Cities of the Dead as Global History

Abstract

Cities of the Dead as Global History Kathleen Wilson (bio) Joseph Roach's famously generative study, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), founded a new paradigm for performance, cultural, and historical studies, one that remains extravagantly transgressive of national, imperial, and hemispheric boundaries and yet astonishingly effective in materializing quotidian and unexpected demographic and cultural flows. (Calling this work "interdisciplinary" is quaint, as Eric Lott notes on the dustjacket.)1 That paradigm is circum-Atlantic performance, a tag that beckons to both its trans-hemispheric reach and mobility, triangulating between four continents (Europe, Africa, and the Americas), and to the many beings, practices, and lifeways, human and nonhuman, that constituted its hydrographical conditions of possibility. Performance in Roach's hands becomes a way of interrogating, and learning from, the messiness of cultural confrontations to see how popular and elite practices took shape in relation to each other, "repetitions with a difference" that consolidated settlements on other peoples' lands and created new kinds of societies in turn.2 From Thomas Betterton's funeral to King Zulu's Mardi Gras processions, song, speech, dance, and other bodily arts become through Roach's intercultural analysis a new kind of archive, marked by modes of kinesthetic communication and exchange whereby, to quote Victor Turner, "the ethnographies, literatures, ritual and theatrical traditions of the world" serve as the basis for "a new transcultural communicative synthesis through performance," a kind of global history of meaning-making.3 For this cultural and ethnohistorian of eighteenth-century Britain and the empire, Roach's study was quite simply the most important to appear on performance in the twentieth century, and since. Bringing together older anthropological and post-structural models with newer performance studies approaches, it helped reshape the interpretive terrain to which cultural and ethnohistorians of empire must attend. This terrain now includes the multiplicities of performances that clashed on the littorals of contested domains and that sometimes even vanquished brutality to modelnew ways of being and knowing.4 [End Page 5] The circum-Atlantic conjured by Cities of the Dead revealed an oceanic interculture marked by webs of slavery, forced labor, domination, and subordination that unfolded on four continents thanks to a single ocean and singular human trade, creating a new kind of geopolitical entity that reshaped ideas about transnational and transhemispheric history. The persistence of multiplicity in its intercultural spaces unmoored queries about origin from those merely of the nation-state and its supposedly indomitable will, and directed them instead to the stories of the struggles and triumphs of peoples who survived the murderous circuits of mercantile capitalism—and those who did not. Performance provides a unique perspective on these travails and triumphs, as memory, history, auto-ethnography, and theatrical skills were all called upon—both then and now—to make sense of this new environment where the "forgotten but not gone" continued to register their presence despite all efforts to the contrary, creating new identities and futures that hinged upon their performances of memory, loss, and replacement.5 I was broaching the intercultural complexities of the eighteenth-century British Empire when I first came upon Roach's book in 1998. Scholars had begun to confront the "white Atlantic" of Bernard Bailyn and his followers with Black, Red, and Green Atlantics more subversive of nation-state pieties, and to pitch new ways to think about cultural intermixture through the lenses of the Atlantic's intercontinental traffic.6 Cities of the Dead gave a decidedly postcolonial spin to the stories of Atlantic entanglements after 1492, illuminating different genealogies and possibilities for what circum-Atlantic history, with its geometric forms and ever-lasting wakes,7 not only could but must look like in order to address the long-lasting verities and brutalities of the past and present global orders. Future interpretations of the everyday life and politics of such culturally-multitudinous geopolitical spaces needed to attend to the new ways of thinking and doing that performance, both theatrical and social, enacted before everyone's eyes. Performance's evanesces underlined its importance as events. Within the matrices of perpetual war and empire-building, the purposes of playing took on an almost cosmic urgency, embraced by dislocated British peoples...