Remembering Oral History Performance

Drawing on the work of scholars and practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Gloria Anzaldua, and Trinh Minh-ha, these essays advocate oral history and oral history-based performance as means to challenge and expand upon traditional ways of transmitting historical knowledge. The contributors' central concerns are performative aspects of oral history itself and the theatrical or classroom "re-performance" of oral history. The essays detail classroom and public pedagogies, community-based interventions, processes of developing interview-based performances, and the ethical and political implications of oral history as an embodied form of representation. The essays collected in this volume present the most current scholarship straddling the rich intersection between oral history and performance, and together suggest ways for scholars and performers to use oral history to challenge more traditional modes of knowledge.

Della Pollock is a professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in performance studies. She is author of Telling Bodies Performing Birth: Everyday Narratives of Childbirth and editor of Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance History. She is co-editor with Lawrence Grossberg of the journal, Cultural Studies.