the young people's professor

People often ask me “what is performance studies?” when they find out I’m receiving a doctoral degree in this field. It’s a question that I hear each and every day of my life. I've noticed that while alot of people know that i'm a doctoral student few people actually know what exactly my field is or what i actually "study". When I tell people that I’m studying for a Ph.D. in performance studies they often mistake me for an “artist”: an actor, singer, dancer. When I tell these folks I’m none of these things and that my work DOESNT deal with“drama”, “music”, or “dance” they really get confused. I thought i'd take a few minutes just to break down what is it I do in this crazy world called "academia." Ok, so here’s the story friends:

As an academic discipline performance studies comes out of socio-cultural anthropology. The field basically emphasizes the study of performance in different social, cultural, and political contexts. I’ll explain.

I specialize in twentieth century black cultural performance and expressive culture. By “black cultural performance” I mean rituals, ceremonies, and everyday types of “performances” that cannot be simply categorized as music, dance, or theatre. I’m talking about more of the “in-between” stuff. Some examples of what I mean by “black cultural performance” might include: sermons by black preachers (or “church” on Sunday in general), New Orleans funeral processions, Haitian “Rara” festivals, Brazilian carnivals, Drag Balls in Harlem, black kids playing “freeze tag” in Queens, or Jamaican block parties in Brooklyn. In each of the examples that I just gave you can see how it would be impossible to “study” these performances as straightforward “acting”, “music” or “dance” events, rather you’d need to know the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which these types of performance emerge. This is what performance studies scholars do. We emphasis types of “performances” that do not take place on a stage or as a part of some “framed” event, but are instead deeply connected to people’s everyday lives. So in other words, we can think about southern black women gossiping in their kitchen as a type of “performance”, or even black men in a barbershop as a type of “performance.”

In fact, the real difference between performance studies and traditional cultural anthropology for instance is not what these scholars study but rather on how they study it. I’ll explain. Traditionally, socio-cultural anthropologists have taken a “top-down” approach to studying different cultures: the anthropologist comes into a community, “observes” it, conducts interviews, collects data, then goes back home and writes a book about what he or she has “learned.” Performance studies scholars do things differently. We understand performance as not only a “thing” that can be studied, but also as a WAY of studying things. “Performance” is not only an object of analysis but is also a method of analysis. Performance anthropologists believe that in order to “know a culture” a person has to perform in and with that culture in order to understand it to the fullest. So what’s a more practical example?

Let’s use the underground ballroom scene as an example. I have lots of really smart friends that sometimes come with me to balls and they always leave completely clueless about what’s going on at these events or how to understand their importance. Even after they’ve gone to a dozen balls, have gotten a general sense of the difference between a “butch queen” and a “femme queen”, or can see that gender is a “performance” in this scene, they still often feel “out-of-the-know” in terms of how to think about this community theoretically and politically. They don’t walk balls so they don’t know what it feels like to miss their category or to become a legend. They’re not in a house, so they don’t know what it means to get excited over one’s “house brother” walking for the first time. They don’t walk, so they don’t know that walking “thug realness” at a ball is sometimes a rehearsal for how to walk down Franklin Avenue at 3am and not get “spooked.” Because they are not performers in and with the community, their conclusions about what the scene is about is not based on an intimate connection to their everyday lives or an bodily understanding of what it “feels like” to have “member” status. This scenario is basically a metaphor for the whole discipline of anthropology, which traditionally emphasizes learning about a culture through one’s distance from it.

An anthropologist or sociologist might attend a series of balls over the course of two years, conduct interviews with various house parents, go to a few house meetings, then call it a day. They would then go back and write a dissertation or book based on their observations (or they would “participate” in the balls by being a spectator). As a performance studies scholar, my approach to the scene is completely different. As a performance ethnographer I believe that the only way to actually “understand” the ballroom scene is not by simply being in the audience, but by literally being a member of the community and performing in it. In other words, the ground-level, embodied experience of actually “walking a ball” and being in a house provides a much richer epistemological insight into “what the scene is all about” then if I was just simply “observing” playfully from a distance. You see, performance studies scholars believe—in the words of Zora Neale Hurston—that when dealing with a culture, you have to “go there, to know there.”

Does this make the questions “what is performance studies?” and “what the hell does Frank do for a living” a little clearer? Lawd knows I hope so. To recap: I’m an ethnographer that specializes in the study of black cultural performance and expressive culture.

My primary areas of specialization (the fields that I’ll be taking comprehensive examinations in) are African American Socio-Cultural Anthropology, African Diaspora Studies, and (naturally) “Performance Studies”. At one point i was planning on focusing my dissertation on black british expressive culture, but i've sinced abandoned that idea completely to follow my original desire to write the first dissertation on underground house-ball culture in New York City (more on that later). After I graduate, I would like to teach in an Anthropology department or an interdisciplinary program such as African American Studies, Women’s Studies, or Ethnic Studies. I would teach courses such as “The African American Tradition in Socio-Cultural Anthropology”, “Black Folklore and Oral Traditions”, “Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora”, “Performance in the Black Diaspora”, “Performance Anthropology/Ethnography”, “Qualitative Research Methods”, and various classes in critical theory such as critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. Basically, i would teach courses dealing with African Diaspora Studies from the lens of expressive culture, and methodological approaches to African American Studies that are rooted in ethnographic paradigms.
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Stay tuned for more on “what is performance studies?, I feel like there might be lots more questions and lots more explanations we could discuss! This is just a beginning.

What do you think?

Posted by the young people's professor on 6/08/2006 at 5:18:00 AM | Permalink