B K Alexander
Biographic Data
| ID | 41992 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B K Alexander |
| GIVEN NAMES | B K |
| FAMILY NAME | Alexander |
| SIGNATURE | ALEXANDER B K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loyola Marymount University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7382-6696 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 81 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 178 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 81 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
“Still Hanging? A Revisitation of Ghosts From the Past and the (Re)Authorization of Human Dignity in Americanism ( or Motions of Discovery )”
In this project, the two authors further theorize on a collaborative spiriting-writing activity that pivots on the public story of a Black male body found “hung/hanging” near a public roadway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In three movements, the authors tease through politics of the happening in relation to a history of hanging Black bodies against the backdrop of the current race-based political climate in the United States, with wholesale commentary…
Writing From the Field
A portion of this piece was presented at the 2025 International Conference of Autoethnography (ICAE) in Bristol, England. The theme of the conference was “Breathing Spaces.” This piece was specifically on the invited spotlight panel, “Letters from our own Correspondents.” A format based on the long-running British Broadcasting System tradition (with podcasts) of field correspondents reporting from international locations on breaking news of publi…
“Building Impetus for Change”
In this short performative paper the author engages one of five points of entry that seek to “(playfully) play with possibilities inherent in [autoethnographic] writing for building an impetus for change , for mining the ‘gold’ of memory , for living deeply in the present moment , for constructing a hoped-for future , for emerging/recovering from the rubble .” Showing, as Christopher Poulus constructed the panel, ‘how our words may point us towar…
In Response to the Activist Affect of “Risky Business, Uncertain Futures . . .”
The respondent to the 2025 Autoethnography Special Interest Group (SIG) session at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), offers brief commentary on the potency of the panel. At the same time, he signals the reader to a more extended response/reaction to the panel published in the International Review of Qualitative Inquiry immediately after the performance panel. The author uses the constructs of “activist affect” and “activist ef…
“I Thought It Was Going to Be Simple, But It Wasn’t
The performative essay, constructed through a method of collaborative spirit-writing, teases through three textual encounters: Trump’s public statement that the 1960 Civil Rights Act led to white people being very badly treated ; the experience of two Black subjects at airport security that become analogous to the surveillance of national borders, and the politics of race and the materiality of bodies in the United States. All making an argument …
“The Generativity of Autoethnographic Inquiry
This paper was generated on a 2025 ICQI panel entitled “Autoethnography as Inquiry and Generativity.” The author builds an argument for the generative nature of autoethnography as advocacy and action in light of current national and world challenges (linked with the Trump administration) building on the transformative potentials of autoethnography as a form of critical qualitative inquiry and an activist affect
“Responding to the Panel ‘Risky Business, Uncertain Futures . . . and (How) the Work Continues’ in Qualitative Inquiry”
In this short critical performative and poetic response to the 2025 Autoethnography Special Interest Group (SIG) session at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), the author draws meaning and value from the offerings of four presenters. The author narrates the importance of the panel to both the theme of the SIG and the overall ICQI, further building a theory on the resonance of audience response in autoethnographic performance…
“Lessons, Learnings, and Leanings Toward a Future With/Out Norman”
In this short performative tribute to Norman K. Denzin, the author outlines contributions that Denzin made to a diverse group of qualitative researchers at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and beyond. In the process, he used the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke likening Denzin to a falcon, a storm, and a mighty song
Presencing
This performative position statement was originally presented in person at the Autoethnography Special Interest Group (SIG) Panel at ICQI 2024 with the theme: “Qualitative Inquiry in the Present Tense: Writing a New History,” organized by Stacy Holman Jones including Durrell Callier, Marcello Diversi, Elissa Foster, and Dominique Hill, immediately after the passing of Norman K. Denzin. What followed was the 2025 ICQI online. I am revisiting this …
“Pivoting Between the Past/Present and Towards the Future/perfect of Autoethnography”
Following the guide of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group preconference at the 2021 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), this short think piece was placed on the closing panel. The charge was to “speculate on autoethnographic futures.” This contribution uses the notion of national and international pivoting due to the Covid pandemic in practical everyday engagements to theorize on the notion of “the new normal,” not only …
“Norman as Academic Shane ”
