Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture

Incorporating his own "performative autoethnography" (stories about his life and town) into the text, Denzin (communications, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) examines the practice of performance ethnography as a critical sociological practice in the formation of cultural politics. His "single yet complex thesis" that organizes the argument is that we (presumably Americans) "inhabit a performance- based, dramaturgical culture" in which the dividing line between performance and audience blurs and culture becomes performance. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR