; no smiles;shoulders down. Five thousand dead and still counting, and that’s without theundocumented workers whose families can’t tell, the homeless men and womenwhose families don’t know. Each evening, millions of nightmares startle andawaken, alone and dark, throughout the metropolitan area.

The air in the City chokes with smoke, �esh, fear, memories, clouds andcreeping nationalism. . . . Now a �ood of �ags, talk of God, military and patrio-tism chase us all.

Two days later Fine writes:

The Path train stopped. In a tunnel. No apparent reason. I couldn’t breathe.Anxiety. . . . Is this an ok way to die?Lives and politics; grief and analysis. Those of us in New York seem to be havingtrouble writing. . . . U.S. politics then and now, racial pro�ling and anxious wor-ries about what’s coming next. . . . Death, ghosts, orphans, analyses of U.S. impe-rialism, Middle East politics, and the terrors of terrorism sit in the same room.


How do you write the meaning of the present, when you have never experiencedthe nightmares and terror that de�ne the present?

Laurel Richardson (2002:25) writes:

September 11, 2001:When I hear of the airplanes and the towers, my �rst

thoughts are—the children. . . . What will the children be told?. . . .And then I see that the children are being told, as the

adults are, through television cameras and media voices. Thechildren are seeing the airplane and the second tower, and theairplane/tower, airplane/tower over and over until it’s All Fall Down. And All Fall Down

again and again.

I call my children. I call my stepchildren. I call my grandchildren. . . . Myheart breaks for the children whose lives are broken. . . . What can I say? Whatcan anyone say? My email Listservs are repositories for quick �xes, ideologicalpurity. . . . I can’t join the discussion. I refuse to intellectualize, analyze, or academ-ize. I don’t have any answers.

I call my grandson’s mother to see how Akiva is doing. She tells me that hewas afraid an airplane would hit his school. . . . On Rosh Hashanah the rabbi said“Choose Life.” I meditate on our small world. I pray. I write this piece.

As these examples demonstrate, performance autoethnographers anchor theirnarratives in an ongoing moral dialogue with the members of a local community, bethat family, neighbors, or colleagues. Troubling the usual distinctions between selfand other, they fold their own life histories and testimonios into the self-stories ofothers. These are performance events.

Following Conquergood (1998:26) and Pollock (1998a, 1998b:40), we use perfor-mance as a lever for questioning earlier generations’ ethnographic textualism, atextualism that produces books with titles such as Writing Culture (Conquergood1998:26). Using the methods of inscription and thick description, textual modelsturn culture into an ensemble of written words (Conquergood 1998:28; Geertz1973:23–24). The ethnographer reads culture as if it were an open book (Conquer-good 1998:29). Textualism privileges distance, detachment, the said, and not thesaying, the done, and not the doing (Conquergood 1998:31).

In contrast, the performance autoethnographer struggles to put culture into mo-tion (Rosaldo 1989:91), to perform culture by putting “mobility, action, and agencyback into play” (Conquergood 1998:31). The performance paradigm privileges an“experiential, participatory epistemology” (Conquergood 1998:27). It values inti-macy and involvement as forms of understanding. This stance allows the self to bevulnerable to its own experiences as well as to the experiences of the other (Behar1996:3).

In this interactionist epistemology, context replaces text, verbs replace nouns,structures become processes. The emphasis is on change, contingency, locality, mo-tion, improvisation, struggle, situationally speci�c practices and articulations, theperformance of con/texts (Pollock 1998b:38). By privileging struggle, the perfor-mance ethnographer takes a stand (Conquergood 1998:31; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett


1998:74–78). The dividing line between text and context falls away. Texts are insepa-rable from contexts and the “processes by which they are made, understood and de-ployed” (Pollock 1998b:38). In turn, context cannot be separated from culturalpractices, which are performances.

Performances are the sites where context, agency, praxis, history, and subjectivityintersect (Langellier 1999:127). An improvisatory politics of resistance is anchoredin this space where cultural performances, the doing and the done collide.

A Politics of Resistance

The emphasis on the politics of resistance connects symbolic interactionism andperformance autoethnographies to critical Marxist participatory action theories(McLaren 2001). Participatory action theories have roots in liberation theology,neo-Marxist approaches to community development, and human rights activism inAsia and elsewhere (Kemmis and McTaggart 2000:568). These theories enable socialcriticism and sanction nonviolent forms of civil disobedience (Christians 2000:148).

