Whose Memory? Whose Forgetting?

Abstract

Whose Memory?Whose Forgetting? Lisa A. Freeman (bio) When we consider the fields of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Theater and Performance Studies, it would be difficult to think of a scholarly book that has been more influential and more far-reaching than Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, first published by Columbia University Press in 1996. The collection of short essays that comprise this roundtable are dedicated not only to celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the publication of this award-winning work, but also to illustrating the transformative impact it has had on scholarship across these intersecting fields both with respect to the conceptual apparatus and methods we use, and to the narratives we trace and the knowledges we produce.1 By way of offering a brief framing introduction, I want to take a quick look backward before going forward with an account of Cities's impact on our period of study and its indelible imprint on the shape of critical work today. Some might say that Roach's study of embodied performance across what he deftly termed, drawing on the influential work of Paul Gilroy, the "Circum-Atlantic" has traveled an almost immeasurable distance from his own dissertation work, conducted at Cornell University so many years ago, on "Vanbrugh's English Baroque: Opera and the Opera House in the Haymarket."2 But those of us who are attentive students in the field can recognize in Roach's ever erudite work the expansive, interdisciplinary sway of a touchstone figure like John Vanbrugh, whose own career both straddled and intermingled the disciplines of drama, music, and architecture. Even more, we can trace the Baroque as an influence on the style and substance of Roach's capacious mode of thought, specifically the emphasis on repetition with a difference and the ability to discern those variations with a fine-tuned acuity that understands ornamentation as an embodied expression of the incongruous conditions of human life. Indeed, little noted in this respect is a statement which Roach sets out in the penultimate sentence of his original preface that substantially grounds the work and insights of Cities of the Dead in the unruly and voracious world of eighteenth-century [End Page 1] cultural production and consumption. Explaining that the "topoi of memory as performance" which recur across his book take their inspiration from "the aesthetic tangibility of live performances," he makes a deliberate point of clarifying: "I use the word aesthetic in what I understand to be its eighteenth-century meaning: the vitality and sensuous presence of material forms."3 For Roach, then, it is important that when we talk about the long, deep, and wide influence of eighteenth-century culture, ideology, and thought on the shape of things today—for better and for worse—we also engage its embrace of an aesthetic that was felt in and expressed through bodies in performance. Eschewing the kind of cold formalism evacuated of human touch which has gained traction in some quarters, Roach reminds us of, and indeed insistently returns us to, a set of scenes in which the tactile presence of the human body and the palpable imprint of human consciousness, of memory and forgetting, both in the creation of the beautiful and in claims to inventions of the new, were deeply implicated in imperial scenes of extraordinary human violence and human upheaval. Even more, as he persuasively demonstrates, the ramifications and traces of these global, historical events are still playing out and being enacted in performances on our stages and our streets today. Embodied performances in this regard constitute a kinesthetic field of encounter and negotiation, an enactment of what Roach brilliantly delineates across his stunning volume as the iterative dynamics of substitution and surrogation, or as he so eloquently encapsulates it, "the social process of memory and forgetting, familiarly known as culture."4 Work on the order of Roach's extraordinary achievement in Cities of the Dead does not just arrive sui generis upon the scene. Nor could his work have had the kind of seismic impact it has had on critical discourse without breaking through a significant set of impasses in the field. In the first regard, we can...