Remembering Dwight Conquergood

The following text is drawn from the plenary session, Remembering Dwight Conquergood, at the 11th Annual Performance Studies international conference, Brown University, April 2, 2005. The speakers at this session were Jon McKenzie, Ken Prestininzi, Shannon Jackson, Richard Schechner, Della Pollock, Tracy C. Davis and Patrick Anderson. Ken Prestininzi and Richard Schechner's contributions were not scripted.

Opening Remarks

Jon McKenzie

On behalf of the PSi Board and the organizers of this conference, I welcome you to this session, "Remembering Dwight Conquergood." We gather today to honor the life and work of Dwight Conquergood, who passed away last November after a long bout of cancer.

As many of you know, Dwight was a respected ethnographer, activist, and filmmaker, who worked with the Hmong community and street gangs of Chicago, as well as with refugees in Thailand and the Gaza Strip. Dwight was also a dedicated teacher, mentor, and academic administrator. He was Associate Professor and past-Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, as well as Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts. Dwight was very committed to the field of performance studies, which for him meant both the field of fieldwork and the academic field of performance research.

He was also committed to PSi-and indeed was involved with it even before this organization was officially started in 1997. In preparing for today's session, I realized that virtually all of my memories of Dwight involved PSi conferences-official or unofficial.

In 1995, at the Future of the Field conference, now retrospectively called "PSi 1," Dwight gave the opening keynote lecture, in which he presented his perspective on the field at large and on the distinctive approaches of the Northwestern program.

Even earlier, in 1990, at a conference which NYU graduate students organized and which happened to be called "PSI," Dwight spoke and presented his documentary film The Heart Half Broken. I remember this well, as I was the grad student who handled Dwight's booking and travel arrangements.

Finally, in 2002, at an official PSi conference, I stepped into an elevator with Dwight. I remember being struck by how good he looked: beautiful man, beautiful suit. And I remember that he did something incredible: he thanked me for my book. I later thought: "He thanked me? I should have thanked him." And I should have. That was the last time I ever saw Dwight.

At the time of his passing, Dwight was Vice-President of PSi. The PSi Board, headed by Adrian Heathfield, and the conference organizers, John Emigh and Ken Prestininzi, all felt strongly that we wanted to honor Dwight's life and work. We have done so in three ways.

First, we have been showing Dwight's award-winning documentary The Heart Broken in Half, about Chicago street gangs.

Second, the PSi Board has established the Dwight Conquergood Award, to be given to an artist, activist, or academic working on or with disenfranchised communities.

And third, we have organized this plenary session, "Remembering Dwight Conquergood," inviting friends, colleagues, and students to share their thoughts and memories of Dwight.

Caravans Continued: in memory of Dwight Conquergood

Shannon Jackson

At the premature January memorial of Dwight Conquergood-teacher, scholar, activist, performer, foster parent, foster grandparent, godfather, neighbor, and professor of performance studies at Northwestern University-former students and colleagues from around the world gathered to pay tribute. The composition of that gathering was eclectic. It drew academics of all varieties, representing departments of English, Communication Studies, Theatre, Folklore, Musicology, Anthropology, Rhetoric, Gender Studies, and Visual Art to name just a few of those whose professional and personal lives had been transformed by working with Conquergood. It also drew theatre directors and actors, community organizers and legal activists. And it drew members of both Dwight's family of origin-his biological siblings-and his adopted Hmong family-his foster son, his foster son's former wife, their extended family, and Dwight's foster grandson and godson, Christopher. The memorial's performance was also eclectic, including Gospel singing, poetry recitation, and oratical tributes that ranged from the staid to the incantatory. It included performances of Zora Neale Hurston, theatrical performances about gang violence, performances of an African funereal lament, and performances of personal memories of Conquergood's exchanges of food, ideas, inspiration, and gossip.

