Philip G. Sadler IV

My grandfather, Philip Goldsborough Sadler IV, was a scholar in his own right; a Gramscian organic intellectual if I’ve ever known one. His bedroom, guest room, and office were full of books about any number of topics. After he passed, I took a few of the books that most sparked my interest, the most important of which being The Big White Lie by Michael Levine. This book outlines “The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War” as told by Levine, a 25-year veteran of the DEA. It discusses the CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine conspiracy, which my grandfather believed in when it was considered a mere conspiracy theory. His embodied knowledge of racism made him suspicious of the American government — a skepticism that, I would argue, is a deeply ingrained aspect of Black American culture. He discussed his theories with his friends over drinks and with family at Christmas dinner. His kitchen table was a space for the free exchange of ideas, even with his grandchildren. He planted seeds of curiosity and a desire to question everything in me, and his (validated) knowledge of the crack conspiracy has come to form the foundation of my dissertation project. 

A performative paradigm, as discussed by Conquergood (1998, citing Said, 1979 and Jackson, 1989), disrupts the centrality of text as a (or the) locus of knowledge; "whereas a textual paradigm privileges distance, detachment and disclosure as ways of knowing e. g., "knowledge means rising above immediacy," a performance paradigm insists upon immediacy, involvement and intimacy as modes of understanding, e. g., ‘the primordial meaning of knowledge as a mode of being-together-with’ (Said 36; M. Jackson 8)" (Conquergood, 1998, p. 26). This speaks directly to the type of scholarship my grandfather engaged in — a lived scholarship— which, if taken seriously, might have brought us to a point of truth about the crack conspiracy much sooner (perhaps even as it was happening). 

Even further, Conquergood (1998) draws connections between embodiment and culture. He quotes Paul Gilroy (1994) stating,"instead of an ‘ensemble of texts,’ a repertoire of performance practices became the backbone of this counterculture where politics was ‘played, danced, and acted, as well as sung and sung about, because words, even words stretched by melisma and supplemented or mutated by the screams which still index the conspicuous power of the slave sublime, will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims to truth” (Conquergood, 1998, p. 28). In other words, genuine knowledge of a culture is one that must be lived. Fischer-Lichte (2010) similarly states, “the performative character of culture cannot be investigated properly without recourse to the corporeality of all those who participate in a performance” (p. 130). Performance constitutes an ever-developing embodied knowledge which constantly transmits, makes, and remakes a given culture.