Genre, Agency, and Meaning in the Analysis of Complex Performances: The Case of a Malawian Political Rally

Building on Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about dialogism in complex genres and Richard Bauman's and others' scholarship on genre and intertextuality, this article offers a methodological strategy for analyzing performance. As illustrated through an analysis of a Malawian political rally, the proposed strategy highlights relationships among form, agency, and meaning to yield information about the intertangled webs of social and communicative work operating during the course of an event. The strategy thus offers insight into the processes through which meaning is produced and interpreted and the ways in which participants negotiate power relations through performance.