Coming to terms with the disciplinary legacies of what is sometimes erroneously called the "Northwestern" strain of Performance Studies in the United States is, to some degree, about contending with the heterogeneity of that memorial gathering. The gathering itself indexed a wider network of scholars and practitioners engaged culturally and sometimes aesthetically in the communicative dimension of performance. To be so engaged is to take particular interest in performance's oral, embodied, and narrative dimensions, especially as those conceptual concerns have been developed and refracted through the changing fields of the interdisciplinary humanities and communication studies over the course of the 20th century. What seemed premature about Dwight Conquergood's memorial, however, was that, if there was a single person who was celebrated or blamed for propelling the transformation from speech to performance studies, Dwight Conquergood was it. Thus, to bear witness to his passing at the disciplinary level was to wonder whether our field could possibly be ready to let go of a person, figure, and symbol who so epitomized a disciplinary future. It was to worry, and for many of us to resist, the dumb temporality that would allow his death to push progressive hope into the recent past.

As it happens, of course, most are resisting that push by remembering the political, intellectual, international, interdisciplinary and aesthetic combinations that Dwight Conquergood pursued in his scholarship and in his classroom. I want to briefly touch on a few themes that seem to me to recur again and again in Dwight's work: 1) the transformational commitment to the institution of performance studies 2) the advancement of complex interactions between so-called theory and so-called practice 3) intense analytic and political support for what the provosts and the politicians call under-represented populations 4) the fusion of the tools of cultural critique with those of political economy. At the end, I want to reflect more broadly upon the significance of his work ethic, particularly as it manifested itself in a daily political practice of human attachment.

Instituting performance studies: Members of other fields do not always have to do the intense institutional work that those of us in performance studies have to do in order to create a place for our work and our students. Dwight's commitment to that act was visible in almost every essay he wrote or every keynote he gave. At all times, one had the feeling that he was never only speaking for himself and his own personal scholarly preoccupations but constantly reaching for a meta-language within which all of us could place our efforts and with which we could gauge our contributions. Dwight's commitment to that act also took place in the less visible domains of institution-building, however; in memos written, in curricula defined, in meetings planned, and agendas set, he never felt himself to be above the mundane but necessary work of disciplinary formation that allows everyone else to be creative. To commit institutionally to the discipline of performance studies while coming from the field of speech-or the even more stodgily named field of oral interpretation-meant also having to be present, centered, and rhetorically expedient at some difficult moments of growth and transformation. Dwight was there at Northwestern when Hurston was added to Joyce in the class on performance of literature. He was there when the oral narratives of Hmong refugees or Korean elders entered the class on the performance of non-fiction. And he was also there to argue for a continuity between these curricular shifts and the larger preoccupations for which speech and oral performance stood at Northwestern and at other universities across the country. The exploration of the intersection between narrative and vocal embodiment would persist even if the regions, styles, and politics of those narratives and voices shifted with each generation.

Theory and Practice: That kind of continuity manifested itself also in Dwight's commitment to the creation of curricular, artistic, political, and scholarly spheres that unsettled assumed oppositions between theory and practice. All of those insistent discussions of "theory and practice" received a different kind of attention in the forums he created: rigorous without being labored, critical without being defensive, expanding the domain of performance practice beyond the traditionally aesthetic while simultaneously using the mode of performance-making that he learned in the stodgier halls of oral interpretation to do so. In my view, the fact that this strain of PS began with a tradition of "making a piece" rather than "casting a show" differs from the theatrical tradition that lies behind the formation of other strains of PS, making it oddly a more heterogeneously open tradition to break with-and I mean "with"-now. Certainly, I learned as much about making performance in my five years of graduate school as I had in fifteen years of community, high school, college, and professional theatre. To a variety of sites-medical theatres, immigrant parades, Ghanaian story-telling, queer autobiography, and so many more-the interest in the propulsion of embodied narrative animated our practice. The interest in cultivating a simultaneously centered and indexical mode as a performer, the interest in performances that would allow the voice of another to be heard but never claimed-that pursuit of "speaking with" animated what we did on our feet as often as it animated what we did in print.

