# E. Patrick Johnson

Elondust Patrick Johnson (born March 1, 1967) is an American academic scholar and aritist best known as the creator of Quare theory. He is dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor of Performance Studies and African-American studies at Northwestern University. Johnson is the founding director of the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern. His scholarly and artistic contributions focus on performance studies, African-American studies and women, gender and sexuality studies.

## Early life

Elondust Patrick Johnson was born on March 1, 1967, in Hickory, North Carolina, to Sarah M. Johnson. She worked as a factory worker. He is the youngest of seven siblings. They grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Ridgeview, a majority-Black section of Hickory. He was mentored by black women in the Ridgeview Community, including Z. Ann Hoyle, who became the first black alderman of Hickory's city council. After graduating from Hickory High School in 1985, Johnson attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated with a B.A. in 1989 and M.A. in 1991 in speech communication. He then went to Louisiana State University and received his Ph.D in speech communication in 1996.

## Career

Johnson became an assistant professor of English at Amherst College. In 2000, he joined the faculty of the performance studies department at Northwestern University as assistant professor, then received tenure and a joint appointment in African-American studies in 2003. From 2003 to 2006 and 2014 to 2016, he served as the director of graduate studies for the department of performance studies. He served as the chair of performance studies from 2006 to 2011. Johnson was promoted to full professor of African-American studies and performance studies in 2007 before becoming the Carlos Montezuma Professor of African-American Studies and Performance Studies in 2011. He was appointed dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, on August 1, 2020.

## Personal life

Johnson is married to Stephen J. Lewis. Lewis is an arts and media producer at Northwestern and writes articles for the university. Johnson mentions him in the acknowledgment of some of his books.

## Influence

Johnson's introduction of "quare" as a theoretical concept became particularly influential in the fields of queer theory, women, gender, and sexuality studies, and black studies. Originally published in Text & Performance Quarterly, "'Quare' Studies, Or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From My Grandmother" went on to be reprinted numerous times. "Quare" signaled a significant departure from the lack of engagement with race and class by queer theorists and with gender and sexuality among black studies scholars.

## Research

Johnson's first book, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, examines how blackness is appropriated and performed within and outside African American culture. It won the Lilla A. Heston Award and the Errol Hill Award.
His second book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008), is an ethnographic oral history of the lives of black gay men in the US South, a traditionally uninterrogated region. This book received the Stonewall Book Award from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association.
Published in 2005 with Mae G. Henderson, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology interrogates the experiences of black queer people whose subjectivities, beliefs, struggles, triumphs and desires had not previously been interrogated by either queer theory or Black studies. The anthology includes writings from scholars including Cathy Cohen, Kara Keeling, Roderick Ferguson, Rinaldo Walcott, and Dwight McBride.
Published in 2014 with Ramon H. Rivera-Servera, solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays is a collection of writings that feature seven solo performances by emerging and established feminist performance artists from the past three decades. The book received an honorable mention for the Errol Hill Book Award.
In 2013, Johnson published Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, an edited collection of essays written by Dwight Conquergood, who selected Johnson to publish his work before his death in 2004. Conquergood was an ethnographer in the field of performance studies whose ethnographic methods focused on power, privilege, and researcher reflexivity/responsibility.
Published in 2016, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies features the next generation of black queer theorists who follow in the lineage of writings in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. The text was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and features pieces by Amber Jamilla Musser, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Lyndon Gill and Marlon M. Bailey.
Published in 2016, Blacktino Queer Performance (with Ramon H. Rivera-Servera) is a collection of nine performance scripts by established and emerging black and Latina/o queer playwrights and performance artists. Each script is accompanied by an interview and critical essay by scholars across a range of interdisciplinary fields.
Published in 2018,Black. Queer. Southern. Women—An Oral History examines the experiences of black women who love other women and live in the American South. In this text, Johnson employed similar methods (ethnographic oral history) as he did in Sweet Tea.

## Creative scholarship
### Sweet Tea—The Play

Inspired to present a more comprehensive version of Sweet Tea and the men that Johnson interviewed, in 2006 he created a solo Reader's Theater performance, called Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales, based on selected stories of the men that he interviewed. Pouring Tea toured across the country to over 100 universities, conferences and events over a decade. In 2010, in collaboration with Jane M. Saks, Columbia College and About Face Theatre Company in Chicago, Johnson developed the show into full production called Sweet Tea—The Play. After its Chicago debut, the show traveled to the Warfield Center (2010) in Austin, Texas; Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia in 2011; Dixon Place in New York City (2012); the Durham Arts Council (2014); Rites and Reasons Theater in Providence, Rhode Island (2014); Towne Street Theater in Hollywood, California (2015); Northwestern University's Wirtz Center (2015); and the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (2015). Johnson won the Black Theater Alliance Bert Williams Award for Best Solo Performance for the show in 2010.

### Honey Pot

This text (2019) is the creative nonfiction companion to Black. Queer. Southern. Women—An Oral History. The story is loosely based on women who participated in Johnson's study.