ABSTRACT
Autoethnography merges biography, ethnography and history. It treats each writer as an universal singular, as an universal instance of a historical moment and its contingencies. Autoethnography merges the personal and the political. The implications of the theatrical, performance turn are complicated, tangled up in biography, politics and acts of resistance. Erving Goffman is all theatre, all pretense, illusion, masks, impression management, no historical moment. Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire’s theatre’s of the oppressed use performance, ethnography, theatre and dramatic theory to criticize neoliberal discourse, to inspire acts of activism. Boal’s theatre of the oppressed uses new terms, from simultaneous dramaturgy, to spectators as actors, to bring persons into performance spaces where acts of resistance can be imagined. There are many different ways of reflexively writing the self into and through the ethnographic text, isolating that space where memory, history, performance and meaning come together.
