Second Life - The Plaza Is The Place

Twice in the early eighteenth century, New York city officials passed legislation aimed at preventing people of African
descent
from using their funerals as cover for planning rebellions. … New York's African Burial Ground - Erik R. Seeman
Only in the collective, ambivalent laughter of

the carnival can the utopia (of reconciliation)
develop; in the festival time it acquires its own
“place” on the festival square.
Bakhtin and Carnival: Page | 1
Culture as Counter-Culture
the plaza is the place

on second funerals & lines
Second Life
placemaking in the new world
of mortals & zombies, of the sacred &
the profane, on modernism, social death
& carnivalesque funeral processions
- the call to placemaking & to mourning
compiled by
amma birago
The funeral began with the mourners making

“loud lamentations” and ended with “noise and
laughter.”
Jazz Funerals and Second Line Parades -
Matt Sakakeeny
Neighbor women acting as mourners - ‘‘old women devoted to

easy tears and theatrical gestures,’’ …. There was also joyous,
playful behavior, ‘‘a sign that the dead did not want sorrow, …
Death Is a Festival
Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Joao Jose Reis
“We have no mother, no child, what is death?” - In Zombie Theory. A Reader, ed. Sarah Juliet Lauro
Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom. - The Black Mardi Gras Indians and the Second Line - M. Smith
Twice in the early eighteenth century, New York city officials passed legislation aimed at preventing people of African descent
Anthropologists identified the social convergence of this

for the ordinary Asante citizen in the sense that the severance of
lineage ties may be comparable to passing a death sentence
over him or her (McCaskie 1995: 89).
Page | 2
Thus in the zombie the relationship between labour,

social death, and freedom get complicated to the point
that the zombie presents a double negotiation between
agency and submission.
Cities of the Dead:
Performing Life in the Caribbean
A machine for the production of global capital. Slaves bodies
are the main tools of these forms of instrumentalization of labour
and capital production. Their bodies are instrumentalized in the labour
process as their humanity disappears, not only by forms of
exploitation but also by law.
Writing in 1790, Beckford stated that the…

principal festivals of the slaves are at their
burials. …
The Celebration Of Life In New Orleans Jazz
Funerals - Sybil Kein
"Ye living men come view the ground," for example,

was sung as "A living man come through the ground."
And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death,
& Heaven in the Slave Community 1700-1865
David R. Roediger
"to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction

or negation but ... a planting or fruition of it."
A Coffin for "The Loved One":

The Structure of Fante Death Rituals'
Page | 3
The world of the gods and demons, the carnival
of their masks and the curious game of ‘as if in
which the festival of the lived myth abrogates all
the laws of time, letting the dead swim back to
life, and the ‘once upon a time’ become the very
present - Joseph Campbell
… that the earliest theatre in Athens was built

in its market square (agora) and used temporary wooden stands
(ikria) for seating and a cleared area of the market for a stage. …
Sometime before 497 BCE, the Athenians moved their theatre
from the market square to a precinct dedicated to the god
Dionysus on the southeast slope of the Acropolis.
Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert
Bryn Mawr Classical Review by Robert Fowler
A Serious Kind of Laughter

Oliver Hennessey
the collective psychological functions of carnival, as well as its

role in articulating grass-roots social power.
Anthropologists have shown us that rituals of inversion are present in all human societies, yet this is just
one aspect of carnival. … Carnival rites also contain the power to manage the destructive energies of
collective grief, offering their participants a temporary experience of life-in-death, and death-in-life.
…the day sets in cheerfulness and the night Page | 4

resounds with the chorus. (Emery, 42)
Funerals - Sybil Kein
In those areas where masters insisted that burials be cursory, or where
itinerant preachers visited only periodically, this "second funeral"
received emphasis out of exigency, as it was indeed the only real funeral
service.


