Eighteenth-Century Studies

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 literature, we have through Roach a palimpsestic encounter that is iterative in its acts of both presencing and erasure.

"Circum-Atlantic" is the term that Roach coins to encompass this new geography. It is a term that incorporates movement into the static shape of geographical boundaries: rather than defining just a space, particularly a national space, the term points to what moves around the edges of and across an ocean. Nothing is still here. "The geohistorical matrix of the circum-Atlantic world," Roach explains, is "bounded by Europe, Africa, and the Americas, North and South." This is not merely an inert space, it is a system: an "economic and cultural system [that] entailed vast movements of peoples and commodities to experimental destinations, the consequences of which continue to visit themselves upon the material and human fabric of the cities inhabited by their successors." And it is a system still in movement today, even when we are standing with our feet planted in New Orleans, or, for that matter, in Boston.

Together with—and building on the work of—Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, Cities of the Dead enacted a Copernican revolution of sorts, shifting how we read the texts of early America away from the proto-U.S. teleology of a previous generation in favor of attending to the networks of exchange that constituted the culture of the Atlantic—networks that were not Puritan (although Puritans did indeed traverse them), but "Eurocolonial," African-diasporic, and Native American in their makeup. The "circum-Atlantic" geography of Cities of the Dead gives primacy of place to the erased presence of Indigenous Americans and diasporic and enslaved Africans over settler colonial white Europeans. It is not that the canonical literary figures of white European-centered literature have disappeared; rather, their position on the map and in the narrative of cultural development has shifted. [End Page 14]

For instance, the foundational route from London to New England—that of the Arabella and the Mayflower—still appears on this map. But Roach traces it in reverse, and adds an entirely new passenger list. In place of the words pronounced by John Winthrop en route to Massachusetts, Roach focuses on the diplomatic voyage of three prominent Mohawks and an Algonquian Mahican to visit Queen Anne in London in 1710, from which he traces a web of connection to canonical texts by William Shakespeare, William Davenant, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Alexander Pope. Texts written by these authors and performed on the stages of London enact both the execution and resuscitation of the "feathered peoples" of North America and the kings and queens of Africa. Prince Oronooko and Emperor Montezuma lived and died nightly on the boards of Covent Garden.

Constellated in relation to the circum-Atlantic encounter and violence visited on Indigenous peoples and African Americans by European settler colonialism, these texts speak, in Roach's reading, not of the margins of the British Empire, but of the formation of Englishness and whiteness in the heart of England. In short, the history of the encounters that appear in the streets of New Orleans, even today, takes us, in Roach's hands, through a circulating lineage around the Atlantic world—not just westward with the course of empire, but in multiple directions that confound the relation of periphery and center. The effect is a startling unmooring of the chestnuts of American historical, developmental narratives, including those underwriting literary studies. Take the simple clarity of Manifest Destiny—an enduringly resonant term coined by the editor of an east coast literary magazine in 1845—which describes the culture and sovereignty of the U.S. state rolling inexorably from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores of North America.³ According to this narrative, the Louisiana Purchase is a key materialization of the bloodless and pre-ordained growth of the U.S. into a continental nation. Jefferson, in his perspicacious wisdom, purchased Louisiana from Napoleon, turned his face westward, expeditiously funded Lewis and Clark, and the shape of the nation unfolded before us. A circum-Atlantic geography, however, places Louisiana in a far different and more complexly layered story. Roach locates us on the streets of New Orleans in April, 1885, when Buffalo Bill's Wild West show was performed there: "the show came to town with two hundred cowboys, Indians, and Mexicans to enact its simulacrum of manifest destiny: the Pony Express and the Deadwood Coach getting through, the buffalo hunt, the duel with Yellowhand, the Indians' scalp and war dances, the nostalgic adieu to a proud and vanishing race" (203).