On hearing the news of Norman Denzin’s death, the author engages a performative reflection, as film analysis, comparing the character of Shane from the 1953 Western movie to Norman Denzin. A social justice theme is played out in the text, keying in on Norman’s commitment to analyzing the Western motif
Four Movements From Melbourne
This collaborative autoethnography invited and engaged 16 participants in a workshop to both explore and embody autoethnography as communal activity. Working in four groups, each group determined a prompt for reflection and remembrance, writing individually and sharing communally their diverse but interlocking cultural memory and practice
Tripping the Light Fantastic
This collaborative autoethnography invites the reader to experience and audience four performative reflections on the prompt 'tripping the light fantastic' as a foray into experiences with/through dance as performative cultural practice, along with an invitation to reflect on experiences of their own relations to culture, dance, being, and becoming
A Jazz Aesthetic Reprise (on the Work of Tami Spry)
This performative piece serves as a tribute to Tami L. Spry upon her retirement from academic teaching. The piece is considered a reprise because it is based on a shortened version given on a panel at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (2016) that celebrated the publication of her book, Autoethnography and the Other: Unsettling Power through Utopian Performatives. A variation of this piece was presented at the 2022 National Communi…
“Inter and Enter
This performative and collaborative autoethnography plays with the homophonic or maybe homiletics of “inter” and “enter” as the invitational aspect of collaborative autoethnography. The contribution of diverse collaborators from differing racial, ethnic, geo-spatial locations, and generational standpoints speak to/between experiences with the dialogic aspects of autoethnography; the speaking of self with and for others that is always a part of au…
“Masking/Truth
This short piece serves as introduction to the Special Issue of a triple panel at the 2022 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), entitled “Masking/Truth.”
“‘We Wear the Mask’
In this short performative piece, the performer engages a critical juxtaposition of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s classic poem, “We Wear the Mask” in relation to shifting currents of COVID-19, Racism, and Black Lives Matter; using the act of masking not just as a safety precaution against COVID-19 but as strategies of passing through oppression, and surviving under threat, with de-masking as a performative act of resistance against that which most threa…
“Collaborative Autoethnographic Writing as Communal Curative”
This collaborative autoethnography reflects on how each author experienced COVID-19 and associated precarity. We explore the ways in which this experience relates to our identities (both particular and plural), and our positionalities in terms of privilege and marginality. As a collective of diverse collaborators, we confront dialectical questions of self and society. Our contributions reveal our advantage/disadvantage, mobility/immobility, and t…
Onboarding, Orientation, and Mentoring as Culture-Crafting Processes
This essay uses autobiographical detail as theorizing through experiences and observations of culture-building in organizational structures that work through the tensiveness of maintaining cultural systems even while engaging commitments to DEI-A. The essay is written through the perspective of a Black queer/quare scholar/administrator in shifting cultural and institutional contexts. The essay engages autoethnography as a culture-centered methodo…
A Welcome, A Warning, and A Wish
After the cancelation of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (2020) due to the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), the substantive content of my presentation for the plenary, “Higher Education in the Time of Trump: Resistance and Critique” came into confluence with my invitation to deliver the 2020 Keynote to the 17th Incoming Cohort of the doctorate program in Educational Leadership for Social Justice, School of Education, Loyola Mary…
Resounding/Resonating Sounds of Home, Heritage, and Heart
Initially, this collaborative autoethnography brought together five authors to explore the trope of sound through re/membering the self and storying family. But it very quickly became an exploration of the inter-reliability and inner relatability of sounds of home, heritage, and the heart across diverse human lived experiences of grief, mourning, recovery, and intergenerational legacies of hope. The essay explores the relational practice between …
I don't know why she swallowed the fly
This piece serves as introduction for the Special Issue: '' I don't know why she swallowed the fly': On Dubious Cures and Drastic Measures in Post (?) Pandemic Times.' A panel presented at the 2023 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Each of 10 performative and poetic essays respond to the prompt and speak to issues of agism, sexism, gender-bias, homophobia, violence, pharmaceutical consumption, medical industry bias, the social constr…
Learning How to Drive
This collaborative autoethnography uses the prompt of 'learning to drive' as a pivot point of critically remembering aspects of the authors being and becoming; from the earned autonomy of operating a vehicle to a broader sense of self-determination, social responsibility, and determined directionality as literal and figurative metaphor for life choices. The authors from diverse backgrounds working in the same academic institution engage the proce…
Fat Asses, Weight Gain, and the White Feminine Commodification (Contortion) of Black Female Bounty