Poetics and Politics of the Disenfranchised: To the pursuit of embodied narrative, Dwight incorporated in the field of performance studies a political imagination about whose narratives were heard, under what conditions, and through what vehicles. It is no secret that Dwight strongly identified with the strain of social science and humanistic thought that did its "history from below." He focused on the individuals and groups, or more often liminally undefined individuals and groups, whose marginal status on the peripheries of class, race, or national privilege made them both the most important persons one could work on behalf of as well as provide the most illuminating angle from which to do the most complex analysis of the asymmetrical workings of societies and nations. To work with marginal, liminal, under-represented, often undocumented populations was to politicize one's scholarship, but it was also to cultivate humility, deferentiality, and other-directedness. He worried about the danger of cross-cultural theft as much as he argued for the importance of cross-cultural knowledge. He was thus as adamant about guarding against scholarly appropriation as he was adamant about guarding against scholarly cynicism. The impossibility of a fully symmetrical cross-cultural exchange was never an excuse to stop trying.

Cultural and Political economic analysis: Dwight's commitment to the incorporation of cultural analysis and political economy is probably one of the most rare elements of his profile in performance studies. In conducting such analyses of immigration or urban space, he called the bluff of PS's interdisciplinary calls by incorporating methods from quantitative social sciences. As he rounded up statistics on immigration patterns, on household incomes, on attrition rates in public housing, you could almost feel all the experimental humanities scholars cringing. ("We didn't mean this kind of interdisciplinarity!") In a field that liked to measure agency through embodied gesture and that wanted to keep its anthropology "cultural" Dwight's integration of political economic analysis was path-breaking and inspiring. If this former medievalist turned ethnographer could use numbers-and use numbers without allowing them to flatten those all-important "embodied gestures" - then we could do it, too.

At the same time as Dwight sought to institutionalize performance studies, to find various ways of integrating theory and practice, to focus politically and intellectually on the concerns of subordinants, and to draw from the widest range of analytic tools to do it all, he required of himself and his students a hyper-rigorous work ethic. As he constantly told us, he was and would always be "a Calvanist." Doing interdisciplinary work meant the necessity of doing more work, not an excuse for doing less. Doing fieldwork or archival work meant reckoning, unconditionally, with the alteration in one's own habitus as a scholar, to undo ingrained bodily habits in order to commit to a sustained research agenda. It meant sitting all day at a site, waiting for someone to talk to you; it meant slogging through dusty bins in library basements. It did not mean using one example found in one conversation as synecdoche for an entire culture. The same went for other kinds of methodological or disciplinary innovation in performance studies. To experiment in the domain of performative writing meant intensive labor with the arrangement of words and arguments; it did not mean turning in the "meditation," the "notes toward," or-that much abused term-the "riff" to disguise the fact that you had not thought hard or thoroughly about what you purported to be talking about. So this is also to say that to be his student or his colleague was not without its frictions, its tensions, and its occasional manipulations. He did not allow extensions in his courses and said so in the syllabus. To any student who asked, he would respond-"Oh, an extension that I would give to you but not give to the other students. Can you tell me please how you think I could do that?"-always with a wide-eyed solicitation that was never all that far from reproachful.

