E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea & Performance Ethnography
Saltzberg, Matt
2012 On Sweet Tea: A Yankee’s Response. Text and Performance Quarterly
32(3):259-268
Matt Saltzberg’s “On Sweet Tea: A Yankee’s Response” explores the impact and usefulness of performance ethnography by looking at E. Patrick Johnson’s performance of his “oral history archive,” Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Saltzberg 2012:260)). Through his performance, Johnson attempts to access something essential in the stories of the various narrators, thereby revealing a shared humanity and destabilizing the truth of discrete identity categories. Saltzberg opens his discussion of Johnson’s work by disclosing that he is a White, gay man from downstate New York. But this Whiteness, according to Saltzberg, is no more impenetrable than Johnson’s Blackness, that is: both identity positions are constituted via performance, which can be appropriated by bodies no matter their phenotypical characteristics. This argument is substantiated through reference to Johnson’s performance of Countess Vivian, Larry J., Chaz/Chastity, and others whose recounted experiences as gay Black men of the South reveal the possibility to connect to Others through storytelling. This possibility is especially relevant to Anthropology as the field seeks to understand the human condition through reflection on the self, the Other, and the relation between the two.
My interest in performance ethnography stems mostly from my concern with the constitution of identity, especially as it relates to what has been referred to as Blackness, and the relationship between Blackness and performance. Prior to reading Saltzberg’s work, I was not at all familiar with performance ethnography or Dwight Conquergood’s dialogic performance. But like Saltzberg, I’ve seen Johnson’s performance and, from it, have been moved to question the relationship between a researcher, their embodied position, and the stories they relay. One question that Johnson’s work inspires is of how a researcher, given their embodied position, can relate to the stories of another who may or may not be situated in a different cultural context, but who is always situated in a body that particularizes their experiences. Ethnographic performance, according to Saltzberg, provides the possibility, not of transcending race, gender, or sexuality, but of forcing a confrontation both with embodied stories that are marked by those features and with a researcher who must maneuver through those stories in their own marked body. These confrontations reveal how much performance matters in constructing our realities, but also how those matters to which we give meaning—skin color, body parts, sexual activity—may not be as fixed as we assume.
Through his engagement with Johnson’s work, Saltzberg concludes that his downstate-New-York Whiteness, his Yankeeness, exceeds the stereotypical image of the average American constructed by “early nineteenth-century American drama” (2012:267). Johnson’s work reveals that performance destabilizes this racial position so that there is no inherent connection between Saltzberg’s physical markers and constructions of Whiteness. Though this conclusion is sufficient, I am disappointed with Saltzberg’s lack of application of the ideas drawn from Johnson’s work to his own work. As a performer, director, and professor, Saltzberg’s phenotypical Whiteness remains relevant in his performances, just as Johnson’s body cannot be overlooked even as he embodies the stories of similarly situated gay, Black men of the South.
Saltzberg’s conclusion that no inherent tie exists to bind performances of Whiteness and physical markers of Whiteness seems to miss the question of Johnson’s work: What happens when two embodied experiences collide? That Saltzberg’s Whiteness is more than a stereotype, though arguably relevant, does nothing to actually come to terms with what his particularized, “Gay Man of the North” (Saltzberg 2012:259) Whiteness means, for example, when he introduces Johnson’s work to his Black female student who then cries “sweet and bitter” tears (Saltzberg 2012:267). What does it mean for him to relay that story—to hold such a “position of authority” (Saltzberg 2012:262)? Saltzberg’s answers to these questions would likely be interesting, and would have made a satisfying addition to an otherwise good introduction to performance ethnography.
Promo Video for E. Patrick Johnson’s "Sweet Tea :Black Gay Men of the South"
E. Patrick Johnson visits George Eagerson, a.k.a Countess Vivian