But Roach asks us to view this performance together with another that occurred in the same streets at roughly the same time: namely, that of the Mardi Gras Indians' "gangs," the befeathered, exuberant, sequined performers who today form the heart of Second Line culture in New Orleans. The Mardi Gras Indians first emerged in New Orleans in the late nineteenth century when African Americans began "masking Indian" in response to the outlawing of Vodou. Just as whites performed as Indians in Buffalo Bill's show, so too did Blacks "play Indian" in New Orleans at the close of the nineteenth century. In making visible this strange repetition, the scene of encounter among whites, Blacks, and Indigenous peoples becomes multi-layered rather than binary. [End Page 15]

Not only was the outlaw of Vodou dance associated with the Indian masking of Black dancers in New Orleans; we learn from Roach, as well, that at the same time the Paiute Ghost Dance was banned from public performance. Both dances open a door between the living and the dead; both speak, at a moment of increased segregation and post-Reconstruction "Blacklash," of erasure, substitution, connection, and imagined communities that resist newly invented Anglo-Americanity parading as time-honored tradition. "In New Orleans," Roach writes, "the truth that Mardi Gras Indian parades seem to alter, by reenacting African-American memory through the surrogation of Native American identities, is the infinitude of Anglo-American entitlement" (207). In the layered performances of the Mardi Gras Indians, destiny is no longer manifest, but contingent, subject to revision, open to imagination.

SECOND MOVE: PERFORMANCE AND ERASURE

The second move enacted from within the Second Line is one that foregrounds performance itself over textuality alone. Roach's work may be said to have shifted definitions not only of the container of culture (its geospatial dimensions), but also of the nature of culture contained within it. This model of culture is less print focused, less mono-cultural, less nation-oriented, and less white. Cities of the Dead enacts a theory of culture grounded in history as well as performance, one that finds in the embodied presence of performance an archive of other lives remembered. "The voices of the dead," Roach writes, "may speak freely now only through the bodies of the living" (xiii).

The parades of New Orleans today thus have a living history that can be traced directly to eighteenth-century African American social clubs and mutual aid societies.⁴ Importantly, moreover, the Second Line has a genealogy linked not only to the collective nature of African American social life but also to its fugitivity in a historically white supremacist political and social landscape. Mardi Gras Indian gangs emerged in relation to the threatened obliteration of Afro-Caribbean culture by white domination. Second Line culture, then, embodies two opposing imperatives: display and disguise.

In Roach's account of performance as history, what matters, then, is not simply embodied presence, but perhaps surprisingly, erasure. Performance, as Roach points out, operates by way of substitution—substitution that both stands in for (represents) and takes the place of (erases) that which is absent. In the specific context of the Atlantic world, the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans and African-descended peoples are foundational acts whose unspeakable terrors have been elided from dominant European accounts of the westward progress of empire. However, as Roach argues, "the unspeakable cannot be rendered forever inexpressible: the most persistent mode of forgetting is memory imperfectly deferred" (4). In acts of performance, the play of memory and forgetting, of substitution and surrogation, both creates new worlds and revives unspoken pasts, "because performances so often carry within them the memory of otherwise forgotten substitutions—those that were rejected and, even more invisibly, those that have succeeded" (5). For Roach, then, the phenomenology of performance has a specific ability to address the violent and contested history of the multiple peoples who inhabit the Atlantic world. [End Page 16]

"Surrogation" is the word Roach often uses to name the presence of an absence within the space of performance. What, he asks, comes to physically stand in for something else in a given performance? What has been replaced, and in that act of replacement, memorialized and hauntingly referenced as well? The introductory chapter of Cities of the Dead offers up a textual example, to assist us in seeing the operations of circum-Atlantic surrogacy. Roach recounts a gossipy anecdote that appeared in Addison and Steele's Spectator in 1711. The story relates the rivalry between two white women, Phillis and Brunetta, who both marry wealthy West Indian planters and vie for supremacy at a series of balls and performances in Barbados. Brunetta finally triumphs when she appears at a ball with an enslaved servant who is dressed in the same silk of the gown worn by her rival, Phillis. Roach concludes, "To perform as protagonists of gendered whiteness they [Phillis and Brunetta] must rely on an unnamed black antagonist, who, like millions of indispensable actors in the dramas of the circum-Atlantic world, remains forgotten, but not gone" (31). Brunetta has triumphed in this vicious little narrative, but only by granting a star turn to the African woman beside her, without whom Phillis would not reign in the ballroom of Barbados or appear in the pages of London literature.