To those who did not have Dwight as a teacher, did not know him as a colleague, are less familiar with his wonderful essays and introductions, and now wonder where to find the singly-authored book that we in the academy so fetishize, I need to say that it is painful to me that the singly-authored book did not appear before his death. But I need also to say that it did not precisely, I think, because of the rigor he required of himself and, most importantly, of the time he spent cultivating rigor in so many people other than himself. To amplify on that sense of rigor requires me to incorporate not only his tireless commitments as a teacher but also his tireless commitments as an activist. For while so many of us claim political commitments in our scholarship, there is quite frankly no scholar that I can think of who so completely gave himself and his rhetorical skills over to the cause of others, whether to Latin King members, to Hmong refugees, or to death row inmates. In courtrooms, in family gatherings, in civic meetings, in national protests, Dwight served as cultural translator, therapist, booster, and defensive lawyer on occasion after occasion. And he missed writing deadlines to do it. Thus, coming to terms with the particular legacies of Dwight Conquergood is also to return to that memorial gathering that I described and to remember the variety of non-academic community activists and family members that constituted his network of extended kin. To me, this kinship network-and I mean to call it a kinship network - is not simply a warm fuzzy sign that Dwight was well-loved but also the result of a self-conscious personal politics. To become a foster parent, cousin, uncle or grandparent (legally or unofficially) with the many friends he made, was part and parcel of what it meant for him to live in the world as a progressive activist. It became increasingly clear to me that Dwight's extension of unconditional love and attachment beyond the biological nuclear family and the extension of Dwight's unconditional political commitments beyond the university actually derived from the same impulse. The radicality of that coincidence, the rarity of that coincidence, and the necessity of that coincidence have become even clearer to me in the last few years. I have realized-oddly, fantastically-that of all the teachers I have ever had, as an undergraduate or graduate student, that Dwight was the only one who ever talked to me about what it meant to raise a child, something that happened in the same breath as a discussion of immigrant politics, social welfare bureaucracies, or juvenile justice. He was in fact the only teacher who I ever saw carrying a child; I can still see him racing across a Chicago street, chatting energetically and compassionately with a parka-ed Christopher as his bundle. It is odd to me how odd that image seemed at the time. It is unbelievable, telling, and inspiring to think that my male, queer, activist, foster-parent dissertation advisor is my role model for academic care-giving. If you are (like many at a panel this morning) looking for "a non-reproductive model of human attachment that exceeds biological ties," here you have it.

In recalling his lectures on immigration politics, a story from his adopted family always emerged. In his courses on cultural performance, in his scholarship on border politics, in his office hours where he'd describe the events of the night before when he helped his neighbor bail her son out of jail, Dwight's critical insights derived from lessons learned in his practices of extended kin-building. So many lectures on the politics of urban space or immigrant agency would begin the same way, with similar slides: "This is Big Red, the Chicago housing project where it has been my privilege to live." During such lectures, insights into the politics of his life as a neighbor in the public housing project would come out on the side-how he babysat children, lent money, organized meals, and accompanied, unconditionally, his neighbors to the precincts and courthouses that intervened all too often their daily lives. Indeed, his participatory fieldwork and his practices of kinship were quite often one in the same. In this place, in Dwight's place, a queer politics of attachment and kinship coalesced with a transcultural ethic of political engagement; the fusion was unheralded in his scholarship, but it was evidenced in every aspect of his daily life. It is for these reasons that I find it important to say here, to this group gathered here, that the absence of that singly-authored book is evidence, not of his lack of hard work, but of its abundance. He worked harder, in more varied ways, on more varied fronts, for more hours of the day than any scholar/teacher/activist/parent/neighbor/artist I know. And it will be the true test of performance studies if, as much as we remember Dwight's commitment to print, we decide to remember Dwight's commitment to action, to embodied practice, to the transformative effects of undocumented acts, and to the affective ties that bind human beings in varied ways, on varied fronts, at all hours of the day.

Remembering Dwight

Della Pollock

I recently discovered an old email from Dwight that made me wish I'd never indulged in erasing anything. Responding to concern about what was at the time my own impending eye surgery, Dwight briefly recounted his own and what he considered one of the most serendipitous turns in his life. "Eyes are very delicate and sensitive organs," he consoled:
"emotionally, psychologically, as well as physiologically. I experienced the detached retina in my left eye with the two unsuccessful surgeries in April 1981 as a profoundly transformative event. It was out of that despair, and terror-I was haunted by fears that I would lose the other eye because to this day they have not given me a medical explanation for a spontaneously detached retina, the statistical incidence is one in 500,000-that I sought out and began working with Lao refugees that June, when my bandages came off. It worked out. What I thought would be a summer of volunteer work to pull me out of the darkness turned out to be life-changing."