Performance autoethnography now becomes a civic, participatory, collaborativeproject. This project centers on an ongoing moral dialogue involving the sharedownership of the performance-project itself. Together, members of the community,as cultural workers, create the performance text and the performance event (McCall2000:426). These community-based interpretations represent an emancipatory com-mitment to community action that performs social change, much like Du Bois’s all-black theater (Kemmis and McTaggart 2000:568, 598). Paraphrasing Kemmis andMcTaggart (2000:598), this form of performance inquiry helps people recover and re-lease themselves from the repressive constraints embedded in the racist structuresof global technocapitalism.

In these performances of resistance, as Langellier (1998:210) argues, the personalbecomes political. This happens precisely at that moment when the conditions of iden-tity construction are made problematic and located in concrete history. As MaryWeems, the poet-performer says, this “Evolution will not be televised.” In this moment,performers claim a positive utopian space where a politics of hope can be imagined.

This performance ethic asks that interpretive work provide the foundations for so-cial criticism by subjecting speci�c programs and policies to concrete analysis. Per-formers show how speci�c policies and practices affect and effect their lives (Mienc-zakowski 2001). bell hooks does this when she critically re�ects on the way EdSullivan treated Louis Armstrong on his 1950s Sunday night television show. In re-reading the Sullivan show, hooks lays the foundations for a critical race consciousness.

The autoethnographer invites members of the community to become co-performers in a drama of social resistance and social critique. Acting from an in-formed ethical position, offering emotional support to one another, co-performersbear witness to the need for social change (Langellier 1998:210–11). As members ofan involved social citizenship, “they enact a politics of possibility, a politics that mo-bilizes people’s memories, fantasies, and desires” (Madison 1998:277, 282). These


are pedagogical performances that matter. They give voice to the subaltern—Theydo something in the world. They move people to action.

Baraka ([1969] 1998:1502) said,

we want poems that wrestle cops intoalleysand take their weapons . . .

Pedagogical performances have artistic, moral, political, and material conse-quences (Madison 1998:283–84). In a performance of possibilities, moral responsibil-ity and artistic excellence combine to produce an “active intervention to . . . breakthrough unfair closures and remake the possibility for new openings” (Madison1998:284; emphasis in original). A performance of possibilities gives voice to those onthe margin, moving them for the moment to the political center (Madison 1998:284).

A Politics of Possibility

Madison shows how this politics of possibility works. In 1968 two African Amer-ican women employed as cafeteria workers at the University of North Carolina leda strike. They protested for back pay, overtime pay, and better working conditions.The national guard was called in. The Chapel Hill police “circled the cafeteria withguns in hand, and classes were canceled. For the two African-American womenwho led the strike, it was a dif�cult time and an unforgettable ordeal. One womanwas �red; the other still works in the University cafeteria” (Madison 1998:279).

In 1993 the University of North Carolina was celebrating its bicentennial. Madi-son (1998:279) notes that some people “felt it was time to honor the leaders of the(in)famous 1968 cafeteria workers strike, as well as labor culture on campus. Aftersome time, a performance based on the personal narratives of the two leaders andother service workers was �nally scheduled.” On opening night the strike leadersand their partners, children, grandchildren, and friends, cafeteria workers, house-keepers, brick masons, yard keepers, and mail carriers “were the honored guestswith reserved seats before an over�owing crowd” (p. 298).

Madison observes that although the university never acknowledged the “strikeleaders’ struggle or their contribution to labor equity on campus, almost thirty yearslater, the leaders, Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Brooks, watched themselves and their storybeing performed in a crowded theatre” (p. 279).

At the end of the performance Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Brooks were introduced and“the audience gave them a thunderous and lengthy standing ovation” (p. 280). Mrs.Smith said that a night like this “made her struggle worthwhile” (p. 280). Her grand-children reported that they “now understood their grandmother’s life better afterseeing the performance” (p. 280). The next day the press reported that “the produc-tion told a true and previously untold tale” (p. 280). Madison reports that four yearslater workers still stop her on campus and “remember and want to talk, with pride


and satisfaction, about that night four years ago when their stories were honored inperformance” (p. 280).

