This performative autoethnography utilizes jazz swing as a method to further activate the critical processes in qualitative research. In reflecting on my father’s 25 years as a jazz musician, I find his everyday lived methodology of swing provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which family inheritance collides with sociocultural practices of racial inequity and cultural appropriation. Autoethnographically re/inhabiting this space and sound with my father revealed a performative ethos, an empathetic epistemology of critical reflection activated by the transgressive discipline of jazz. Specifically, this performative ethos is applied to issues of racial accountability, embodied theorizing, and the ethical implications of an aesthetic/epistemic praxis in autoethnography. More broadly, I offer performative ethos as critical pedagogy assisting in living a critical life where issues of power and privilege are personally political and are written and rewritten daily with others in hope of utopia.
Auslander, P. ( 2006). Performing glam rock: Gender and theatricality in popular music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
2.
Austerlitz, P. ( 2005). Jazz consciousness: Music, race, and humanity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
3.
Burke, K. ( 1972). Dramatism and development. Barre, MA: Clark University Press.
4.
Butler, J. ( 2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.
5.
Clifford, J. ( 1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography . Berkeley: University of California Press.
6.
Conquergood, D. ( 1985). Performing as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Literature in Performance, 5, 1-13.
7.
Conquergood, D. ( 1998). Beyond the text: Toward a performative cultural politics . In S. Dailey, (Ed.), The future of performance studies: Visions and revisions (pp. 25-36). Annandale, VA: National Communication Association.
8.
Conquergood, D.Rethinking Ethnography (1991): Towards a Critical Cultural Politics, Communication Monographs , 58: 179-194.
9.
Conquergood, D. ( 2004). Performance studies: Interventions and radical research . In H. Bial (Ed.), The performance studies reader (pp. 311-322). New York: Routledge.
10.
Daniels, G. G. (Ed.). (1971). The swing era, 1939-1940. New York: Time Life.
11.
Denzin, N.K. ( 2006). Politics and ethics of performance pedagogy: Toward a pedagogy of hope. In D. S. Madison & J. Hamera (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of performance studies (pp. 325-338). New York: SAGE .
12.
Dyson, M.E. ( 2003). Open mike: Reflections on philosophy, race, sex, culture, and religion. New York: Basic Books .
13.
Gabbard, K. ( 1996). Jammin at the margins: Jazz and the American cinema. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
14.
Gingrich-Philbrook, C. ( 2005). Autoethnography’s family values: Easy access to compulsory experiences. Text and Performance Quarterly, 25, 297-314.
15.
Holman Jones, S. ( 2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N. K. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 763-792). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
16.
hooks, b. ( 1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.
17.
Iyer, V. ( 2004). Exploding the narrative in jazz improvisation. In R. O’Meally, B. H. Edwards, & F. J. Griffin (Eds.), Uptown conversation: The new jazz studies (pp. 393-403). New York: Columbia University Press.
18.
Lorde, A. ( 1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press.
19.
Madison, S. ( 2005). Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and performance . New York: SAGE.
20.
Marsalis, W., & Vigeland, C. ( 2001). Jazz in the bittersweet blues of life. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo.
21.
Marsalis, W., (with Hinds, S.S.). (2005). To a young jazz musician: Letters from the road . New York: Random House.
22.
Marsalis, W., (with Ward, G.C.). (2008). Moving to higher ground: How jazz can change your life. New York: Random House.
23.
Palazzolo, L.A.G. ( 2003). Horn man: The Polish-American musician in twentieth-century . Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
24.
Papagaroufali, E. ( 2008). Carnal Hermeneutics: From "concepts" and "circles" to "dispositions" and "suspense". In N. Panourgia & G. Marcus (Eds.), Ethnographic moralia: Experiments in interpretive anthropology. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 113-125.
25.
Pelias, R. ( 2004). A Methodology of the Heart: Evoking Academic and Daily Life. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira .
26.
Pollock, D. ( 1998). Performing writing. In P. Phelan & J. Lane (Eds.), The ends of performance (pp. 73-103). New York: New York University Press.
27.
Ratcliff, B. ( 2001, January 7). Fixing, for now, the image of jazz. The New York Times, p. 32.
28.
Spry, T. ( 1997). Skins: A daughter’s (re)construction of cancer . Text and Performance Quarterly, 17, 361-365.
29.
Spry, T. ( 2006). A performative-I copresence: Embodying the ethnographic turn in performance and the performative turn in ethnography. Text and Performance Quarterly, 26, 4, 339-346.
30.
Spry, T. ( 2008). Systems of silence: Word/less fragments of race in autoethnography . International Review of Qualitative Research, 1(1), 75-80.
31.
Spry, T. ( 2009). Bodies of/as evidence in autoethnography. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1, 425-445.
32.
Strine, M.S. ( 1998). Mapping the "cultural turn" in performance studies. In S. Dailey (Ed.), The future of performance studies: Visions and revisions (pp. 3-9). Annandale, VA: NCA.
33.
Venenciano, J.D. ( 2004). Louis Armstrong, Brico lage, and the aesthetics of swing . In R. O’Meally, B. H. Edwards, & F. J. Griffin, (Eds.), Uptown conversation: The new jazz studies . New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 97-114.
34.
Willis, V. ( 2008). Be-in-tween the spa[]ces: The location of women and subversion in jazz. Journal of American Culture, 31, 293-301.