David R. Roediger
At Aunt Dicey's funeral, for instance, "before the preacher could

his benediction, some of the women got so happy they just drowned him
out with their singing and hand-clapping and shouting."
So intense was their combined grief and religious ecstasy that some
of the shouters had to be carried away from the burial.
Early 18th century accounts of slave burials in the United States

include the addition of singing and playing instruments as well as
large processions to accompany the dead
to the graveyard (Epstein, 27; Raboteau, 31).
The Celebration Of Life In New Orleans Jazz Funerals -
Sybil Kein
the… principal festivals of the slaves are at their burials. …

Their bodies lie in state, an assemblage of slaves from the
neighborhood appear.
The religious meaning of death, as a time of rebirth and not the end of life, is another African cultural
pattern still present Jazz in the Funerals. The idea of returning to Africa, as expressed in the song already Page | 5
mentioned, is based on a "firm religious belief in reincarnation" (Raboteau, 32)
The Celebration Of Life In New Orleans Jazz Funerals
Sybil Kein
… the highly sexual form of most of the movements undoubtedly has to do with
the stimulus to procreate new life to replace death. The banda is officially a
funeral dance … known as the Bongo ... danced in honor of the dead. This
dance originates in West Africa where death is not mourned… it is believed that
the deceased must be provided with the necessary conditions for a happy passage
beyond. (Ahye, 93)
Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture

Renate Lachmann, Raoul Eshelman and Marc Davis
… the proclamation of the second birth of the world out of the spirit of laughter and the morphology of
the extra-ordinary carivalesque culture, which undermines the prevailing institutions of power through its
symbols and rites of laughter. The second truth about the world reveals it to be that place in which the
"drama of the body" is played out, the drama of birth, coitus, death, growing, eating, drinking, and
evacuation. This corporeal drama applies not to the private, individual body, but rather to the larger
collective one of the folk.
The truth of the second revelation is the truth of the relativity of the truth, the truth of crisis and change,
the truth of ambivalence. In the act of carnival laughter, crisis manifests itself as negation and affirmation,
as ridicule and triumph. The consciousness of transition and crisis which corresponds to the carnival
period resists the single monologic solution and univocalization, the absoluteness of death.
This was politics conceived not as a conventional battle between partisans,

but as a struggle to define a social being that connected the past and present.
The death rite thus enabled them to express and enact their social values, to articulate their visions of
what it was that bound them together, made individuals among them unique, and separated this group of
people from others. The scene thus typifies the way that people who have been pronounced socially
dead, that is, utterly alienated and with no social ties recognized as legitimate or binding, have often made
a social world out of death itself. The funeral was an act of accounting, of reckoning, and therefore one
among the multitude of acts that made up the political history of Atlantic slavery. This was politics Page | 6
conceived not as a conventional battle between partisans, but as a struggle to define a social being that
connected the past and present. It could even be said that the event exemplified a politics of history,
which connects the politics of the enslaved to the politics of their descendants.
Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery
Vincent Brown
Death Is a Festival
Joao Jose Reis
Neighbor women acting as mourners - ‘‘old women devoted to easy tears and theatrical gestures,’’
according to Cascudo - cried vehemently to drive the soul away. Joao Varela shuddered to recall the
‘‘strident shrieking of those funereal occasions.’’ … while the body was exhibited, relatives and friends
did not refuse to give alms. There was also joyous, playful behavior, ‘‘a sign that the dead did not want
sorrow,’’ according to Vianna.
"second lines." Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom.

Even jazz funerals, the ultimate freedom celebrations, are called "second lines." . . . The celebration is an
opportunity to honor the spirit of the departed and to experience death and freedom vicariously or
sympathetically. Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom.
Behind the Lines: The Black Mardi Gras Indians and the New Orleans Second Line
Michael P. Smith
The Banda ... a funeral dance, its sexually suggestive

hip-thrusting movements showing that life emerges from
death. … a sexually motivated dance used to symbolize
the act of rebirth. Halfway between the sacred and the
secular … (also) known as the Bongo ... danced in honor
of the dead. … originates in West Africa where death is
not mourned…
Funerals Sybil Kein
Welcome to the carnival?