It was soon after his retinal surgery in the early 80s that Dwight fell more and more surely into the robust, bardic style that so fascinated him and for which he became so duly famous. Let me insist that it is far from a diminishment, to the contrary: an elaboration of the extraordinary nobility of his work and spirit to repeat what he would say to deflect praise for the full, sensuous rhythms on which he would carry his listeners and with which their/our memories would then be impressed. Explaining why he didn't read lectures or barely refer to notes: "oh", he'd say, hiking up his shoulders and stage whispering a half-secret:"well you know I can't seeeee."

During another summer, ten years later, Dwight would, as he said,"painstakingly read through two dissertations . . . with the largest magnifying glass purchaseable held inches between the paper and my nose," trying to complete what he could while he put off and put off cataract surgery. "Eyes are scary," he wrote, "just ask Gloucester." Dwight's bodily life performed him even as he performed it, performing himself into vitality time and again, against every doctor's expectations, in the end: in order to have one more summer with his godson, Christopher, who gave him an excuse for one last, triumphant roadtrip and with whom he continued to play and wrestle, laughing at his own trickster wit in using his illness to get this large 13-year old boy to ease up: "I'm a cancer patient!" he'd wickedly cry, mimicking his mock-performance of longsuffering despair, "I'm terminally ill!"

Serendipity, he called it: the bizarre coincidences that made fieldwork in Thailand or on the Gaza strip or in the community hospital where he received chemo, relentlessly performed an informal ethnography of medicine in urban culture, tutored the head nurse's son, and spiritedly debated politics of the diaspora with his Indian doctor so interesting. It was as if I'd never heard the word before Dwight spoke it. Seren-dip-ity he said, yes uh huh, nodding what he took to be its peculiar mysteries and pleasures into our bodies. It was serendipitous that, on the eve of his arrival, regulations barring researchers from overnight stays in the Thai refugee camp, Ban Vanai, had just been installed. This meant he would have to hide out with the internal exiles, in the leper huts, where the camp police wouldn't bother to check. It was serendipitous that he became so ill in the camp that he could receive the ministrations of the local shaman and community. In ill health or in the practice of health theatre, Dwight hailed radical contingency, making me think that remembering Dwight, that performing him now-and now-and now--must be mired in it. It must be the ongoing work of refusing to make monumental sense of his life and work in the very spirit of his vigorous, critical challenge to ocular-text-centrism. It must be a matter of greeting grief in the serendipity of each bodily grievance, each excursion into the field or dialogue, each act of teaching word by powerful word-and seeing where this flammable gathering up of embodiedness-as-embeddness takes us this time.

And today, for me, that means remembering how much Dwight loved performance. He loved it urgently, stubbornly, anxiously, exuberantly. He couldn't get or do enough of it-whether in the form of gossip or advocate testimony or mischievous play or the work of the Albany Park youth theatre project with which he worked so closely in the last few years and in which he found, he said, what theatre can and should do. He loved a good story and, to the extent that he had to be at the center of his own tales, he could no more escape his own scathing wit and gentle savvy than anyone else. Indeed, he always made himself the most curious figure, the one most worth laughing with, gasping with ("can you believe . . .?" he'd say, wide-eyed now and reaching out, tracing the direct line of contact holding two bodies in narrative suspense) and finally then rising with on the gathering, expanding momentum of his love and gratitude. In hospice rounds of great laughter were framed by "I have provided for Christopher's education" and "I am sooo grateful." These became his refrain, his formula and theme. I have lived in the South now for almost 20 years. But it was from Dwight that I learned the pleasure and power of elongated vowels.

