staging performativity

The faculty and grads of the Center for Writing Studies here at Illinois were very lucky to host Vershawn Ashanti Young from the University of Iowa yesterday. He is a scholar of literacy, race, and performativity, and he attends keenly to class and gender as well. I enjoyed two meals with him and various colleagues yesterday, and he got to meet our super smart graduate students. He performed at our colloquium, and when I say performed, I mean performed. In addition to being a careful and provocative scholar, Young is also a performance artist, and his ability to render his book as a performance was quite stunning, I'd say. He can write, act, and dammit, he can dance. His mimetic renderings of characters from his overconcerned mother to his full-of-herself colleague, to his pimped-out brother to his young, fearful self being jumped for his postage stamp money were as convincing as they were amusing. It was like watching a screenplay of the theories of Bourdieu, Butler, Bakhtin, and Althusser all rolled into one, only with pathos and verve (and with no mention of any of them).

Of course it made me wonder just how many scholarly books lend themselves to performance. The answer is probably not many. I mean if Aristotle is right that conflict is the basis of drama, then Young's story--Young himself--embodiesa deep and seemingly unresolvable conflict. The conflict of moving between social situations that call for (call him to) radically different comportments, down to gestures, enunciation, and the set of his jaw. The performer here is at once actor and social critic, as evidenced, for example, by his reading of an African-American woman's over-enunciation of the word "the" as an over-earnest overdoing of overwhiteness.

At lunch we wondered how the Q&A session would go. I feared that people would be too in the "entertained" mode to engage the performance intellectually, but instead everyone offered quite high-level questions and observations about identity, performativity, literacy, bodies, movement, and on, and on. Amazing stuff, this was. Really, really good stuff. Rhetorically potent stuff.

Comments

[Mindy]

Yep. Sounds like y'all got to have the excellent intellectual experience that happens when encountering an example of performance as a form of scholarship and scholarly representation. As an ardent believer in performance as intellectual work and scholarship, it heartens me to hear about encounters such as this. I occasionally worry that audiences will be captivated (distracted?) by the entertainment and ignore the intellectual work of/in performance...but then I recall all of the classrooms and conference rooms I have been in where theories and arguments get lost in the midst of attention to trivial matters (like identification with the text, for instance), and I remember that engagements with writing can also veer off into tangential territory.