This short performative essay reflects on the author's Black mother teaching him about cultural critique, particularly as this relates to the social construction of the Black female body. The author structures his reflections and lessons learned through the construct of fat asses, weight gain, and the White feminine commodification (contortion) of Black female bounty. He uses contemporary exemplars to reinforce aspects of his mother's lived exper…
A Warning/A Call
This short piece was originally conceptualized as a response and support of a young tenure-track faculty-of-color who was experiencing academic bullying and threat of recrimination for her unwavering work in DEI-A (diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism) in an academic unit that claims to support the work of decolonizing its curriculum. But also, a unit in which some seemingly resist personal challenge and the necessary self-work that diffe…
Fading, Twisting, and Weaving
Barbershops in the Black community are discursive spaces in which the confluence of Black hair care, for and by Black people, and small talk establish a context for cultural exchange. This interpretive ethnography describes the barbershop in a Black community as a cultural site for ethnographic exploration and description. The article defines a cultural site not only as the chosen geo-social locale of the ethnographic gaze but also as a centraliz…
Performing culture in the classroom
The notion of performing culture in the classroom is both a paradigmatic description of a phenomenon as well as a theoretical position. This research is poised at the productive intersection of critical pedagogy and the increasing focus on autobiography and autoethnography in Performance Studies. The essay seeks to contribute to the development of education as well as performance theory
Skin flint (or, the garbage man's kid)
This essay capitalizes on the hope that autobiographical performance's aesthetic of incarnation may become an aesthetic ofreincamation. Explicating the construction of “generative autobiographical performance,” the essay continues the retheorizing of the personal narrator in autobiographical performance as something other than a heroic autonomous subject. It documents the essentially interdependent and collaborative effort evidenced between two a…
Black Skin/White Masks
This article uses the iconic text Black Skin/White Masks by Frantz Fanon as a metonymic trope to examine the nature of White Studies through the autobiographical frame of a Black critic. The article is structured around three components. First, the socially constructed identity of "Whiteness" as embedded in, emergent from, and critiqued by those in (and of) the project of White Studies. Second, it addresses the question of how White Studies serve…
Passing, Cultural Performance, and Individual Agency
This performative article uses the trope of 'passing' as reference to crossing racial identity borders as well as to intra/interracial issues of identity and authenticity. Passing is constructed as a performative accomplishment and assessment by both the group claimed and the group denied. This article is structured around three divisions-passing as cultural performance, the social construction of identity, and the quest for self-definition of so…
Standing in the Wake
Using the metaphor of 'standing in the wake' to represent a time after experience for critical reflection, this performative and autoethnographic text uses reflexivity as both the subject and the method of engagement, to explore the nature of reflexivity in ethnographic research; as well as the idiosyncratic and diverse ways in which ethnographers enact reflexivity in relation to definitional orientations and intents of ethnography itself. The es…
Querying Queer Theory Again (or Queer Theory as Drag Performance)
Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us
In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship
Racializing Identity
This performative article/script serves as an extended functional definition and a practical exploration of the notion of 'racializing identity.' Through a series of individually labeled autopoetic movements, the performative article/script creates a typology that compares and analyzes the foci of each form, facilitating the definition and exposing the socially constructed intersection between race and Black queer identity. The performative artic…
Reflections, Riffs and Remembrances
Callaloo - Volume 23, Number 4, Fall 2000
Resounding/Resonating Sounds of Home, Heritage, and Heart
Initially, this collaborative autoethnography brought together five authors to explore the trope of sound through re/membering the self and storying family. But it very quickly became an exploration of the inter-reliability and inner relatability of sounds of home, heritage, and the heart across diverse human lived experiences of grief, mourning, recovery, and intergenerational legacies of hope. The essay explores the relational practice between …
Learning How to Drive
This collaborative autoethnography uses the prompt of 'learning to drive' as a pivot point of critically remembering aspects of the authors being and becoming; from the earned autonomy of operating a vehicle to a broader sense of self-determination, social responsibility, and determined directionality as literal and figurative metaphor for life choices. The authors from diverse backgrounds working in the same academic institution engage the proce…
A Warning/A Call
This short piece was originally conceptualized as a response and support of a young tenure-track faculty-of-color who was experiencing academic bullying and threat of recrimination for her unwavering work in DEI-A (diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism) in an academic unit that claims to support the work of decolonizing its curriculum. But also, a unit in which some seemingly resist personal challenge and the necessary self-work that diffe…
