Locating Community, Memory and Meaning-Making in the Performative Gap: An Experiment in Aesthetics, Autoethnography, and the Ethic of the Unfinished

Rebecca M. Kennerly, Georgia Southern UniversityFollow

Abstract

I perform here a complex triangulation of shifting centers of geography, intellect, and memory as I investigate the practice of marking sites of death on the road with a shrine. This essay introduces a close-to-the-bone layer of sound/experience that emerged while in-field and in memory, as I risk revealing what Pollock (2006) calls "going under," a process which "folds back on the researcher-subject, catching her in . . . processes of transformation" (pp.327-328). Following Bowman (2002), I become "lost in my own back-yard" (p.349), as I chase (listen for) the spectral voices of the dead. Accidentally on purpose, my work with roadside shrines turns me around, teaches me (you, us?) how (where, when) to listen, to hear the call of the living, to respond anew to the call home, even as I attempt to write myself elsewhere.

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Iowa Journal of Communication

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Kennerly, Rebecca M. (2009) "Locating Community, Memory and Meaning-Making in the Performative Gap: An Experiment in Aesthetics, Autoethnography, and the Ethic of the Unfinished," Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 41: No. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol41/iss1/4

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