And it is from him that I am learning the politics of grief, that in grief there is a perversely serendipitous chance to rearticulate the compound fractures of death with the performance of social mortalities-with doing dying in our everyday lives. Dwight rarely let on about the number of deaths he attended, grieved, mourned, and protested. The number of times his own deep grievances serendipitously turned, for instance, towards a charge on "lethal theatre." A chance. A serendipitous moment in which to remember and re-remember the alchemy of terrifying contingencies Dwight remembered for us, with us, time and again, in rough and radiant concert with the transformations of his own bodily life.

Tracy C. Davis

I will address aspects of Dwight that probably would not have been evident to members of PSi, national or international colleagues, or even his students. My remarks are on the theme of colleagueship, for this is the context in which I came to know Dwight. When I arrived at Northwestern in 1991, Dwight had already been instrumental in defining the pragmatic engagements of the Department of Performance Studies; he continued to regard this as a work in progress, seeking the best ways to encapsulate what were evolving as schismatic methodologies into a unified outlook of research through performance and performance through research. He was like a departmental shop steward who endeavored to guarantee collective bargaining.

From what I could see, Dwight regarded university service as an ethnographic site: he was involved with committees on sexual harassment, student diversity, and the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at formative moments in their emergence. He genuinely enjoyed university politics, and relished the minutiae of jostling for positions: not on his own behalf, as his self-styled title of "campaign manager" for a colleague's deanship attests, but purely on behalf of The Good Fight. He was an indefatigable hallway lobbyist, and mixed a great thirst for gossip and nose for scandal with fiercely progressive convictions. One of his favorite phrases, which I think he meant admiringly, though sometimes his admiration was barely distinguishable from indignant awe, was "take no prisoners." I came to regard this as a version of his own tenacity: if he took on a task, it would be done no matter what the personal cost, and we'd never see the reckoning.

While championing his department's transition to ethnographically-based work, Dwight held to the department's legacy in the oral interpretation of prose and in its even earlier mandate for rhetorical training. Dwight deliberately embodied this history every time he introduced a public speaker. He would meticulously compose a recitation of their laurels, but never take notes up to the podium, implicitly asserting that the person he introduced was so important that he knew their c.v. off by heart. With consummate concentration and impassioned oratory, every fiber of his being strained to emphasize the significance of the person from whom we were about to hear. Each time someone else made an introduction, unless they matched this performative style, they would fail to meet Dwight's standard, and so the speakers who followed them would diminish in significance, their words and thoughts dwindling into the intellectually commonplace. To be introduced by Dwight was a privilege; to see this done, was a spectatorial obligation to engage.

Our colleagueship developed over pots of tea, occasional dinners, but most importantly in the chance encounter at the threshold to one another's offices, usually as the afternoon gave way to evening, and the Theatre Interpretation Centre temporarily quietened down. As colleagues scattered away home or to a hurried meal before rehearsals, gossip could be safely carried on without fear of undetected listeners. In these sessions, Dwight shared his enthusiasm for projects - his work with the Latin Kings, at Cook County Jail, with the Albany Park Theatre Project, and his involvement in campaigns against the death penalty - and was unfailingly and tangibly supportive of my own explorations, as we talked about disciplinary transgressiveness and the latest book that had raised our hackles. He shared his passions (and reservations) about students' work, always suggesting in the most judicious way possible how to conspire on their behalf. He charmed the elderly ladies who dispense doctoral fellowships from the Northwestern Alumnae Fund, nudging them like a relentlessly vigilant border collie toward the applications from women whose circumstances might, in less enlightened hands, exclude them from higher education. In unsung work like this, in back offices as well as in front parlours, he remade affirmative action into a subtle instrument and even elderly 'ladies' into champions of the unconventional, innovative, and intellectually avant-garde. If someone showed skill in wielding a weapon of the weak, he'd do everything in his power to help them put that weapon into production and keep it sharp.

