Cities of the Dead

Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance along the Atlantic rim from the eighteenth century to the present, Cities of the Dead explores a rich continuum of cultural exchange that imaginatively reinvents, re-creates, and restores history. Enriched with fifty-five illustrations, including spectacular photos of New Orleans's famed Mardi Gras Indians, Joseph Roach's work employs an entirely unique approach to the study of culture. Rather than focusing on one region, Cities of the Dead describes broad cultural connections over place and time, showing through myriad examples how performance can revise the unwritten past. Through illuminating discussions of social events ranging from burials to sacrifices, from auctions to parades, encompassing regional traditions as diverse as Haitian Voudon and British funerals, the book looks at the synchretic performance traditions of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Exploring processes of substitution, or surrogation, as enacted in performance, Roach demonstrates the ways in which we fill the voids left by death and departure. Cities of the Dead proposes a new way to think about the relationship between history and memory as well as between document and performance. It details patterns of remembrance and forgetting, of communities forging their identities and imagining their futures.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.