The performance of these stories helped these workers tell their story, empower-ing “them before strangers and kin” (p. 280). The performance became an epiph-any, a liminal event that marked a crisis in the university’s history. The performanceredressed this historical breach and brought dignity and stature to those who hadbeen dishonored by the past actions of the university. The performance allowedthese women and their families to bear witness to their suppressed history. This per-formance did not create a revolution, but it was “revolutionary in enlightening citi-zens to the possibilities that grate against injustice” (p. 280).

This kind of political theater moves in three directions at the same time; it shapessubjects, audiences, and performers. In honoring subjects who have been mistreated,such performances contribute to a more “[e]nlightened and involved citizenship” (p.281). These performances interrogate and evaluate speci�c social, educational, eco-nomic, and political processes. This form of praxis can shape a cultural politics ofchange. It can help to create a progressive and involved citizenship. The performancebecomes the vehicle for moving persons, subjects, performers, and audience membersinto new, critical, political spaces. The performance gives the audience, and the perform-ers, “equipment for [this] journey: empathy and intellect, passion and critique” (p. 282).

Such performances enact a performance-centered evaluation pedagogy. Thus, fu-sion of critical pedagogy and performance praxis uses performance as a mode of in-quiry, as a method of doing evaluation ethnography, as a path to understanding, as atool for engaging collaborative meanings of experience, as a means to mobilizepeople to take action in the world. This form of critical, collaborative, performancepedagogy privileges the experience, the concept of voice, and the importance ofturning evaluation sites into democratic public spheres (see Worley 1998). Criticalperformance pedagogy informs practice, which in turn supports pedagogical condi-tions for an emancipatory politics (Worley 1998:139). The best art, the best perfor-mance autoethnographies, are “unquestionably political and irrevocably beautifulat the same time” (Morrison 1994:497).

This performance ethic seeks external grounding in its commitment to a post-Marxism and communitarian feminism with hope but no guarantees. It seeks to un-derstand power and ideology through and across systems of discourse. It under-stands that moral and aesthetic criteria are always �tted to the contingencies of con-crete circumstances, assessed in terms of local understandings that �ow from afeminist moral ethic (Christians 2000). This ethic calls for dialogical inquiry rootedin the concepts of care and shared governance. How this ethic works in any speci�csituation cannot be predicted in advance. It has not been done before.

PERFORMATIVE CRITERIA IN THE SEVENTH MOMENT

In the seventh moment the criteria for evaluating critical performance events com-bine aesthetics, ethics, and epistemologies.12 Like hooks’s black aesthetic (1990:111)


and Giroux’s public pedagogy (2000b:25), these performance criteria erase theusual differences between ethics, politics, and power and create the possibilities fora practical, performative pedagogy, a manifesto for a critical performance art andauthoethnography, a call for performances to interrupt and intervene in public life.

In feminist, communitarian13 terms, our manifesto presumes that no objective,morally neutral standpoint exists. Hence, for example, an Afrocentric feminist aes-thetic (and epistemology) stresses the importance of truth, knowledge, and beauty(“Black Is Beautiful”) and a notion of experiential and shared wisdom. Wisdom soconceived derives from local, lived experience, and expresses lore, folktale, andmyth (Collins 1991:212–13).

This dialogical aesthetic enacts an ethic of care, an ethic of personal and commu-nal responsibility (Collins 1991:214; Giroux 2000a:130). It presents a moral commu-nity ontologically preceding the individual. This community has shared moralvalues that include concepts of shared governance, neighborliness, love, kindness,and the moral good (Christians 2000:144–49). This ethic embodies a sacred, existen-tial epistemology that locates persons in a noncompetitive, nonhierarchical rela-tionship to the larger moral universe. This ethic declares that all persons deservedignity and a sacred status in the world. It stresses the value of human life, truthtelling, and nonviolence (Christians 2000:147).

Anchored in a speci�c community of moral discourse, the performer, as culturalcritic, takes sides. Performers show how a participatory, feminist, communitarianethic addresses situations of injustice. Advocates of the Black Arts Movement inthe 1970s, for example, asked how much more beautiful a poem, melody, play,novel, or �lm made the life of a single black person (Gayle 1997:1876).

