Oral Traditions in Performance

When I arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986 to teach Performance Studies in the Department of Communication Studies, I found I was to teach a relatively new course on “Oral Traditions.” The course I inherited was constructed as a Western history of oral performance, beginning with the classical rhapsode, moving through medieval minstrelsy, turn-of-the-century elocutionary traditions, rising to the American progressivist Chatauqua circuit and modern studies of literature in performance. In this sense, the course served both as an introduction to types and practices of “high” orality and as a history of one current in the field, establishing what until relatively recently had been “Oral Interpretation” as a classical correlate of drama and rhetoric. In the mid-eighties (some will say earlier) the field exploded, in part leading, in part following the “performative turn” across disciplines. As the humanities and social sciences absorbed the deconstruction of the “text,” and the revered object of literary study began to dissolve into processes of production and reception, Interpretation became Performance Studies, signaling above all the expansion of “performance” to include heretofore “low” forms of oral performance (performance in everyday life, personal and life narrative performance, rites of conservation and resistance) as well as large-scale processes of social change and identity formation. The literary met the anthropological; the text collapsed into context—and a fury of debates over the nature, status, and value of performance ensued. My course changed. I clung to the chronological model for a while, expanding it to include non-Western traditions. But over the years, I have felt more and more compelled to engage students in a performative