Dwight Conquergood 1949-2004

Opening and Closing Lives

Most institutions of higher learning prioritize three areas in which its faculty must excel: research, teaching, and service. These three areas are often the sites where administrations make us accountable at the time of tenure and promotion. Rarely, however, do any of us excel in all three without making some kind of personal sacrifice or succumbing to burnout. Before tenure, teaching might suffer so that we can work on a book manuscript or produce a string of "paradigm shifting" articles. After tenure, the research may wane when we are overextended with committees. The road to full professor may take yet another toll on our teaching as we work on the second or third book manuscript. Whatever the case, ours is a constant negotiation of priorities and balancing acts in which we aspire to be good citizens of the academy. I know of no other person who assailed all three as adeptly and gracefully as Dwight Conquergood. His life and his legacy stand as academic benchmarks.

I met Dwight in the spring of 1990 during my first year of graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My thesis advisor, D. Soyini Madison, one of Dwight's advisees, invited him to campus to screen his documentary, The Heart Broken in Half (1990), an ethnographic film about the life of the Latin King street gang in Chicago. Soyini designated me as Dwight's host until she was done teaching that day and asked me to pick him up at the airport. I remember being so excited to meet the Dwight Conquergood, the scholar who had done all of this courageous work with street gangs and who had become an advocate on their behalf. As I peered through the crowd at baggage claim, I did not expect to find the short, salt-and-pepper-haired, timid-looking man that was Dwight. "How on earth," I thought, "did this man befriend street gangs?" After a long and engaging lunch with him, I came to understand how. Behind that mild-mannered smile, easygoing demeanor, and gentle spirit, was a fierce intellectual and an even fiercer ethnographer and activist.

Much of his commitment to social justice was due to his working-class background. He was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, but grew up on a farm in Indiana,

Dwight Conquergood at the 1996 Performance Studies International conference, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Cecilia Hayes)

one of five children. Dwight was a very private person, but on rare occasions spoke of his childhood in Indiana and especially of helping his father, Daniel, with raising animals and working in the vegetable garden. "I hated when it was time to kill the animals," he once told me. "I became very attached to them and I would be depressed for days after they were slaughtered. I was inconsolable." His sensitivity to the powerless might explain why early on in his career Dwight became a champion of the disenfranchised, both at home and abroad, by calling attention to their plight in his scholarship and by becoming an advocate on their behalf. He began on the ground by working on boards and in institutions that served the people for whom he was an advocate. His extensive ethnographic research in refugee camps in Thailand and the Gaza Strip, as well as in new immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago, marked sites where he demonstrated this imbrication of research and activism.

Dwight Conquergood's scholarship was integral to the gradual paradigm shift from "Interpretation Studies" to "Performance Studies," in the early 1980s within the National Communication Association (formerly Speech Communication Association). He advocated envisioning performance as a "border" discipline that rigorously challenges positivism, expands the meaning of texts, and privileges embodied research. In his last publication in TDR, "Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research," he solidified his critique of the theory/practice split, arguing that performance studies "struggles to open the space between analysis and action, and to pull the pin on the binary opposition between theory and practice" (2002:145). He took seriously the "critical" in critical performance ethnography by...