In advancing this utopian project, the performer seeks new standards and new toolsof evaluation. Karenga ([1972] 1997), a theorist of the Black Arts Movement in the1970s, argued that black art should be political, functional, collective, and commit-ted. Politically and functionally, this art would be, as it was for Du Bois (1926:134),black theater about blacks, made by blacks, for blacks, and located in local black com-munities. Collectively, black art comes from the people, and must be returned to thepeople, “in a form more beautiful and colorful than it was in real life. . . . [A]rt is every-day life given more form and color” (Karenga [1972] 1997:1974). Such art is com-mitted to political goals. It is democratic. It celebrates diversity, personal and collec-tive freedom.14

PERFORMANCE ART

This black performance aesthetic, art by, for, and about the people, complements anew movement in the arts, a movement that has had various names: performanceart, activist art, community art, and “new genre public art” (Lacy 1995:20; Miles1997:164; Radford-Hill 2000:25; Rice 1990:207).15 New genre artist Suzanne Lacy(1995:9–10) states that this is “an art whose public strategies of engagement are animportant part of its aesthetic language. . . . Unlike much what of has heretofore


been called public art, new genre public art . . . might include . . . installations, per-formances, conceptual art, mixed-media art. . . . Attacking boundaries, new genrepublic art draws on ideas from vanguard forms.”

Performance art is “predicated on a history of cultural resistance” (Garoian1999:10). Earlier formations can be found in performance art and avant-garde ex-perimental theater movements of the 1970s and 1980s (Garoian 1999:10; McCall2000:423). New genre public art is performative, political, feminist, and activist(Garoian 1999:8). According to Lacy (1995:28), four historical factors, embedded inthe conservative backlash of the 1980s and 1990s, shaped this movement: increasedracial discrimination; threats to women’s rights; cultural censorship targeted atwomen and ethnic and homosexual artists; and deepening health (AIDS) and eco-logical crises. This art understands, to paraphrase Giroux (2000a:136), who quotes thelate Pierre Bourdieu, that there is no genuine democracy without genuine opposition.

Performance art does not subscribe to the tradition of High Culture. It is revolution-ary art. It reclaims the radical political identity of the artist as social critic (McCall2000:421). In the hands of cultural workers like Suzanne Lacy, performance art dis-solves the “differences between artists and participants[,] . . . showing how art shouldbe a force for information, dialogue, and social change” (Giroux 2000a:136).16

Rebecca Rice, black theater artist and educator, provides another example. Riceseeks a theater for social change. Her performances illuminate the beauty and dig-nity of black women who have been victims of violence, abuse, and addiction(1990:212). Over the past decade, Anna Deavere Smith (1993, 1994) has created aseries of one-woman performance pieces about race and racism in America(1993:xvii). She titles her series On the Road: A Search for American Character.

Paraphrasing Miles (1997:164), the value of new genre activist art, like criticalperformance ethnography, lies in its ability to initiate a continuing process of socialcriticism in the public sphere. This art engages “de�ned publics on issues fromhomelessness to the survival of the rain forests, domestic violence and AIDS”(Miles 1997:64). It transgresses “the con�nes of public and domestic domains”(Miles 1997:167). It shows how public laws and policies in�uence personal deci-sions. It shows how the limits of the public sphere shape changes in the privatesphere (Miles 1997:169). Activist art challenges the relation of art and the artist tothe public domain.

The Pedagogical as Performative

These new artistic formations move from the global to the local,17 the political tothe personal, the pedagogical to the performative. They make the “political visiblethrough [performative] pedagogical practices that attempt to make a difference inthe world rather than simply re�ect it” (Giroux 2000a:37). Du Bois’s radical blacktheater performs scenes of liberation for an oppressed people. bell hooks’s blackaesthetic and Rebecca Rice’s black theater imagine and perform liberated subjec-tivities for African American women.


Performance art is shaped by six pedagogical strategies, six forms of interventionwhich trouble the relationships between ethnography, �eldword, culture, language,ideology, race, the body, community and technology (Garoian 1999, p. 45). The �rststrategy is methodological. Performance art pedagogy rede�nes ethnography as re-�exive, performative autoethnography (Garoian 1999, p. 44). The second strategyfocuses on the performance and use of language as a way of criticizing “the culturalmetaphors that codify and stereotype the [racial] self and the body” (Garoian 1999,p. 44). The third pedagogical strategy uses performance art as a way of generatingspectacles of resistance which challenge the structures of power that circulate inspeci�c sites like schools or hospitals.