Podemos, populism and Bakhtin’s carnivalesque
Catherine Macmillan
In terms of the carnivalesque, this emphasis on death Page | 7
and rebirth can perhaps best be understood through Bakhtin’s
concept of the grotesque body. In carnival imagery, death is
not perceived as the antithesis of birth; in contrast, the death
of the individual body is viewed as part of
a wider cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
Michael D. Bristol emphasizes that the funeral of

Hamlet's father goes alongside with a wedding feast, and
this "odd mingling of grief and of festive laughter is
typical of the play as a whole."
A Serious Kind of Laughter:
Shakespeare's Grief and Mardi Gras 2006
- Oliver Hennessey

Only in the collective, ambivalent laughter of the carnival can the utopia (of reconciliation) develop; in
the festival time it acquires its own “place” on the festival square. In the carnival, dogma, hegemony, and
authority are dispersed through ridicule and laughter. In their stead, change and crisis, which for Bakhtin
constitute the primary factors of life and which represent the consequences of the primordial life/death
opposition, become the theme of the laugh act.
The funeral began with the mourners making “loud

lamentations” and ended with “noise and laughter.”
Jazz Funerals and Second Line Parades

Matt Sakakeeny
Though funerals would seem an unlikely source for such a festive tradition, the jazz funeral celebrates life
at the moment of death—a concept common among many cultures until the twentieth century. In New
Orleans and elsewhere, Europeans and Anglo-Americans attended funerals with music that featured a
brass band playing “solemn music on the way to the grave and happy music on the return.” There is also a
history of rejoicing at death through music in West African burial traditions. In 1819, architect Benjamin
Latrobe witnessed a continuance of this tradition at a black funeral in New Orleans. The funeral began Page | 8
with the mourners making “loud lamentations” and ended with “noise and laughter.”
"second lines." Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom.

Even jazz funerals, the ultimate freedom celebrations, are called "second lines." . . . The celebration is an
opportunity to honor the spirit of the departed and to experience death and freedom vicariously or
sympathetically. Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom.
Behind the Lines:

The Black Mardi Gras Indians and the New Orleans Second Line
Michael P. Smith
Since this was right after Mass at St. Louis Cathedral in the
French Quarter on a Sunday afternoon, it is probable that this
second line was headed for Congo Square. Such marches
gradually become associated with the cause of freedom and
political advancement for blacks in New Orleans (Schaffer and
Allen 1977, 12).
Congo Square: La Place Publique
Jerah Johnson
Congo Square, nestled at the foot of the towering facade of the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium on
Rampart Street and surrounded by a high new fence with a locked gate, looks today more like the
landscaped frontage of a public building…
Behind the Lines:

The Black Mardi Gras Indians
The great Congo-dance is performed. Everything is license and revelry. Some hundreds of negroes male
and female, follow the king of the wake, who is conspicuous for his youth, size, the whiteness of his eyes,
and the blackness of his visage… he produces an irresistible effect upon the multitude. All the characters
that follow him, of leading estimation, have their own peculiar dress, and their own contortions. They
dance, and their streamers fly, and the bells that they hung about them tinkle.
and the New Orleans Second Line
Michael P. Smith Page | 9
"We had about 12 negroes did willfully drown

themselves, and others starved themselves to death; for,"
he explained, "tis their belief that when they die they
return home to their own country and friends again"
Captain Thomas Phillips' journal of the voyage of the
Hannibal 1693
Orlando Patterson refers to this natal alienation as "social death" (Patterson 5). He argues that the slave is
a "socially dead person" because he has been extracted from his community and culture. . . . The slave
trade thus meant death for those who survived because it alienated them from their communities, but not
for those who committed suicide, because they were "able to return home."

David R. Roediger
that the dehumanization of enslaved Africans related to

the enforced erasure of their culture and deprivation of
what are now more widely considered universal human
rights constructed a slave as a “socially dead person.”
“A Fixed Melancholy”:
Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage
Ramesh Mallipeddi
Bahian carnival and social carnivalesque in trans-Atlantic context

Piers Armstrong
All of the very different approaches of the contributors to this special issue read the relationship between
the carnivalesque and the carnival as they do the social and the political, that is, as two sides of the same
coin. Carnival traditions, along with other traditions, can be considered embodied arguments. But carnival
may be different, as a restless yet timeless geist.
Page | 10
Reassessing the “Sankofa Symbol” in New York's African Burial Ground

