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  • Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood
  • Renée Alexander Craft (bio)
Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis. By Dwight Conquergood, edited by E. Patrick Johnson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013; 344 pp.; illustrations. $90.00 cloth, $37.50 paper.

Performance theorist, ethnographer, and social justice activist Dwight Conquergood’s research and praxis helped redefine the field of performance-centered, critically engaged, embodied research from its earlier iteration as speech and interpretation to performance studies in the 1980s. I am among several generations of scholars who first engaged with Conquergood’s theories and methods in a performance studies classroom through a course-packet of his foundational essays pulled from journals — including TDR. These methodologically interdisciplinary essays were deeply invested in the fields of communication, theatre, and cultural studies. Because Conquergood left no central monograph, I went on to teach his impressive body of work through a constellation of PDF copies that multiplied as his contributions continued to grow.

Posthumously published under the careful editorial leadership of his colleague and friend E. Patrick Johnson, Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis is the first collection to present the 20-year breadth of Conquergood’s work in one stunning monograph. “The subtitle,” Johnson explains in his adroit introduction, “stems from Conquergood’s interests in generating theories about performance studies and its relationship to ethnography; critiquing and developing methodologies to enact these theories; and, actually deploying theory and method in field research” (6). Johnson continues: “Cultural Struggles is the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies” (13). This alone represents a significant scholarly contribution, but that is only part of the collection’s brilliance. Another of the collection’s strengths is its deft pairing of text with context. In addition to the three sections implicated in the subtitle, Cultural Struggles presents the body of Conquergood’s discipline-defining work within the context of his intellectual genealogy, pedagogy, and commitment to engaging with voices and epistemologies often marginalized within the academy.

Johnson frames Conquergood’s work with his own introduction, but also through critical responses from distinguished former students and colleagues, including Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach. The introduction and critical responses are written with the kind of intimacy, rigor, clarity, and investment that characterized Conquergood’s own commitments. Thus, Cultural Struggles allows readers to witness how one of the most important qualitative researchers and cultural theorists of our time developed what have become key tenets of performance studies and performance-centered critical ethnographic research over the arc of his career. Moreover, it attends to what this dedicated scholarartistactivist (no hyphens/no dashes) came to mean and how he came to matter in particular ways to scholars who represent a sample of the diverse disciplines that Conquergood’s research has impacted. [End Page 181]

Cultural Struggles organizes Conquergood’s work chronologically within the conceptual framework laid out in the subtitle — performance, ethnography, and praxis. The first section focuses on “performance” as a theoretical orientation toward studies of culture that challenges the theory/practice binary, privileges the body as a site of knowledge, and helps audiences track subtle workings of and resistances to local and global networks of power. Taken together, the essays in this section shift our interpretation from culture as a set of “texts” to read toward culture as a set of dynamic “performances.” In “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” an essay that forms a cornerstone of the anti-/trans-/inter-discipline, Conquergood uses his signature alliterative style to distill performance studies into his oft-cited trinity of artistry (performance as culture), analysis (performance as cultural critique), and activism (performance as a mechanism for cultural change). Within this matrix, performance emerges as equipped to engage culture as social, discursive, and political.

In the second section, Conquergood sets his theories of performance in motion as a method of ethnographic research animated by dialogic performance, coperformative witnessing, and what Micaela di Leonardo refers to in her critical response as “performative political economy” (303). In the first essay of the section, Conquergood maps “dialogic performance” as an ethical orientation toward ethnographic field research that...

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