The fourth strategy performs community, by empowering citizens to work col-laboratively in “restoring . . . civility in their neighborhoods” (Garoian 1999:44).Using the body as a site of intervention, the �fth and sixth strategies show how-machine-body transactions scar and shape the material and lived body, its fantasies,desires, illnesses, and pains. At these levels, performance art pedagogy examines theaesthetic experiences that surround the embodied expression of a culture, and itsracial and gender codes (Garoian 1999:45).

Performance art pedagogy re�exively critiques those cultural practices that re-produce oppression. At the performative level this pedagogy locates perfor-mances within these repressive practices, creating discourses that make the strug-gles of democracy more visible. In their performances, artists, teachers, students,and other cultural workers “invoke their personal memories and histories[;] . . .they engage in storytelling” (Garoian 1999:5). They perform testimonios. They“remember, misremember, interpret and passionately revisit . . . [the] past and[the] present” (Diamond 1996:1). In so doing, they invoke a “continuum of pastperformances, a history . . . juxtaposed . . . with existential experiences” (Dia-mond 1996:1). Through their co-performances cultural workers critique and eval-uate culture, turning history back in upon itself, creating possibilities for new his-torical ideas, images, new subjectivities, new cultural practices (Diamond 1996:2;Garoian 1999:6).

Building on Giroux (2000a:138), these forms of democratic practice turn the po-litical into a set of performance events. Occurring in the here and now, these perfor-mances contest situations of oppression. They make things happen. They are conse-quential. They initiate and model change. In these events performers intervene inthe liminal and politicized spaces of the culture (Garoian 1999:50).

These events, or happenings, “reclaim the political as pedagogical” (Giroux2000a:138). As sites of resistance, they connect “mystory performances” to popular,personal, and scholarly cultural texts.18 These texts are located in their institutionaland historical moments, the sites of power in everyday life. These performances jointransnational and postcolonial narratives with storytelling about personal problemsexperienced at the local level. These interventions represent pedagogy done in thepublic interest, democratic art for, by, and of the people.

Bryant Keith Alexander offers an example of such performances in his discus-


sion of black barbershops as cultural spaces where the past and the present perme-ate identities and memories:

Black people enter these spaces for cultural maintance and cultural proliferation. As I sit in the barber’s chair my body, like my history, is in relation to other Black bodies. . . . Mr. Brown, Luke, Deanna and those who came before and those who will follow are simultaneously present. The fading, twisting, and weaving of hair, of voices, andlife stories are a part of the process, a part of the experience, a part of me. Butthese are my stories. My hair tells its own story. (Alexander 2002:17)

Everybody’s hair tells a story, and in these stories culture is performed, and thepolitical becomes personal and pedagogical.

CONCLUSION

In this manifesto I have argued that symbolic interactionism is at a crossroads. Weface a challenge, how to reclaim the progressive heritage given to us by Du Bois,Mead, Dewey, and Blumer. I have suggested that we need to craft an emancipatorydiscourse that speaks to the issues of racial inequality under neoliberal forms ofgovernmentality. This discourse requires a turn to a performance-based approach toculture, politics, and pedagogy. We need to explore performance autoethnography asa vehicle for enacting a performative cultural politics of hope. I have outlined provi-sional interpretive criteria for others to evaluate and continue this important work.

Acknowledgments: I thank Art Bochner, Kathy Charmaz, Andrea Fontana,Laurel Richardson, and Rebecca Small for their comments on earlier versions ofthis manuscript.

NOTES

1. A performative cultural studies enacts a critical, cultural pedagogy. It does so by using dia-logue, performative writing, and the staging and performance of texts involving audiencemembers (see Schutz 2001:146).

2. For McLaren (1998:441) and Kincheloe and McLaren (2000:285), cultural pedagogy refers tothe ways that cultural production functions as a form of education, as “it generates knowledge,shapes values and constructs identity. . . . [C]ultural pedagogy refers to the ways particular cul-tural agents produce . . . hegemonic ways of seeing.” Critical pedagogy (McLaren 1998:441) at-tempts to performatively disrupt and deconstruct these cultural practices in the name of a“more just, democratic and egalitarian society” (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000:285; but seeLather 1998).