Dwight took significant leadership roles on many public issues, but he also revelled in the role of sideline coach to colleagues he regarded as promising allies. He would listen for hours to our concerns about this or that - I hesitate to admit what trivia this sometimes entailed - showing the same body posture he exhibited to really worthy topics. He didn't seem to believe in giving advice, but he was an Olympic-class listener: back straight, torso tipped slightly forward, head nodding, nodding more vigorously and affirmatively if you were on the right track, then the whole pose torquing slightly and the hand coming up in an intervention - posited as a theoretical bon mot - if you were so wildly off course he simply couldn't let you go on.

Despite thirteen years of colleagueship in which we discussed the unfolding milestones of our working lives and the discoveries of our students, Dwight remained a deeply mysterious figure. A sphinx. He knew so well how to be an ethnographer and how to not become, in turn, the subject of others' knowledge. Venturing into the personal was usually a one-way street, so when he consulted me about the logistics of a making a car trip to Thunder Bay, taking his mother back for the first time to the place where she gave birth to him, these discussions became a sacred trust, the map a mandala of anxieties, hoped-for reclamation, the liberation of the road, the coming back to a point of origin. Having survived his first winter in Canada was a matter of honor and pride to him, a point of symbolic embodied connection. I recognize in retrospect that this was how he shared of himself.

Dwight learned of his illness in a sudden, horrific, and debilitating manner early in the fall of 2002. He took his godson Christopher to O'Hare following their summer holidays together, then drove himself to the emergency room at Swedish Covenant Hospital, thinking he was stricken with the West Nile virus. Instead, he had double pneumonia that hid a treacherous underlying cause. The lungs and the bowels, as any medical practitioner of Eastern or Western traditions will tell you, are inextricably linked. I had recently undergone a string of medical emergencies, and we both emerged from these hospitalizations needing to cope with the aftermath of the same surgical procedure, though undertaken for significantly different reasons. For once, and perhaps only this once, I genuinely had more experience with something than Dwight, having a few months head start at coping with my third colon surgery in as many months while he reeled from just one. Never a truer bond was forged than in our ensuing discussions of what Bourdieu and de Certeau would have made of our mutual predicament. But, as the occasion for our gathering today attests, his experience soon eclipsed mine. As chemotherapy took a toll on his energy, he let go of university politics, departmental concerns, and the everyday trivia of institutionalized academia, prioritizing his remaining dissertation students. As my strength returned, Dwight's fate became more settled.

My first impulse is still to seek him out to talk through institutional and intellectual muddles, to plot and scheme, to moot strategy, to catch up on 'the latest'. The chasm that I perceive where he should still be is testament to his colleagueship, to his solidarity.

Patrick Anderson

I first met Dwight Conquergood in his Performance and Culture course at Northwestern. It is not enough to say that Dwight was an exceedingly popular instructor, although that is certainly true; he had a mythos about him that appealed to students from all departments in the arts, humanities, and sciences, and that quickly became an ethos when you entered his classroom. This is all to say that Dwight was known to be one of the most engaged teachers on campus, someone whose pedagogy was deeply conscientious of the conditions of people's lives. In becoming his student, you were exposed to a vast terrain of art production and cultural scholarship that is otherwise under-represented on university campuses, but you were also shown how caring about these visual and literary texts could become a radical form of caring for the world. I remember the first time I read Renato Rosaldo's Culture and Truth, and the deft, careful way in which Dwight both honored the political intimacy of Rosaldo's writing, and demonstrated how critique can be so much more than just an intellectual enterprise whose central goals are to find the holes in an argument, to rend someone's writing limb from limb, and to proclaim one's own mastery of theoretical language. Dwight taught us that cultural criticism can be a scholarly and politically conscious performance of love.