Erik R. Seeman
Excluded from the city’s churchyards, black New Yorkers
bury their dead in the rocky ravine of little use to the city’s white residents,
… The funerals there kept white New Yorkers on edge. Twice in the early
eighteenth century, New York city officials passed legislation aimed
at preventing people of African descent from using their funerals
as cover for planning rebellions.
… blacks had stolen the scene: 'multiple batuques... in every

plaza and public places, all day and sometimes until late in the
evening, …. … 'a foreigner arriving in the city would believe he
had before him an African village, so numerous and noisy were
those batuques!'
Batuque: African Drumming and Dance between Repression
and Concession, Bahia, 1808-1855
João José Reis
Michael D. Bristol emphasizes that the funeral of Hamlet's father

goes alongside with a wedding feast, and this "odd mingling of
grief and of festive laughter is typical of the play as a whole."
A Serious Kind of Laughter: Shakespeare's Grief and Mardi
Gras 2006- Oliver Hennessey
‘Acknowledgement of their own “social death”

shored up the slaves’ resistance as in the rebel
chant: “We have no mother, no child, what is
death?”’.
In Zombie Theory. A Reader,
ed. Sarah Juliet Lauro

agency and submission. Page | 11
Cities of the Dead:
Cities of the Dead:
Jossiana Arroyo
We may think of the space of death as a threshold that allows for illumination as
well as extinction’ (Quoted in Holland, 2000, 4). The plantation as a self-
enclosed system of patriarchal normative power was a necropolis which had its
own ways of dictating how, when and why the enslaved would die.
Orlando Patterson refers to this natal alienation as "social death" (Patterson 5).
He argues that the slave is a "socially dead person" because he has been extracted
from his community and culture.
Slavery and Social Death:

A Comparative Study Orlando Patterson
Orlando Patterson notes that the “natal alienation” intrinsic to enslavement, that is, the “incapacity to
make any claims of birth or to pass on such claims, is considered a natural injustice among all peoples,”
and thus millions of people of African descent who were obliged to suffer such natal alienation had to be
regarded as somehow socially dead (8).
… not only physical death resulting from the slave trade, but the spiritual, cultural, and social uprooting
caused by it. This passage condemns the discontinuity and rupture resulting from the alienation from the
homeland for enslaved Africans.
Death Is a Festival Page | 12

