Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance / Edition 1

by Joseph Roach

Overview

The colorful handmade costumes of beads and feathers swirl frenetically, as the Mardi Gras Indians dance through the streets of New Orleans in remembrance of a widely disputed cultural heritage. Iroquois Indians visit London in the early part of the eighteenth century and give birth to the "feathered people" in the British popular imagination.What do these seemingly disparate strands of culture share over three hundred years and several thousand miles of ocean? Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance from the eighteenth century to the present in London and New Orleans, Cities of the Dead takes a look at a rich continuum of intercultural exchange that reinvents, recreates, and restores history. Complemented with fifty-five illustrations, including spectacular photos of the famed Mardi Gras Indians, this fascinating work employs an entirely unique approach to the study of culture. Rather than focusing on one region, Cities of the Dead explores broad cultural connections over place and time, showing through myriad examples how performance can revise the unwritten past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231104616
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/25/1996
Series:	The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1520L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joseph Roach is professor of English at Tulane University. He is the author of The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, which won the Barnard Hewitt Award, and coeditor, with Janeele Reinelt, of Critical Theory and Performance.

Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: History, Memory, and Performance Circum-Atlantic Memory Locations and Bearings Materials and Methods The Everlasting Club Genealogies of Performance

2 Echoes in the Bone The Effigy Performing Origins The Segregation of the Dead Bodies of Law Congo Sqaure The King is Dead-Long Live the King!

3. Betterton's Funeral
"Sticks and Rags": The Celebrity as Effigy Vortices of Behavior The Life of Betterton: Talking with the Dad Canonical Memory and Theatrical Nationhood The Pinacotheca BettertonaeanaL Bibliography of origin White SKin, Black Masks

4 Feathered Peoples The Accursed Share: Abundance, Reproduction, and Sacrifice Condolence Councils and the Great Peace Windsor Forest Dimplomacy

What People are Saying About This

Emory Elliott

Cities of the Dead is going to be one of the most important books of the decade. It will have a profound and significant impact on the areas of cultural studies, performance studies, and literary criticism and theory. It will be on the list of the dozen significant studies of race and culture in the West of the last fifity years.

— Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside

Eric Lott

This... exploration of Atlantic rim performance cultures restores the centrality of memory and gesture, profession and surrogation-the invention of a modern world out of the forcible destruction of the old-to the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa, the Americas, and Europe....Roach pursues a pathbreaking version of cultural history.

— Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: The Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

Editorial Reviews

This . . . exploration of Atlantic rim performance cultures restores the centrality of memory and gesture, profession and surrogation-the invention of a modern world out of the forcible destruction of the old-to the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. . . .Roach pursues a pathbreaking version of cultural history.

Eric Lott

The author's thesis defies reduction. However we might say that it involves the performance of memory and forgetting, culture, and performance events from carnivals to stage plays to everyday ritual. He investigates history, memory, and performance as it is acted out in London and New Orleans by the matrix of African, Caribbean, European, and American cultures. A sampling of chapter titles will set the tone for this fascinating and complex volume: Canonical memory and theatrical nationhood, The Mohawk Macbeth, The demon actors in Milton's Paradise Lost, and Mystic chords of memory--or, Stevie Wonder Square. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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