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  • Caravans ContinuedIn Memory of Dwight Conquergood
  • Shannon Jackson (bio)
Abstract

The heterogeneity of the memorial gathering for the late Dwight Conquergood reveals the disciplinary legacies of what is sometimes erroneously called the "Northwestern" strain of performance studies in the United States-which Conquergood was key in developing.


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(facing page) Dwight Conquergood participating in the Lao Baci ceremony. Chicago, 1995. (Photo courtesy of the Dwight Conquergood estate)

At the premature January memorial of Dwight Conquergood-teacher, scholar, activist, performer, foster parent, foster grandparent, godfather, neighbor, and professor of performance studies at Northwestern University-former students and colleagues from around the world gathered to pay tribute. The composition of that gathering was eclectic. It drew academics of all varieties, representing departments of English, communication studies, theatre, folklore, musicology, anthropology, rhetoric, gender studies, and visual art, to name just some of the fields of those whose professional and personal lives had been transformed by working with Conquergood. It also drew theatre directors and actors, community organizers and legal activists. And it drew members of both Dwight's family of origin-his biological siblings-and his adopted Hmong family-his foster son, his foster son's former wife, their extended family, and Dwight's foster grandson and godson, Christopher. The memorial performances were also eclectic, including Gospel singing, poetry recitation, and [End Page 28] oratical tributes that ranged from the staid to the incantatory. It included performances of Zora Neale Hurston's work, theatrical performances about gang violence, performances of an African funereal lament, and performances of personal memories of exchanges of food, ideas, inspiration, and gossip with Conquergood.

Coming to terms with the disciplinary legacies of what is sometimes erroneously called the "Northwestern" strain of performance studies in the United States is, to some degree, about contending with the heterogeneity of that memorial gathering. The gathering itself indexed a wider network of scholars and practitioners engaged culturally, and sometimes aesthetically, in the communicative dimension of performance. To be so engaged is to take particular interest in performance's oral, embodied, and narrative dimensions, especially as those conceptual concerns have been developed and refracted through the changing fields of interdisciplinary humanities and communication studies over the course of the 20th century.

What seemed premature about Dwight Conquergood's memorial, however, was that if there was a single person who was celebrated or blamed for propelling the transformation from speech to performance studies, Dwight Conquergood was it. Thus, to bear witness to his passing at the disciplinary level was to wonder whether our field could possibly be ready to let go of a person, figure, and symbol who so epitomized a disciplinary future. It was to worry-and for many of us, to resist- the dumb temporality that would allow his death to push progressive hope into the recent past.

As it happens, of course, most are resisting that push by remembering the political, intellectual, international, interdisciplinary, and aesthetic combinations that Dwight Conquergood pursued in his scholarship and in his classroom. I want to briefly touch on a few themes that seem to me to recur in Dwight's work: (1) the transformational commitment to the institution of performance studies; (2) the advancement of complex interactions between so-called theory and so-called practice; (3) intense analytical and political support for what the provosts and the politicians call "underrepresented populations"; and (4) the fusion of the tools of cultural critique with those of political economy. At the end, I want to reflect more broadly upon the significance of his work ethic, particularly as it manifested itself in a daily political practice of human attachment.

Instituting Performance Studies

Members of other fields do not always have to do the intense institutional work that those of us in performance studies have to do in order to create a place for our work and our students. Dwight's commitment to that act was visible in almost every essay he wrote and every keynote he delivered. At all times, one had the feeling that he was not only speaking for himself and his own personal scholarly preoccupations, but constantly reaching for a metalanguage within which all of us could situate...

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