ABSTRACT

Acts of Recovery: Autoethnography, Performance, and Trauma in Ethnographic Work

by

Ming Lauren Holden

This dissertation aims to add the cultural weight of advanced scholarship to a description and understanding of the relationship between trauma, performance, and recovery. It does so using case studies and methodologies whose operative modes and execution both stray consciously from the confines of some of the historically traditional ivory tower’s most egregious disciplinary blind spots. Chapter One, as an introduction, lays out a definition and history of trauma; and a justification for examining it the way I do in the name of progressive scholarship. Chapter Two recounts and analyzes my experience co-founding the Survival Girls, a theater collective for Congolese refugee women in a Nairobi slum, in a meditation on the role of performance studies in a modern and responsible conception of subjective and ethnographic scholarship. Chapter Three approaches the sort of gender-based violence that the members of the Survival Girls suffered by way of literary scholarship by analyzing two plays that address the experience of such violence without re-enacting that violence upon the women I worked with, thereby positioning stage directions in a playscript as an acceptable alternative subject onto which to responsibly employ an “anthropological spyglass” in 2019 as a privileged interloper. Chapter Four uses a performance studies perspective to document over a decade of oral history interviews with an American Indigenous man who is also a Vietnam War veteran and a cancer survivor, dancing with the performance of those interviews as constitutive of an ethnography which illustrates what might be called the reverse effect of the historical anthropological spyglass.

Each of these explorations use performance studies as an entry point for the effort toward decolonial methodology, epistemology, and tradition to examine intersubjective possibilities for understanding trauma and recovery as affective phenomena.