This book is Norman K. Denzins most political and personal work, to date. Not only does he weave his encyclopedic knowledge of multiple disciplines into a compelling tour de force manifesto about performance, he intimately reveals his autoethnographic self through poignant family memories and a morally-driven agenda. Performance Autoethnography is a vibrant tribute to the field of performance studies scholarship, and to Denzins advocacy of it as a vital forum for individual and social change.
Johnny Saldaña, Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University, School of Film, Dance, and Theatre
When I downsize, I will need only one academic book: Norman Denzins Performance Autoethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture, Second edition. At Last! A book that brings together diverse performance theories and practices into one genre-bending, ethically grounded, spirited text. It inspires social activist writing, reading, pedagogies and performances that can change the world into a radically just one.
No one could have written this book but Norman Denzin. I know of no one who has his breadth of theoretical and methodological understanding of the issues facing research and teaching at this moment in history. His passion for justice, moreover, resounds on every page. Norman Denzin has deployed his incredible powers of analysis, writing, and ethical compassion. In a brilliant book, Performance Autoethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture, Second edition, Denzin transforms the autoethnographic into the performative, the performative into the political, and the political into the possibility of a radical utopia with justice and freedom for all. The books accomplishments are breath-taking.
This would be my Number 1 choice for any course in qualitative research, performance studies, sociology of culture, political sociology, visual arts, theater or the foundations of education. Rather than dividing disciplines into tidy boxes, Denzin has shown how these boxes are porous. Acting from a shared critical performance perspective, they can engage the worlds problems and work towards a radically just utopia. Everyone is invited to help change the world! Sometimes you just have to wait for what you need and want. I have needed and wanted an accessible way to connect-the-dots---theory, methods, social activism---that could resonate with students, traditional colleagues, and dubious friends. I have waited for this book. The wait is over. Thanks, Norman.
Laurel Richardson, Professor Emeritus, The Ohio State University
Denzins critical performance authoethnography suggests a critical performance pedagogy, which, in turn, creates spaces for a "more humane, pluralistic, and just racial order." He thus sets a tall order for himselfto critically examine the murky spaces of social and structural injustice and racial inequality through memory, story, and performance, all while making an urgent plea for a turn from performance to social justice. He delivers beautifully, masterfully, on his promise to make a strong case for a critically-informed performance autoethnography as socially transformative research praxis.
Christopher N. Poulos, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
In Performance Autoethnography, Norman Denzin advances a broad visionary agenda for the future of the interpretive human sciences. Laying theory and method on the line, Denzin anticipates and encourages refined and new forms of representation and expression that can at once embody and convey the dramaturgical nature of existence in ways that are absorbing, ethical, honest, and artful. Performance Autoethnography is a manifesto that appeals to the conscience of the social sciences. At stake is the future of critical performance autoethnography. Denzin seeks nothing less than a broadened autoethnographic science of heart and soul that seeks to transcend its own particularity in the pursuit of social justice and in the name of a politics of healing and hope. The problems of our agethis moment in human historymake this book and its politics of hope more urgent than ever as we seek to produce meaning, dignity, and justice for the exiled, the banished, and the oppressed, and for all of us engaged in the struggle for open, civil, free, and humane democratic societies. Denzins Performance Autoethnography is as much about feeling as it is about seeing, as much about listening as it is about talking, as much about the human sciences as moral, ethical, ideological, and political as it is about their ontological status as sciences of brute data, as much about hearing voices that have been shrouded in secrecy as it is about the absence of imagination in what passes for social science. Denzin wants social scientists to open their hearts as well as their heads and to listen attentively to stories that feel raw, cut deep, and resist distance and abstraction. What is needed, Denzin shows, is dramaturgical and autoethnographic forms of inquiry and representation that can bring audiences and readers into dialogue and encounter with the otherness of others and of themselves.
Arthur P. Bochner, University of South Florida, Distinguished University Professor, NCA Distinguished Scholar
Experience Denzins sociological imagination as he brings together ideas developed in the last five decades on critical performative inquiry and the values of a feminist communitarianism. In this thoroughly researched collage of stories, scripts, and essays, he demonstrates an autoethnography that redefines the political, cultural, moral, and ethical in performative, pedagogical, critical, and relational terms. With this text, he contributes a hopeful qualitative ethic that inspires us all to do our part for social justice and freedom.
Carolyn Ellis, Distinguished University Professor, Department of Communication, University of South Florida
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