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Dwight Conquergood, "Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research"

Page history last edited by Joh 13 years, 10 months ago

Conquergood, Dwight “Performance studies: Interventions and Radical Research” The Drama Review 46 (2002): 145-153

 

Conquergood is an ethnographer most notably known for his work with marginalised and refugee communities in South-East Asia and gang communities in the United States. He opens his article by discussing the two different and competing forms of knowledge, one the official, objective and abstract and the other the practical, embodied and popular. Conquergood suggests that the migration between the two schools of thought is what performance research has the potential to do.

 

Conquergood’s article has a direct and descriptive writing style that contains a critical analysis of knowledge production and ownership. Conquergood talks about Foucault’s theory of the subjugation of knowledge and quotes numerous scholars and political writers about the symbolism and power of the pen and literacy as a tool that only validates dominant and often western knowledge. This does not therefore validate knowledge that is local, community and or non-verbal.

 

Conquergood’s article strongly argues and is a compelling call to arms for performance-based research to be employed not because of its validity and academic standing, but due to its power to create agency for subordinate people and to bridge the binary between theory and practice, the ‘apartheid of knowledge’. Conquergood directed two films during his life. Here is a link to 1990 documentary “The Heart broken in Half” about the complexities and identities of street gangs in Chicago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np7WkGxYHy4

 

Joh Fairley

 

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