Joao Jose Reis
Neighbor women acting as mourners - ‘‘old women devoted to easy tears and theatrical gestures,’’
according to Cascudo - cried vehemently to drive the soul away. Joao Varela shuddered to recall the
‘‘strident shrieking of those funereal occasions.’’ … while the body was exhibited, relatives and friends
did not refuse to give alms. There was also joyous, playful behavior, ‘‘a sign that the dead did not want
sorrow,’’ according to Vianna.
The dead spent the night in the company of relatives and friends, for whom food and drink was
provided… . Foreign travelers also failed mention food, either during the wake or after the funeral. The
only one who touched on the subject was Ewbank, who wrote that nothing was eaten at Brazilian
funerals. This is intriguing, because the collective memory of ancient burial rites insistently records the
custom of eating, inherited from Portugal and Africa and still common in rural Bahia. Food was
fundamental for mobilizing and keeping people together - and awake - around the dead.
Death Is a Festival
Joao Jose Reis
Traditional Funeral Corteges
Funerary themes occupied a prominent place in the imagination of nineteenth-century Bahia. The
anonymous author of a diary written between 1809 and 1828 made observations about death, the dead,
public executions, funerals, and Lenten and Easter processions in 45 of the journal’s 190 entries.
Confirming the Bahian people’s interest in death, Thomas Lindley wrote that the ‘‘chief amusements of
the citizens’’ included ‘‘sumptuous funerals’’ and Holy Week festivals ‘‘celebrated in rotation with grand
ceremonies, a full concert, and frequent processions.’’ Prince Maximilian of Prussia, who visited Bahia in
1827, also referred to serenades, religious processions, and funeral corteges in a single paragraph of his
journal. For Bahians, death and festivals were not mutually exclusive
Although several of Bahia’s major religious festivals were based on the theme of death, they were also
celebrations of life. On the first Sunday of Lent, a procession for Christ of the Stations of the Cross was
held, beginning at Ajuda Church and ending at the cathedral. The vigil that accompanied the ritual kissing
of the statue of the dead Christ seemed like a lively camp out. Families filled the church to bursting,
taking mats, blankets, food and even chamber pots. Outside, street vendors mingled with people who sang
and played flutes, guitars, cavaquinhos (ukulele-like instruments), and harmonicas.
On Good Friday, the Burial of the Lord procession took place, commanded by the Third Order of Carmo
and accompanied by countless brotherhoods; civilian, religious, and military authorities; troops; the
consular corps; and a crowd that expressed its noisy and irreverent devotion. This was Bahia’s greatest
procession. The bier of the dead Christ traveled from the Carmelite church to the cathedral and back
under a shower of fireworks.
In August, several brotherhoods and convents commemorated Our Lady of the Good Death. The largest
and most magnificent festival was organized by the black confraternity of Senhor dos Martirios at
Barroquinha Church. The procession carried the dead Lady’s bier to Merces Convent and back. Joao da Page | 13
Silva Campos described the ensuing festival as ‘‘a prodigality of expenses … with a large orchestra,
famous preachers, costly decoration and illumination of the church and churchyard, skyrockets, cherry
bombs, firecrackers, bonfires, hot-air balloons, music on the bandstand, and fireworks.’’ As in household
vigils, a huge banquet was held, with plenty of food, wine, and liqueurs to accompany the Virgin’s wake.
… these processions seem to have provided a model for Brazilian funerals, which were true spectacles.
Christ’s burial processions in particular dramatized the apotheosis of the funeral of a victorious God
whom the faithful wanted to join after their own deaths. Funeral corteges reenacted the journey toward
that reunion. The pomp of funerals, which might be called funerary festivities, anticipated the happy fate
imagined for the dead and, by association, helped make it happen.
Death Is a Festival
Joao Jose Reis
When Lindley associated funerals with diversion, he grasped an important aspect of contemporary
behavior. The funerary spectacle distracted its participants from their grief while calling on spectators to
take part in that grief. …
At intervals the procession stopped, and mementoes with full chorus were sung.’’ In the name of a good
death, the faithful broke Church regulations forbidding nocturnal funerals, the insistent tolling of bells,
and music in the streets.
James Wetherell, a Briton who lived in Salvador in the 1840s and 50s, recounts that funeral corteges took
place at sunset and were accompanied by a large number of acquaintances and friends and were headed
by priests, each carrying a candle covered with a paper lantern or a torch. Ferdinand Denis of France
thought it odd that funerals were not attended exclusively by relatives and friends of the family:
‘‘everyone who is decently dressed, who passes in front of the dead person’s house, is invited to take a
torch and go on to the burial.’’
While the burial rite was being conducted inside the church, men and women standing outside shot
fireworks, clapped their hands, played drums, and sang African songs. It was certainly a magnificent
funeral, African style.
Death Is a Festival

Joao Jose Reis
In the late 1830s, Kidder witnessed what he termed ‘‘pagan’’ funerary customs among slaves in Rio de
Janeiro. One Saturday, ‘‘loud and protracted cries’’ from the street attracted his attention. ‘‘On looking
out of the window,’’ he continues, ‘‘a negro was seen bearing on his head a wooden tray, on which was Page | 14
the corpse of a child, covered with a white cloth, decorated with flowers, a bunch of them being fastened
to its hands.’’ Twenty black women and a throng of children followed, ‘‘adorned most of them with
flaunting stripes of red, white, and yellow,’’ walking at a rhythmic pace and singing in an African
language. The man carrying the ‘‘black angel’’ stopped from time to time, ‘‘whirling around on his toes
like a dancer,’’ a gesture that is still common at funerals for Candomble members. When the procession
arrived at the church, the body was handed over to the priests, and the cortege returned, singing and
dancing more fervently than before. This scene was repeated several times during the foreigner’s stay in
Rio’s Engenho Velho district.
In those areas where masters insisted that burials be cursory, or where

itinerant preachers visited only periodically, this "second funeral"
received emphasis out of exigency, as it was indeed the only real funeral
service.


