Dialogics of discomfort: race, roles, and performance

Abstract

Performance ethnography is concerned with more than just the descriptive documentation of culture; it's meant to elicit change by uncovering, critiquing, and – when successful – dislodging the personal and cultural assumptions that all too often go underinterrogated. It's also a public, discursive practice that takes as foundational the notion that we are co-participants in d/Discourse. But what happens once the performance is “over?” Or, put another way, is the performance ever really over? What are the aftereffects of calling on strangers to involve themselves in the rehashing of one's most uncomfortable memories? What changes take place within the writer of the ethnography? What part or parts of the performance can be identified, in retrospect, as transformational? By reevaluating one performance ethnography and proposing two new terms, “live text” and “dialogic discomfort,” this paper attempts to explore the relationship between written texts, live performances, shared discomfort, and the discursive production of self.

Citation

Savage Bilbro, R. (2008), "Dialogics of discomfort: race, roles, and performance", Denzin, N.K., Salvo, J. and Washington, M. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 31), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 163-181. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(08)31009-6