Archiving Performance/Performance as Archive: A Hybrid Book Review and Performance Commentary on E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea

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Notes

1. I presented a variation of this performance review at a symposium in honor of E. Patrick Johnson's “Sweet Tea” at the University of Texas Austin. The symposium was entitled “Archiving Performance/The Performance as Archive.” In this hybrid genre of doing a book review and reviewing live performance, I engage stylistic qualities of performative writing and scholarly critique to parallel the duality of Johnson's project of presenting both the scholarly published text of these oral histories in the book Sweet Tea, and performing selected narratives in the one-man show, “Pouring Tea.” In my process I am further promoting the importance of performed scholarship, performative scholarship, and the sensuousness of performance on the page as the stage and of course the challenges and joys of moving from the page to the stage that Mary Francis HopKins wrote about and that Johnson addresses in his own essay in this Special Issue—to create what Judith Halberstam might refer to as a queer methodology; a methodology that is “supple enough to respond to the various locations of information … and betrays a certain disloyalty to conventional disciplinary methods” (10).

2. This performance review is based on multiple viewings: a videotaped performance provided by E. Patrick Johnson, a performance at the Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association Convention, the staged performance of the show at About Face Theatre in Chicago, and a performance sponsored by the John L. Warfield for African American Studies Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

3. References expressions by narrators drawn from Johnson's live performance text, men also interviewed in the book project. In this first expression, Michael uses the indicated phrase as a self-description marking the evidence of his own gay identity.

4. This discussion is drawing from Diana Taylor's important work, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.

5. Here I am making a reference to the signature line in the comedy sketch, variously named “Men on Books” and “Men on Film,” in which Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier, on the Black comedy sketch show, “In Living Color,” portray two highly effeminate Black critics. See sample: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmL5s3k9o9U>.

6. “Clocked” is a term used in a number of different ways. Johnson includes differing definitions in his appendix of Black gay vernacular. In this context, I am using the term to specifically reference a moment when someone is identified or recognized as being gay; whether accurate or not; as in the use of the infamous gaydar (as in radar, a presumed gay detection system based on demeanor or gaze).

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Notes on contributors

Bryant Keith Alexander

Bryant Keith Alexander is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Dean, College of Communication and Fine Arts, Loyola Marymount University