A Song for You"/"Killing Me Softly
Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges in Today's World
In the next section of the discussion, the participating scholars elaborate on their views of the most pressing intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges that we face in today's world. The discussants identify both historically persistent and newly emerging challenges and crises that greatly impact our world's communities, their health and well-being, the environment, war and violence, oppression, domination, resistance, and political conse…
Our Role as Intercultural Scholars, Practitioners, Activists, and Teachers in Addressing These Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges
As the finale, the participating scholars connect their discussion of key intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges to our role as intercultural scholars and the pathways for engagement. We all inhabit different and multiple roles for addressing and confronting such urgencies—as researchers, practitioners, activists, teachers, and community members with macro and micro modes of agency, influence, and impact. Discussants grapple with how to …
Cultural Struggles
I recently attended a performance of the critically acclaimed The Book of Mormon. If you know the text, then you know that the production is a religious satire musical. Separate from the signal of
Fat Asses, Weight Gain, and the White Feminine Commodification (Contortion) of Black Female Bounty
This short performative essay reflects on the author's Black mother teaching him about cultural critique, particularly as this relates to the social construction of the Black female body. The author structures his reflections and lessons learned through the construct of fat asses, weight gain, and the White feminine commodification (contortion) of Black female bounty. He uses contemporary exemplars to reinforce aspects of his mother's lived exper…
Theme Introduction to Special Issue
The essays in this Special Issue respond in part to a call to acknowledge the multiple crises we now face: the global covid-19 virus pandemic; natural disasters caused by climate change and more. The essays call for a critical collaborative engagement over issues of trauma and survival, to build new templates of sociality towards progressive futures
An Invitation to Rhetoric
This performative essay uses the anticipated 25th anniversary of Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin's essay, 'Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,' as a pivot point to explore the notion of invitational rhetoric applied variously and processed through the embodied experiences of the two authors: A Black gay identified male and a White queer identified woman in what some might construct as a hierarchical relationship as academic d…
June 12, 2016
Epilogue
Introduction
Introduction| February 01 2015 Introduction: Performative Rhetorics of Desire, Resistance, and Possibility Bryant Keith Alexander Bryant Keith Alexander Queer Performance and Performativities Editor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2015) 2 (1): 109–111. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.2.1.0109 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citati…
Morgan Freeman's Black Male Body as Unforgiven
This short introductory reflection focuses on the image of Morgan Freeman's dead body in the 1992 Western remake of the movie Unforgiven. The performance is part eulogy, effigy, and epitaph for the raced body (of color) in Westerns
The “Temperance Mentality”
Canine teeth and rank in Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata)
The “Temperance Mentality”
Performing culture in the classroom
The notion of performing culture in the classroom is both a paradigmatic description of a phenomenon as well as a theoretical position. This research is poised at the productive intersection of critical pedagogy and the increasing focus on autobiography and autoethnography in Performance Studies. The essay seeks to contribute to the development of education as well as performance theory
Standing at the Crossroads
Callaloo - Volume 22, Number 2, Spring 1999
Skin flint (or, the garbage man's kid)
This essay capitalizes on the hope that autobiographical performance's aesthetic of incarnation may become an aesthetic ofreincamation. Explicating the construction of “generative autobiographical performance,” the essay continues the retheorizing of the personal narrator in autobiographical performance as something other than a heroic autonomous subject. It documents the essentially interdependent and collaborative effort evidenced between two a…
Reflections, Riffs and Remembrances
Callaloo - Volume 23, Number 4, Fall 2000
Querying Queer Theory Again (or Queer Theory as Drag Performance)
Fading, Twisting, and Weaving
Barbershops in the Black community are discursive spaces in which the confluence of Black hair care, for and by Black people, and small talk establish a context for cultural exchange. This interpretive ethnography describes the barbershop in a Black community as a cultural site for ethnographic exploration and description. The article defines a cultural site not only as the chosen geo-social locale of the ethnographic gaze but also as a centraliz…
Passing, Cultural Performance, and Individual Agency
This performative article uses the trope of 'passing' as reference to crossing racial identity borders as well as to intra/interracial issues of identity and authenticity. Passing is constructed as a performative accomplishment and assessment by both the group claimed and the group denied. This article is structured around three divisions-passing as cultural performance, the social construction of identity, and the quest for self-definition of so…