After spending four years as Dwight's student, I finished my time at Northwestern and left in 1996 for ethnographic research in Sri Lanka. In his own idiosyncratic way, Dwight went with me. He warned me about the difficulties of packing-and not in the way that my family did, as an urgent reminder to take creature comforts like Chapstick, Pringles, and Hair Gel, or to prepare little gifts like candy and ballpoint pens to win over local children. Dwight told me that I would find myself alone in Sri Lanka, often late at night, left unaccompanied to figure out just what I gotten myself into. He encouraged me to embrace this sense of alienation, to explore it not as a shortcoming in the place itself, or even in me, but as a symptom of inter-cultural encounter. I took Renato Rosaldo's book to assist with these midnight existential crises. I would read his first few chapters, which talk openly about the death of his wife while in the field, over and over again, returning especially to his opening epigraph, from Adrienne Rich: "When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing." I think Dwight must have begun every class with this as his mantra-not in an attempt to universalize a syllabus or, in some multiculturalist mania, to cover every possible form of difference produced in his classroom and in the world, but rather to see what academia so passionately wants to hide from us, to get a glimpse of the secret logic of amnesia that canonizes some texts while casting others aside, to embrace the capacity we all have to experience and share the affect of being-in-the-world.

In Sinhala-the language used by Sri Lanka's majority-there are three words for friend. The first is actually a set of kinship terms, common to many languages, which identify the people in your lives who may not be blood relatives, but who have become like brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles to you. The second word, yaluwa, is more or less equivalent to our word friend; it can describe a range of intimacies and is occasionally used euphemistically to describe a special someone. The third word, machong, is ancient. It describes a fisherman's assistant: the one who, when you go diving deep into the ocean to spear middle- and bottom-dwelling fish, will stay in the boat and hold the other end of the rope tied to your ankle, assuring that you do not drown. This word, machong, the one who holds my rope, is used much more sparingly, and carries the obvious significance of life and death. It is not a word you hear everyday on the streets of Kandy or Colombo, and when someone uses it with you, it's clear that something serious is taking place, something beyond the everyday, something that only briefly exposes itself in the failing structure of language. I told Dwight about this word early one morning in Sri Lanka and late one night in Chicago, across a buzzing trans-Pacific phone line that threatened, at any moment, to abandon us. He paused, and I think I could hear him smiling as, with characteristic generosity, he said, "The rope runs both ways-I'm holding yours, but you're holding mine, too."

Like many of us here, I never even considered the possibility of imagining a world without Dwight in it. His death is more than a personal tragedy. It is a reminder that people who take the compassion and the politics of teaching and research so seriously are few and far between; it is a reminder that our work extends so far beyond ourselves, whether we notice or like it or not; it is a reminder that we all still have a lot of work to do.

In my last conversation with Dwight, he lay in his hospice room, his physical pain kept at a minimum level. He knew that this was goodbye, and I could feel in his tone his awareness of how special and strange it is to be able to do that, to say goodbye before dying. Before our final words, we talked about the job market of all things, and he told me to keep an eye out for the craziness that can define the academic life. He told me that he'd be keeping watch too, that if some day I found myself sitting amongst people who seemed to be going insane before my very eyes, I should listen for his laughter from the corners of the room. He told me that if I thought I heard applause from somewhere when I was alone writing or working on a script, I should not worry about my own impending insanity, but know that he was there, looking over my shoulder, cheering me on. He told me that he'd still be holding my rope, even if I couldn't see him in the boat.

The work of holding ropes is serious, and Dwight taught us that it is political too. His work with Hmong immigrants living in Chicago, and with young people living at Big Red, required him to hold the ropes of those who have been cast aside by the machinery of American cultural production, and those who have been ignored or demonized by the intellectual imaginary that defines and delimits institutions of so-called higher learning. At the same time, Dwight knew how to dive deep. His legacy extends well beyond his office in Annie May Swift, well beyond the walls of this auditorium, well beyond the first and last pages he wrote, certainly well beyond any of our individual memories of him. His legacy reflects the best of what our little worlds of scholarship and art production can do.