Dancing in the Streets with Joseph Roach

Abstract

Dancing in the Streets with Joseph Roach Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (bio) INTRODUCTION: THE MISSING PURITAN There are no Puritans in Cities of the Dead. That I say this at all is perhaps because Cities of the Dead has taught me to read in so many important ways, one of which is to attend to absence as much as presence.1 The absent Puritan in Joseph Roach's book speaks to the nature of the transformation he wrought, one that has helped to reorient the field of early American literary studies in ways that are not fully registered in our genealogies of the field. When I began my training as a graduate student in early American studies, the work of Sacvan Bercovitch stood at the forefront of the field. In particular, his book The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) served as both exemplar and roadmap: look to the Puritans as the starting point of American-ness, and trace from there to today, with stops at Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson along the way.2 Implicit in this methodology is a geography—one that places New England at the center of the field of study. This might make sense if you are a professor at Harvard, as was Bercovitch and others in the field before him, including founding figures of early American studies such as Perry Miller and F. O. Matthieson. Roach was a professor at Tulane University when he wrote Cities of the Dead, and the geography of New Orleans is writ large across the book. What does it mean to take New Orleans—and specifically the performances of Mardi Gras parades and jazz funerals—as a fulcrum of cultural history rather than the sermons of seventeenth-century New England Puritans? Well, it changes everything. The last chapter of Cities of the Dead focuses explicitly on Mardi Gras and the parades of New Orleans jazz funerals. At one point in this chapter, Roach describes the "musical and kinesthetic vortex" of moving with the Second Line in a jazz funeral—the improvisational mass of marchers and dancers who join the parade as its energy collects and expands in the streets. He is not speaking hypothetically, but rather from within the vortex: "moving along with the packed crowd of the Second Line," he relates, "an elderly Second Liner politely touched my elbow to draw my attention to my untied shoelaces—a menace amid the flowing mass of dancing bodies, a literal faux pas" (279). Little of the book is written in the first person; accordingly, this brief, embodied moment stands out from the rest of the [End Page 13] text and invites us to pay attention. Let us start from here, then, and join Roach in the Second Line behind the jazz trombones and the carnival masquers as he traces their routes, touches elbows with elders, ties up his shoelaces to continue the dance without a false step. He is marking the steps of the masquers and musicians and adding a few of his own. He is a good dancer: a new choreography of criticism animates the change-making nature of his book. I aim to trace a few of his crucial moves below. FIRST MOVE: TRACING AN ATLANTIC GEOGRAPHY The Atlantic geography Roach maps out in Cities of the Dead shifts the organizing locus of American literary studies from the ports and pulpits of Boston to the streets and docks of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. But this recentering has done more than move us around on the map: it has changed the map itself, reorganizing both space and time. Two aspects of this new reorganization of the space and time of American literary studies are worth underscoring: this is a history of encounter, a geography of movement. Roach thus invokes an American scene and geography that not only place the Gulf Coast of New Orleans at their center, but that also dissolve the clarity of national boundaries in reaching toward diasporic identities and Indigenous tribal ones. Rather than the uni-directional narrative of Manifest Destiny, the lineage of "Puritans to the present" that once served as the shorthand for the curricula of the survey of American...