David R. Roediger
At Aunt Dicey's funeral, for instance, "before the preacher could

his benediction, some of the women got so happy they just drowned him
out with their singing and hand-clapping and shouting."
So intense was their combined grief and religious ecstasy that some
of the shouters had to be carried away from the burial.

among the multitude of acts that made up the political history of Atlantic slavery. This was politics
which connects the politics of the enslaved to the politics of their descendants. Page | 15
Vincent Brown

From September through May, there is at least one

parade every Sunday, often held on the anniversary of a
club’s founding.
Contemporary Parades and Jazz Funerals
Matt Sakakeeny
Benjamin Latrobe had stumbled into New Orleans's old

Place des Negres, better known for most of its history as
Congo Square.
New Orleans's Congo Square:

By Jerah Johnson
Congo Square. For most of its history before that time the square had been simply an open, grass-
covered field with only a few trees. It always remained different from New Orleans's other squares
because it was never really laid out by the city's planners as a public square. Instead it took its shape
gradually and informally out of peculiarly New Orleanian circumstances. It was, in its origins as in its
development, always of the people, an aspect of its character that was recognized when the spot was, for a
brief time after the American purchase, officially designated La Place Publique.
New Orleans's Congo Square: An Urban Setting for
Early Afro-American Culture Formation
By Jerah Johnson
Page | 16
"to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction

or negation but ... a planting or fruition of it."
I. Chukwukere on J. B. Danquah
Wiredu captures this well in the following statement: In Africa it is anthropologically verifiable that
generally, the operative ethic is communalism. This is a kind of social formation in which kinship
relations are of the last consequence. People are brought up early in life to develop a sense of bonding
with large kinship circles. This solidarity starts from the household and radiates outward to the lineage
and, with some diminution of intensity, to the clan at large.
Idowu, for instance, talks about the concept of the ancestral cults which derives from the belief of
Africans that death does not write finish' to life, that the family or community life of this earth has only
become extended into the life beyond in consequence of the 'death' of the ancestors. Thus the cults are a
means of communion and communication between those who are living on earth and those who have
gone to live in the spirit world of the ancestors. (Idowu 186)
The Stillness That Comes After:

African Traditions And The Meaning Of Death In David Bradley's
The Chaneysville Incident By Marouan Maha

David R. Roediger
"De niggers would be jumpin' high as a cow or mule."

... By the time the procession ended, the slave "was in a good mood for singing de faster hymns and de
funeral soon be forgot." That dancing lightened the sorrow is indicated by a Mississippi ex-slave's
remembrance of funerals as a time when "De niggers would be jumpin' high as a cow or mule." After the
procession ended, the singing and dancing continued at a convivial feast held in the wee hours of the
morning. Page | 17
After this ceremony the affected tear is soon dried the instruments
resound, the dancers are prepared; the day sets in cheerfulness and the
night resounds with the chorus.

Sybil Kein
Writing in 1790, Beckford stated that the… principal festivals of the slaves are at their burials. … Their
bodies lie in state, an assemblage of slaves from the neighborhood appear. When the body is carried to the
grave, they accompany the procession with a song; and when the earth is scattered over it, they send forth
a shrill and noisy howl. After this ceremony the affected tear is soon dried the instruments resound, the
dancers are prepared; the day sets in cheerfulness and the night resounds with the chorus. (Emery, 42)
Behind the Lines:
The Place des Negres (in later years known as Congo Square), located behind the old city, was a place
where slaves, Maroons, and Indians gathered during their free time; it rapidly became one of the city's
most important public markets (Johnson 1992, 42). It may have existed as early as the late 1730s, but
more likely became established in the late 1740s or 1750s, when the population of New Orleans was
around two thousand (Johnson 1991, 125). The marketplace was the primary domain of the slave's
spiritual recreation: not only could one participate freely in all forms of social and economic activities to
make life more bearable, but, during the Spanish period (1763-1803), one could earn money to purchase
freedom. The weekly processions to and from the market, and the legendary dance and drumming
celebrations there, were joyous occasions indeed.
… “King of the Wake,” a traditional staging that appeared in

early black Mardi Gras gatherings. … which in New Orleans and
the vicinity, are like the “Saturnalia” of the slaves in ancient

