by Karen Tranberg Hansen, professor emerita of anthropology
Professor D. Soyini Madison
We all regret missing what would have been the most fabulous retirement party in recent memory: PAS’s celebration of D. Soyini Madison, professor of performance studies (she is on the left in the picture, a favorite of mine). Expected to involve former students, colleagues, and friends in a mix of academic presentations, music, and dance, the celebration had been planned for mid-April 2020 but was cancelled because of the pandemic. A highlight was to be a perfor-mance of Soyini’s composition Seahorse and MarketWorld, an allegorical choreo-poem about climate change and the market economy.
While we look forward to better times to allow a performance of her composition, let us not wait to honor and celebrate our friend and colleague. Wishing to share my deep intellectual admiration and personal affection for Soyini with Northwestern’s Africanist community, I offer here a few observations about her uniqueness and the longtime friend-ship we share.
When I started teaching anthropology and African studies at Northwestern in 1982, Soyini was a student in my upper-level undergraduate anthropology course People and Cultures of Africa. She was a stunner in most regards, intellectually as well as in her ways of interacting with her fellow students; she also was at ease dealing with a rather insecure, newly appointed assistant professor. We began talking. She later added me to her PhD advisory committee in performance studies, chaired by an esteemed (and now much missed) colleague, the late Professor Dwight Conquergood. I have been privileged to learn about approaching research through performance, agency, and creativity from the two of them, and I would not want to be without that knowledge.
Completing her dissertation in 1989, Soyini moved on professionally. Not until the late 1990s did our paths (almost) cross again. When I had a fellowship at the National Humanities Center near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1997–98, I discovered that she held a position at the nearby University of North Carolina. Wanting to reestablish contact, I learned that she was in Ghana as a senior Fulbright scholar. It was not until 2008 that we actually connected again, this time at Northwestern, when Soyini was appointed professor of performance studies, succeeding her mentor Dwight.
Making time to involve herself with African studies colleagues, Soyini soon proved to be an invaluable asset. Serving as interim director of the Program of African Studies in 2008–09, she took on many initiatives. For me personally, she was a source of constant inspiration, with the ability to encourage, prod, and cajole me in creative directions.As a result of our conversations across anthropology and performance studies, we launched two events focusing on dressed-body politics in Africa and the diaspora. In 2008 we organized the panel “Dress, Performance, and Social Action in Africa” at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, held in San Francisco. Next, in 2009, we used PAS’s 60th anniversary celebration as an opportunity to organize and host the conference “Dress, Popular Culture, and Social Action in Africa.” Most of the chapters in the book we subsequently coedited, African Dress: Fashion, Agency, Performance (2013), were presented at these events.
In 2012 I retired from Northwestern, and I now live a quiet life in Copenhagen, Denmark, enlivened and invigorated by memorable collaborative experiences with stunning colleagues and special friends like D. Soyini Madison. I hope that our paths will cross again.
This article originally ran in the PAS Newsletter, Fall 2020, Volume 31, Number 1.