“Grappling to Think Clearly”: Vernacular Theorizing in Robbie McCauley’s Sugar

Abstract

This article examines Robbie McCauley’s Sugar, focusing on how this solo performance work opens up discursive spaces for a range of voices and perspectives. I argue that the ideas expressed in Sugar work as a type of vernacular theorizing, questioning the means by which certain perspectives and ways of knowing are valued over others. In the conclusion, I suggest how Sugar could serve as a model for health professionals involved in the fight again diabetes, as it opens up opportunities for dialogue and makes visible the processual nature of people’s attempts to make sense of the disease.

Endnotes

• ¹ I am focusing my discussion here particularly on personal illness narratives shaped intentionally for public audiences, thereby shifting attention away from the alternate, sometimes therapeutic, functions illness narratives can serve for their tellers (Frank 1995). Lars-Christer Hydén, for example, highlights five different ways this genre is used, including “1. to transform illness events and construct a world of illness; 2. to reconstruct one’s life history in the event of a chronic illness; 3. to explain and understand the illness; 4. as a form of strategic interaction in order to assert or project one’s identity; and lastly, 5. to transform illness from an individual into a collective phenomenon” (1997, 55). See also Bury 2001, Couser 1997, Mattingly and Garro 2000, and Raoul et al. 2006.

• ² As I describe the story circles and performances in this paper, I situate myself primarily in the role of participant-observer. For a more reflexive discussion of my role in one of McCauley’s story circles, see Bock 2012.

• ³ The research for this article has been approved by The Ohio State University Institutional Review Board (Protocol Number 2007B0132). Individuals quoted in this article have given their informed consent.

• ⁴ Hill and Hatch explain how McCauley’s major works can be divided into four genres: site-specific pieces involving community collaborations, collaborations with thought music, sedition ensemble pieces, and the family series (2003, 540). My Father and the Wars, Indian Blood, and Sally’s Rape fall into this last genre. For more bio-bibliographical information, see Peterson and Bennett 1997.

• ⁵ Raewyn Whyte makes a similar observation: “Taking autobiographical material as its starting point, as does much activist art, the narrative is made up of interwoven fragments, personal anecdotes, incidents and aspects of African American history, organized by montage and collage structures” (1993, 288). See also Garoian 1999.

• ⁶ See Mintz 1985 for an in-depth historical study of sugar as a global commodity.

• ⁷ Tessa Carr makes a similar point in her analysis of Sugar, calling attention to “the vast repertoire of stories and associations that reside within [McCauley’s] memory, and the fluctuating chronology of how an insidious everyday trauma becomes cobbled together in a fragmented sense-making process” (2007, 55).

• ⁸ According to Whyte, “This is at once a body saturated with memories of sensual experience, a text written by racism and bounded by family, history, and gender” (1993, 277). This analysis of McCauley’s engagement with her body resonates with Elizabeth Alexander’s analysis of Audre Lorde’s Zami and The Cancer Journals when she writes “In Lorde’s work, life experience ever marks and takes shape as visible body memory, as a collage whose assembled scraps always allude to their part and beyond to a collective race memory…” (Alexander 2002, 221).

• ⁹ For a discussion of how black bodies are marked in America by others, see Henderson 2002.

  ¹⁰ This experience is similar to that described by Zora Neale Hurston in “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” (1992).

• ¹¹ For a fuller discussion on the role of embodiment in performances of Sugar, see Carr 2007, 64–70.

• ¹² This idea overlaps with Audre Lorde’s discussion in The Cancer Journals regarding the importance of transforming “silence into language and action” (1980, 20).

• ¹³ See Turner 1993, Gamble 1997, and Fine and Turner 2001 for discussions about the mistrust of health experts among African Americans.

• ¹⁴ In the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, doctors affiliated with the Public Health Service (the precursor to the Centers for Disease Control) deliberately left syphilitic African American men untreated in order to track the progress of the disease.

• ¹⁵ Patricia Collins also discusses the importance of “talking things out,” identifying “The use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims” (1990, 212) as one key dimension of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. See Ryan 2004 for an application of Collins’ ideas to breast cancer awareness efforts directed toward African American women.

• ¹⁶ Dorothy Noyes makes a similar point when she writes:

  Science reduces reality in an effort to understand it but it also properly lays itself open to an ongoing process of collective correction and revision. While science as converted into institutional practice has often not lived up to its own ideals, its authority legitimating various kinds of oppression, we can nonetheless recognize that science’s own ideology gives us the tools to make this critique and that there is still a qualitative difference in openness to revision between, let’s say, evolutionary theory and intelligent design. (2008, 40)

• ¹⁷ I draw here upon Elliot Mishler’s distinction between the “voice of the lifeworld” and the “voice of medicine” in his study of medical interviews. He describes the “voice of the lifeworld” as “the patient’s contextually grounded experiences of events and problems in her life. These are reports and descriptions of the world of everyday life expressed from the perspective of a natural attitude” (1984, 104).