Rome.
Behind the Lines:

and the New Orleans Second Line Page | 18
Michael P. Smith
Originally, only white members of society participated in New Orleans Mardi Gras and the first
documentation of a black celebration comes from Timothy Flint in 1823. …
Also, in this entry, Flint recounts a dance featuring the crowned “King of the Wake,” a traditional staging
that appeared in early black Mardi Gras gatherings. Every year the negroes have two or three holidays,
which in New Orleans and the vicinity, are like the “Saturnalia” of the slaves in ancient Rome. The great
Congo-dance is performed. Everything is license and revelry. Some hundreds of negroes male and
female, follow the king of the wake, who is conspicuous for his youth, size, the whiteness of his eyes, and
the blackness of his visage… he produces an irresistible effect upon the multitude. All the characters that
follow him, of leading estimation, have their own peculiar dress, and their own contortions. They dance,
and their streamers fly, and the bells that they hung about them tinkle.
Behind the Lines:

Michael P. Smith
Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom.

… one cultural expression, which incorporates music and dance in a ritual parade format and normally
includes elaborate dressing (if not masking) of the principal members, has come to be known as the New
Orleans "second line."
… Even jazz funerals, the ultimate freedom celebrations, are called "second lines." Jazz funerals,
especially for noted musicians, draw thousands of supporters, including many who do not know the
deceased personally. The celebration is an opportunity to honor the spirit of the departed and to
experience death and freedom vicariously or sympathetically.
Behind the Lines:

Michael P. Smith
Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom. Such funerals also constitute a spiritual homecoming
that is reflected in the music; the band begins with hymns well known to Western tradition, but as the
ritual proceeds, the spirit of the celebration becomes more African.
After the mourners leave the burial grounds, or the hearse moves off to the graveyard leaving the second
line behind, the funeral shifts from the sacred to the profane. The deceased is honored first for his or her
good family life (the mournful ceremony preceding the body's burial), and then for his or her "low-down,"
"bad," or "sporting" life- commemorated by the jazz celebration after the body is "cut away".
Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom. Page | 19
Therefore, a funeral is less a cause for sadness in the Christian sense,

than an occasion for celebration in the African sense. One will be reborn
in another life. Related to death and rebirth is the belief that ancestors are
the link between the creator and mankind, equal to
and in addition to other gods.
Sybil Kein
At the beginning, the band plays dirges, somber

Christian hymns performed at a slow walking tempo.
After the body is laid to rest, or “cut loose,” the band
starts playing up-tempo music, the second liners begin
dancing, and the funeral transforms into a street
celebration.
Matt Sakakeeny
Welcome to the carnival? Podemos, populism and Bakhtin’s carnivalesque

