Triumph in My Song: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century African Atlantic Culture, History, and Performance Conference (review)

In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), Diana Taylor presents a concise history of the interdisciplinary field of performance studies. She articulates what she sees as one of the most important contributions of the field, arguing that "by taking performance seriously as a system of learning, sorting, and transmitting knowledge, performance studies allows us to expand what we understand by 'knowledge'" (16). Taylor surveys the "rift" she discerns in traditional approaches to scholarship (specifically) and human history (in general), a gulf between what she terms the archive and the repertoire, the former consisting of "texts, documents, buildings, bones," and the latter embracing less tangible cultural artifacts, such as "spoken language, dance, sports, ritual" (19). She suggests that scholars may obtain a more complete picture of the phenomenal world by consulting both the archive and the repertoire, and that the field of performance studies facilitates both a particular conception of knowledge—as that which is embodied and manifested in performance—and an accompanying set of heuristic tools applicable to a variety of subjects whose nature renders them incompatible with the rigid materialism of the archive.

In many ways, a desire to explore the productive potential of uniting these ostensibly incompatible epistemologies seems to have been at the core of the "Triumph in My Song" Conference held at the University of Maryland, May 31—June 2, 2012. In particular, the program's interdisciplinary approach and innovative integration of performance was well suited to the conference topic; historians of any diasporic or subjugated population have long grappled with the fact that their subjects rarely leave the type of direct evidence that can be preserved in the archive, while scholars of performance must confront similar absences when studying a form that, by its very nature, is unrecoverable and ephemeral. At several points, "Triumph in My Song" suggested ways the inclusion of evidence from the repertoire can complement or enhance research drawing on traditional archival material.

One of the Society of Early Americanists "special topics" conferences, "Triumph in My Song" was also supported by the American Society for Theatre Research; the University of Maryland's College of Arts and Humanities, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, and School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies; and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. The conference featured a wide range of topics to correspond with this broad funding base, including presentations and performances by historians, literary scholars, ethnomusicologists, and theater scholars and practitioners. Many of the sessions engaged with the notion of "performance" in some fashion, approaches that can be grouped into three general categories: those that took types of performance as their subject matter; those that used performance as a metaphor for the ways relationships between individuals and institutions were established, maintained, or challenged; and those that embraced performance as methodology and heuristic technique. Of course, the challenge for any author writing a conference review is the inability to attend every session. Accordingly, this review offers what I hope will be a representative sampling of the work presented throughout the three-day event.

It was in the first session of the conference, "Voices from the Past," that one of the most fitting examples of performance as metaphor, as well as the potential value of studying both the archive and the repertoire, appeared. Sydney Nathans, in a paper entitled "Alabama Griot: Oral History and Re-Scripting the Plantation Past," related the process of constructing a narrative for enslaved African Americans whose absence from the traditional archive is nearly total, but whose memory and legacy endure in oral histories. He related how his (ad)ventures outside the archive revealed apparent contradictions in the evidence documenting the forced migration of slaves from North Carolina to Alabama in 1844. Ultimately, Nathans's discussion demonstrated the value of reading the...