Critical Review - Deborah Wong, "Moving"

In "Moving," Deborah Wong examines some of the problems of performative ethnography in an interesting way; she alternates between outlining the problems in theory and attempting to write about taiko while explicitly avoiding the problems. Two characteristics of the performative ethnography she calls for:

"...it evokes the choreographies and modalities of performance in order to break down the subject/object binary and to deliberately draw on the generative power of performance." (79)

"It shows rather than tells. It is specific and particular." (79)

With regard to the first point, I agree that writing that draws on the "generative power of performance" would be effective. I don't, however, that Wong provides guidelines for (or examples of) doing so. Instead, in the section where she describes a performance, having claimed she would rely on relating the "specific events" (85), she says things like "It was incredibly loud and driven by a youthful energy that was infectious...[toward the end of the jam] the sudden sense of conjoined, coordinated playing was powerful in an entirely different and satisfying way." (86) Statements like those don't exactly evoke the power of performance. They simply assert that a particular performance was moving - telling, not showing.

Earlier, describing her first exposure to taiko: "I had a powerful, unequivocally visceral response to it. I responded as an Asian American watching other Asian Americans, and I am hard put to convey how commanding an experience it was" (79). Granted, she does try, but I don't find her description particularly moving. I don't mean to say that Wong is a vague writer - overall I thought her descriptions of the taiko jams gave a good picture of what was happening - I just don't know whether the type of powerful personal response she hopes to impart on the reader can be transmitted in this context.

Wong writes that "the inevitability of multiple subjectivities on the part of both ethnographer and interlocutor is now usually understood, and the task of representing the overlap is thus difficult and necessary" (83). But what is it exactly to do so? Even when the ethnographer attempts to note all these subjectivities, we're still accepting her subjective assessment of them.

Honestly, I just don't understand what "writing in an awareness of of such mobility [on the part of the ethnographer and her interlocutors] creates vital performative possibility" (83) means, so I feel like I'm missing a significant part of what Wong wants to achieve.