Cities of the Dead
Circum-Atlantic Performance
Author: Joseph Roach Series: The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms
Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance from the eighteenth century to the present in London and New Orleans, Roach explores Atlantic rim performance cultures in 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.
Takes a look at the continuum of intercultural exchange that reinvents, recreates, and restores history. Complemented with fifty-five illustrations, including photos of Mardi Gras Indians, this work employs a study of the culture. It explores cultural connections over place and time, showing through examples how performance revises the past.
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance from the eighteenth century to the present in London and New Orleans, Roach explores Atlantic rim performance cultures in 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.
Takes a look at the continuum of intercultural exchange that reinvents, recreates, and restores history. Complemented with fifty-five illustrations, including photos of Mardi Gras Indians, this work employs a study of the culture. It explores cultural connections over place and time, showing through examples how performance revises the past.
Description
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.
Awards
Winner of James Russell Lowell Prize 1996
Critic 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.
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.
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