Racializing Identity
This performative article/script serves as an extended functional definition and a practical exploration of the notion of 'racializing identity.' Through a series of individually labeled autopoetic movements, the performative article/script creates a typology that compares and analyzes the foci of each form, facilitating the definition and exposing the socially constructed intersection between race and Black queer identity. The performative artic…
Black Skin/White Masks
This article uses the iconic text Black Skin/White Masks by Frantz Fanon as a metonymic trope to examine the nature of White Studies through the autobiographical frame of a Black critic. The article is structured around three components. First, the socially constructed identity of "Whiteness" as embedded in, emergent from, and critiqued by those in (and of) the project of White Studies. Second, it addresses the question of how White Studies serve…
Queer(y)ing the Postcolonial Through the West(ern)
Gendered Labor
This project is an excerpt from an ongoing ethnographically based exploration of Black women hair care professionals in the Los Angeles area and the domesticity of public service. The work extrapolates and applies the narrated experiences of the Black woman hair care professional (BWHCP) into the interlocking spheres of race, culture, performance, and the social marketing of identity in both the formal and informal economy. The project is an expe…
(Performance Is) Metaphors as Methodological Tools in Qualitative Inquiry
In his germinal essay, “Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion” Dwight Conquergood (1995) uses the compelling metaphor of a caravan to describe performance studies; a “commitment to praxis, to multiple ways of knowing that engage embodied experience with critical reflection ... a caravan: a heterogeneous ensemble of ideas and methods on the move” (pp. 139–140). This expanded discussion on the relation between performance and met…
We thank the following reviewers who rendered extraordinary services to the International Review of Qualitative Research, Volume 2
Performance in/as Qualitative Inquiry
Troping a Dope
This manuscript is a critical performative response to Kashif Powell's performance of “[6 Black Boys ∧ Jena (1 Tree+2 Nooses) – Civil Liberties]/1 Indivisible Nation=An Auto-ethnographic Performance of the Jena Six” that juxtaposes the critical methods and the racial-political intensions of the performance against Barack Obama's presidential acceptance speech. The juxtapositioning of the two performances is done through the audiencing experience …
Standing in the Wake
Using the metaphor of 'standing in the wake' to represent a time after experience for critical reflection, this performative and autoethnographic text uses reflexivity as both the subject and the method of engagement, to explore the nature of reflexivity in ethnographic research; as well as the idiosyncratic and diverse ways in which ethnographers enact reflexivity in relation to definitional orientations and intents of ethnography itself. The es…
Introduction
Audience Engagement
An audience engagement included in the QI 2012 panel. The engagement was listed in the program
Morgan Freeman's Black Male Body as Unforgiven
This short introductory reflection focuses on the image of Morgan Freeman's dead body in the 1992 Western remake of the movie Unforgiven. The performance is part eulogy, effigy, and epitaph for the raced body (of color) in Westerns
A Poetic and Performative Synthesis
Additional informationNotes on contributorsBryant Keith AlexanderBryant Keith Alexander is Professor and Dean, College of Communication and Fine Arts at Loyola Marymount UniversityOmi Osun Joni L. JonesOmi Osun Joni L. Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance and in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas, Austin
Introducing the Discussion and One Another
Over a month-long period, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication hosted an online discussion among 11 intercultural scholars across and outside of the discipline in response to four key questions. Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rona Halualani, facilitated the discussion and introduced the question prompts. The goal was to create a vibrant, interactive dialogue about definitional framings of intercultural scholarship and their views of…
Defining and Communicating What “Intercultural” and “Intercultural Communication” Means to Us
In order to engage in our larger discussion, we needed to share our definitions, framings, and theorizings of what “intercultural” and “intercultural communication” mean to us and how we inflect these based on our own experiences, identities, and perspectives. Discussants break down how they understand the notion of “intercultural” behind commonly used and circulated terms in our scholarship
Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges in Today's World
In the next section of the discussion, the participating scholars elaborate on their views of the most pressing intercultural urgencies, issues, and challenges that we face in today's world. The discussants identify both historically persistent and newly emerging challenges and crises that greatly impact our world's communities, their health and well-being, the environment, war and violence, oppression, domination, resistance, and political conse…
Sociology (68 works) · Art (44 works) · Aesthetics (42 works) · Performative utterance (32 works) · Political science (31 works) · Autoethnography (22 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Media studies (20 works) · Anthropology (19 works)