THIRD MOVE: EMBODIMENT AND MATERIAL PRACTICE

As the silk that dresses the enslaved and unnamed woman in the Spectator anecdote shows us, materiality matters. And here is a third move that can be traced to the culture of the Second Line: embodiment matters. This is perhaps clear if we remember the advice concerning shoelaces that has been imparted to us. But we might notice it as well in Roach's focus on the sequins stitched to the Mardi Gras Indians' costumes, the feathers held in an actress' hand, trinkets tossed by the faux-royalty of the Rex Krewe from parade floats.

The last chapter of Cities of the Dead recounts the proceedings of a New Orleans City Council subcommittee, charged in 1993 with discussing the fate of the Liberty Place Monument, a twenty-foot high obelisk honoring the attempted overthrow of Reconstruction in New Orleans. The memorial, Roach points out, dramatizes that white defenders "must always keep alive the specter of the others in opposition to whom they reinvent themselves" (273). Like the feathered peoples on the stage in eighteenth-century London, the threat to white domination is perpetually resuscitated in order to be repeatedly executed—this stagecraft produces whiteness. Memorializing, perhaps especially in the oppressive presence of massive chunks of carved stone, is as much a work of erasure as it is of memory. The push and pull involved in this erasure and resurrection, as Roach points out, marks a battle that is still underway in New Orleans today: not just because the fate of such statues remains a subject of debate, but because the debate itself involves "a continuous reenactment of a deep cultural performance that many New Orleanians call the present" (240). And again, Roach points to the geographical horizon that we might find in this encounter: "Such a performance is…not only a local event but a circum-Atlantic crux" (241).

I teach at a university in Boston, Massachusetts (albeit not Harvard); at the center of the tourist industry in Boston lies the "Freedom Trail"—a red line [End Page 17] about two and half miles long that winds through the downtown; pedestrians can walk the streets from the bucolic Boston Common to the Old North Church to Old Ironsides and explore the "birth of America" along the way. Despite having ice skated in, meandered through, and picnicked on the Boston Common for decades, I only recently learned that over fifty Narragansetts, Pocumtucks, Nipmucs, and Wampanoags were shot, hung, and beheaded in the Boston Common by white settler colonials in 1676. The severed heads of Indigenous leaders were displayed on pikes in the Commons, and bodies swung from Elm trees there. On display today in the Common are any number of statues: perhaps the most famous one depicts Robert Gould Shaw on horseback, leading the trudging Black soldiers below him into war—the first African American regiment to serve in the Civil War. Other monuments include the neoclassical victory column on Flag Staff Hill memorializing the soldiers and sailors who died in the Civil War, and the "Founders Memorial" erected in 1930, which depicts John Winthrop being welcomed to Massachusetts by William Blackstone as loin-cloth clad Indigenous peoples crouch nearby, observing. The memorial includes a quote from the speech Winthrop delivered aboard the Arabella—the one about a "City on a Hill."

In my American literature class, we read Emerson's famous essay "Nature," in which he describes crossing the Common just before arriving at the transcendent state of becoming all-seeing: "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration…I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of god."⁵ We also read Cities of the Dead. And then I take the students downtown on the green line, get off at Park Street, and we cross the Common together. We look at the statues, and we look at the dogs chasing across the open space, and I invite them to see the missing figures of over fifty Massachusetts Indians, hanging from the trees. I invite them to see the "bare" Common as a scene of encounter, and as an on-going encounter that speaks to an extensive, far-flung geography.

Cities of the Dead has invited me to see and walk a Second Line that shadows the Freedom Trail. Much has changed in the field of American literary studies over the past twenty-five years, in part by way of the spectacular reorientations that Cities of the Dead helped to initiate in shifting the geography of early American studies from a national model to an Atlantic one and in inviting us to see performance as a layered archive of embodied cultural history. Important theoreticalwork by scholars such as Diana Taylor (The Archive and the Repertoire, 2003), Tavia N'yongó (The Amalgamation Waltz, 2009), Robin Bernstein (Racial Innocence, 2011), Lisa Lowe (The Intimacies of Four Continents, 2015), and Soyica Diggs Colbert (Black Movements, 2017) has built on Roach's insights and extended the reaches of performance history, of geographical reorientation, and of embodiment and cultural history.⁶ Cities of the Dead sketched a repertoire of moves, including those I have aimed to describe here, that have opened new paths into the past, new means of speaking to the erasures of our histories, and new dances down old streets. [End Page 18]