What is debate if not a site of performance? The label of “performance debate” is an illogical signifier of logistical dichotomization that refuses to see the inherent aspects of performance in everything we do here. Refuse the idea that debate is just a “game” where we can divorce our words from our actions and our performances from our argumentation.

All debate is performative, and all debaters of color embody their performance

The primary reason differentiating between traditional policy debate and performance debate suggests some obscured motive is because all debate is performative (Solt 2004). That is no surprise for debaters and their coaches, nor one would imagine the casual observer. Indeed, the form/content division is poorly suited for forensics competition (Johnson 2017). Put another way, the medium is the message (McLuhan 1964). This will not seem odd to rhetoricians or others who study performance, but it bears repeating for coaches, debaters, and judges who might not actively think about the ways they represent the debate activity and the ways different practices like labeling affect performative potentials. Of course, performance is polyvocal, meaning many things to many disciplines (Cassin 2009). This article is not intended to offer a strict definition of what constitutes performance debate (Is it all plan-less debate? Must there be non-prose? Is it different speaking styles?), because that definition is not necessary to understand how the label functions with respect to race. That performance might suffer from a tremendous number of definitions or understandings does not deny its importance to understanding a broad array of forensics activities and the ways in which debate participants engage them. Furthermore, even if there is concern about performance debate and its argumentative value, one cannot deny that debate of all types remains performative (Solt 2004)

Rhetoric has long been understood as performative (Love 2016), and policy debate, a type of deliberative rhetoric, is especially so. I chose to understand debate as rhetorical and not as a game because even Alfred C. Snyder, perhaps the most popular proponent of the game theory of debate, has concluded that debate is rhetorical in the sense that debate is “a path of critical advocacy that is life changing and empowering” (Snider 2008, p. xii). Snider’s (2008) emphasis on advocacy and empowerment accords with popular scholarly understandings of rhetoric (Opt and Gring 2009; Murray and DeSanctis 2013; Johnson 2016). Snider (2008) also argues that debate is shaped increasingly by “rhetorical critics” (p. 61), and in a special forum on his writings about debate as a game, Snider (2003) concludes that debate is largely about empowerment and advocacy, which are consistent with Johnson’s (2016) emphasis on debate as a rhetorical act that empowers black debaters.

Under the umbrella of forensics, supposing forensics encompasses both speech and debate (recognizing these three terms are used in quite different ways from university to university), many readily recognize events like after dinner speaking (ADS) and program(ed) (of) oral interpretation (POI) as performative. Furthermore, the elocutionists, perhaps unsurprisingly, knew rhetoric was performative (Conley 1990). Some scholars go so far as to argue that “[p]erformance studies was originally defined as oral interpretation” (Reid 2015, p. 22). Yet, for some reason policy debate is held out as distinct from its related events, and by the linguistic differentiation between performance debate and traditional policy debate. There is clear evidence, however, that policy debate stems from both academic majors and academic activities that have long been understood as performative. Furthermore, scholars have long held that many aspects of life are performative including diverse speech and writing acts. One can perform a play, a story, or a poetry reading. One can perform a funeral oration or a best man’s speech. This appreciation, that so much of life is performative, has helped scholars dig deeper into the power relations associated with specific performances. As a result, scholars argue that gender (Butler 1993), knowledge (Bell 2006), politics (Butler 1997), and even economics (Callon 1998) are performative. Thus, performance helps theorize many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and might even be understood as foundational not only to debate but to many of the ideas debaters debate.

But, what does performance debate mean? Performance debate is often used to describe debate that does not advocate a policy option but rather presents a non-traditional argument that makes use of song, dance, poetry, and other stylistic and substantive interventions different from traditional policy, plan-focused debate (Tallungan 2009). Performance debate is debate that believes the act of debate does something in the way that J.L. Austin theorized performative utterances (Solt 2004). That is, debate does something as much as the thing debated about does something. Performance debate often concerns issues of race, but has also been taken up by woman-identified and queer debaters, Indigenous and disabled debaters. Put another way, performance debate is not only what black debaters do, but rather is practiced across ideologies and identities. Performance debate relies less on a plan or discrete advocacy statement and more on the act of speaking to a public about issues important to the debaters.

Although performance debate is not only what black debaters do, it is important to recognize that debaters of color always “embody their discourse” (Vincent 2013, n.p.). Vincent (2013) argues, rely on Charles Mills among others, that debaters of color are always performing and that this performance is always with the body. So, the overidentification of performance debate as opposed to simply debate, reifies notions of black otherness in the debate space such that it deemphasizes the value of performance as uniquely black or racially other, while accepting the Eurocentric notion that white debaters can separate words from actions, bodies from speech acts, and performance from argumentation (Vincent 2013). That is, performance resonates with debaters of color because of the ways in which blackness is, among other things, a visual regime (Raengo 2013).

One might argue that debate participants all understand debate is performative. That argument would be reasonable but for the then redundancy of performance debate. And, scholars of debate and argumentation know many debaters that prefer their judges to focus on the flow only, what has been called tabula rasa (often abbreviated as “tab”) or blank slate judging in judging philosophies, raising the valuable question, not addressed here, of how one flows, or takes notes during, a performance debate given the accepted practices for flowing debate. I, along with many of my colleagues, jot notes down during a performance debate as one would when critically viewing anything from a movie to a painting to an academic lecture. These notes raise questions about argument, ethos, pathos, and logos, nonverbal and verbal communication. In short, they are the notes one makes when critically analyzing any text or presentation. One need not reject evaluation, note-taking, or standards for one to appreciate performative debate. Indeed, we know that poetry can be persuasive. Read Pablo Neruda, Audre Lorde, or Juan Felipe Herrera. Their poetry speaks to the tremendous disempowerment of minoritarian communities in much the way that performance debate seeks to reinvigorate minoritarian debaters in the restrictive space of policy debate to emphasize the activist potential of debate and public speaking.

If debate is performative, then why denote one form of debate as extra performative? That label serves no purpose other than to draw a distinction between non-performance or traditional policy debate and the new form of performance debate. That distinction is not benign; that is, it has a normative quality. If debate or traditional debate is normal, then any form of debate that is not debate or not traditional debate is different, an outlier. As such, performance debate becomes an outlier, something distinct from the norm and as such different.