Customer Reviews

Cities of the Dead

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Roach develops a number of difficult but ultimately rewarding terms ("surrogation," for instance) for thinking about the relations between different populations of the Atlantic world: the British, the native peoples of North America and the Caribbean, white Americans, and black Americans.

For the most part, historical accounts of the contact among these groups have followed one of two models. Either these were self-contained cultures that struggled with one another in coercive power relations, or they were populations that created "hybrid" or syncretic cultures. Roach is able to find a better theoretical model than other of these alternatives. He never ignores the coercive power relations that conditioned the Atlantic world. But he avoids the sloppiness that sometimes mars accounts of "hybridity." Instead, he offers close, painstaking accounts of how particular sites of symbolic contact (diplomatic protocols, theatrical performances, brothel entertainments, New Orleans' funeral processions) allowed people both to forge new social memories--enduring forms recalling historical contact and events--and to forget inconvenient truths that would hinder imperial ambitions.

Roach's prose is quite lucid, but his arguments are complex and theoretically sophisticated. It helps if you're familiar with the theoretical materials he is drawing from. But if you aren't, Roach offers enough explication to allow you to grasp these rich yet difficult ideas--but you will have to invest a good deal of time and brain energy. But if you want to absorb new intellectual tools and fascinating new episodes in 18th and 19th C Atlantic encounters, Roach's book more than repays the effort. This is one of those books that made a lasting difference in the way I think about cultural history.

Roach's use of Paul Connerton's "incorporating practice of memory" (from "How Societies Remember": buy this!) allows him to develop a theory of the genealogy of performance-which seems to me to be a sort of re-construction or re-tracing of origins. This approach allows him to do some extremely interesting analysis of legal ramifications of race, racial categories (the octaroon, for example), public performance of capitalism in the form of the slave markets, and "body ownership." It also reifies race and racial designations and works in many ways against his arguments. For instance, the multiple ethnicities of Native Americans merge together into one self-contained "Other" within the imagination of both African and Anglo Americans. How Africans appropriated these images in their performances of race seem more complex in reality than Roach makes them out to be-related to the idea of "first," land distribution, and the fact that the issue of legal ownership and status was ambivalent at best ("The slave-holding propensities of the Five Civilized Tribes (so-called by whites in part because they held slaves) emphasize the double, inverted nature of the Indian as a symbol for African Americans: the non-white sign of both power and disinheritance" p. 205).

Critique of black/white as a dualism in early American cultural hegemony is something to which Roach also (unwittingly?) succumbs. Although he claims that "the issue of race in America is hard to reimagine without considering Native Americans" (p. 189), Native American identity is seen not as the amalgam of various multi-ethnic groups but as a "buffer" between white and black, thereby reinforcing the stereotypes of white power structures. I guess I am asking if the complexities of racial identity in the United States may be much more complex than we have already seen-African Americans dressing as "big chiefs" could be as multi-layered and problematic in terms of race and identity as high schools using "Redskins" as football mascots, couldn't it?

Not only race, but class, plays an important part in Roach's analysis. In one of the most convincing arguments based on Connerton in the book, Roach discusses the "cities of the dead"-the invention of separation between the living and the dead (ancestors). The tie-in with suburbanization as a model of this physical separation and performance of whiteness seems right on. The section about Congo Square, and the Bataille theories about the economy of excess in violence were excellent. Here I could begin to see the application of the author's theory, however awkward.

Great book, however the author is all over the place and unless you are steeped in the subject matter, you will get lost.