3. Although this text is a call to performance, it is not an example of performance writing per se(see Bochner and Ellis 2002; Madison 1999; Phelan 1993, 1998). I do not intend this essay tobe a deconstruction of the classic journal style; however, I do want to privilege texts that aremeant to be performed.

4. Denzin and Lincoln (2000:2) de�ne the seven moments of inquiry, all of which operate in the


present, as the traditional (1900–1950), the modernist (1950–70), blurred genres (1970–86),the crisis of representation (1986–90), postmodern or experimental (1990–95), postexperi-mental (1995–2000), and the future (2000– ).

5. Race and racism for Du Bois were social constructions and performances. Minstrelsy andblackface were powerful devices that produced and reproduced the color line. Du Bois be-lieved that African Americans needed performance spaces where they could control how racewas constructed. Consequently, as Elam (2001:5–6) observes, African American theater andperformance have been central sites for the interrogation of race and the color line (see alsoElam and Krasner 2001). The inherent “constructedness” of performance and the malleabilityof the devices of the theater serve to reinforce the theory that “blackness . . . and race . . . arehybrid, �uid concepts” (Elam 2001:4–5). Stuart Hall (1996:473) is correct, persons of colorhave never been able to successfully escape the politics and theaters of (racial) representation.

6. McChesney’s (1994:4) de�nition of democracy is as good as any: “the many should and domake the core political decisions.” This de�nition authorizes democracy in the participatoryand not the representational mode. A viable participatory democracy takes the word awayfrom those neoliberal discourses that have reduced democracy to the needs of capitalism andthe attendant corporate colonization of public life in America today (Giroux 2001b:122).

7. In Austin’s theory “the term performative designated the kind of utterance that actually doessomething in the world, e.g., promising, forgiving . . . as opposed to ‘constative’ utterances thatmerely report on a state of affairs independent of the act of enunciation” (Conquergood1998:32; for criticisms, see Garoian 1999:4; Austin 1962:5, 14–15, 108; Perinbanayagam1991:113). Derrida “reworks Austin’s performativity as citationality[,] . . . dissolving constativeinto performative speech” (Pollock 1998b:39).

8. Schechner (1998:362) observes that this is the “performative Austin introduced and Butler andqueer theorists discuss.”

9. I take the title of this section from Conquergood 1998.10. Those words are written on 14 September 2001, three days after the attack on the World Trade

Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.11. Performance writing shows, rather than tells. It enacts what it describes. Performance writing

is evocative, re�exive, multivocal, citational, always incomplete (Phelan 1998:13; Pollock1998a:80–95).

12. De�nitions: Aesthetics: Theories of beauty; Ethics: Theories of ought, of right; Epistemology:Theories of knowing. This section draws from Denzin (2001d:326–27). Under this framework,nothing is value-free, theory and practice cannot be divorced, all inquiry is moral, knowledgeis power, and those who have power determine what is aesthetically pleasing and ethicallyacceptable.

13. According to Christians (2000:151), there are three strands of communitarian ethical theory:feminist theory, critical theory, and participatory inquiry.

14. These parallel Du Bois’s four criteria for real black theater; such theater, he said, should beabout us, by us, for us, near us (1926:134).

15. Sharon Irish has helped clarify my understanding of these terms, suggesting that communityor public art usually occurs outside museums and galleries, thereby emphasizing the hoped-forconnection between artist and audience (see also Garoian 1999:27). Garoian (1999:42) treatspostmodern performance art as a new genre of public art. This genre invites citizens to partici-pate in the production and the collective ownership of performances that intervene in public life.

16. In countless public works, Lacy has focused attention on rape, women’s rights, immigration,racism, aging, and domestic violence.

17. For example, in “The Electronic Disturbance” the Critical Art Ensemble, an anarchist group,models a form of local and global resistance in cyberspace.

18. A mystory (Denzin 1997:116; Ulmer 1989:210) is simultaneously a personal mythology, a pub-lic story, and a performance that critiques. The mystory is a montage text, cinematic and multi-media in shape, �lled with sounds, music, and images taken from the writer’s personal history.This personal text (script) is grafted onto discourses from popular culture and locates itselfagainst the specialized knowledges that circulate in the larger society.


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