Catherine Macmillan
In terms of the carnivalesque, this emphasis on death and rebirth can perhaps best be understood through
Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body. In carnival imagery, death is not perceived as the antithesis of
birth; in contrast, the death of the individual body is viewed as part of a wider cycle of birth, death and
rebirth. According to Bakhtin, then, the opposition of life and death is; completely contrary to the system
of grotesque imagery, in which death is not a negation of life seen as the great body of all the people, but
part of life as a whole – its indispensable component, the condition of its constant renewal and
rejuvenation. Death is here always related to birth; the grave is related to the earth’s life-giving womb.
Catherine Macmillan
… the highly sexual form of most of the movements undoubtedly has to do with
the stimulus to procreate new life to replace death. The banda is officially a
funeral dance … known as the Bongo ... danced in honor of the dead. This Page | 20
dance originates in West Africa where death is not mourned… it is believed that
the deceased must be provided with the necessary conditions for a happy passage
beyond. (Ahye, 93)
Sybil Kein
Expanding the African processional tradition, the Jazz Funeral parade includes the funeral, dances of the
West Indian Voodoo religion, chiefly the Banda, a sexually motivated dance used to symbolize the act of
rebirth. Halfway between the sacred and the secular… the highly sexual form of most of the movements
undoubtedly has to do with the stimulus to procreate new life to replace death. The banda is officially a
funeral dance and may be private and ceremonial… or free, secular, and public…
The Banda is also found in Trinidad and Tobago where it is known as the Bongo ... danced in honor of
the dead. This dance originates in West Africa where death is not mourned… it is believed that the
deceased must be provided with the necessary conditions for a happy passage beyond. (Ahye, 93)
A description of this funeral dance shows that it is almost identical to the dances seen at Jazz Funerals.
Along the parade route of a Jazz Funeral, and very spontaneously, a group of “second liners" will form a
circle around two of their members. Other "second liners" crowd around them. If the two dancers are
male and female, the movements of the two become highly sexual and they are encouraged by those in
the close circle around them who are singing, (one of the songs is a repetition of the line "Aint got no
drawers on", shouting remarks, and handclapping to the rhythm of the song being played by the band. If
two males are inside the circle, the dance becomes highly competitive though still sexual. These male
dancers sometimes mimic each other’s steps, or add twirls, which are usually low to the ground, and
leaps, which end in poses of rebellious strength, and sometimes end with what is called "doin’ the dog" or
"doin’ the alligator", a prone position of the body on the ground, a copulation with the earth.
Sybil Kein
This compares almost exactly with a description of the Bongo by Molly Ahye: Musicians and singers
form a large circle, outside of which the onlookers who actually participate by joining the singing and
spurring on the dancers sometimes have to be pushed back when they close in on the dancers in their
enthusiasm. At times on impulse, one of them… will jostle through the crowd to challenge one of the
dancers of the moment. Full encouragement is given to him by all… Two dancers, usually males, jump
into the circle and move energetically, mirroring each other in competitive spirit, each trying to outdo the
other.
The "second liners" in a Jazz Funeral do not need costumes, but as with the Bongo dancers of Trinidad
and Tobago, "they make adjustments to what they may be wearing at the time. They sometimes roll their
trousers up for freedom of movement and add scarves (handkerchiefs for second liners) around their
necks and headbands which serve to absorb perspiration" (Ahye, 94)
Ahye also mentions the Bongo Croisee or the crossed Bongo which "maintains a clipped crossing of the Page | 21
feet and legs with variations. Movements of stamping, jumping and turning encourage many variations
and improvisations, but the emphasis is on the constant crossing of the feet, whatever the design. " This
Bongo Croisee is also kept intact by the participants in the Jazz Funerals. "The Banda is… a funeral
dance, its sexually suggestive hip-thrusting movements showing that
Sybil Kein
…the day sets in cheerfulness and the night

resounds with the chorus. (Emery, 42)
Sybil Kein
Early 18th century accounts of slave burials in the United States
include the addition of singing and playing instruments as well as
large processions to accompany the dead
to the graveyard (Epstein, 27; Raboteau, 31).
the… principal festivals of the slaves are at their burials. …
Their bodies lie in state, an assemblage of slaves from the
neighborhood appear.
Sybil Kein
One will be reborn in another life. Related to death and rebirth is the
belief that ancestors are the link between the creator and mankind, equal
to and in addition to other gods.
Sybil Kein Page | 22
pattern still present in the Jazz Funerals. The idea of returning to Africa, as expressed in the song already
mentioned, is based on a "firm religious belief in reincarnation" (Raboteau, 32) Therefore, a funeral is
less a cause for sadness in the Christian sense, than an occasion for celebration in the African sense. One
will be reborn in another life. Related to death and rebirth is the belief that ancestors are the link between
the creator and mankind, equal to and in addition to other gods.
The musicians, funeral directors, family, and friends of the dead make up what is called the first or main
line, while the crowd marching behind is collectively known as the second line. As the procession moves
from the funeral service to the burial site, the first and second lines march to the beat of a brass band. At
the beginning, the band plays dirges, somber Christian hymns performed at a slow walking tempo. After
the body is laid to rest, or “cut loose,” the band starts playing up-tempo music, the second liners begin d
Matt Sakakeeny
Rather, the ceremony was suspended for a time, until a "second

funeral" could be arranged. Some slaves, in fact, regarded this
second event "held days, weeks or even a year after interment"
as the real "funeral" and all that had gone before as merely
"burial."

David R. Roediger
Even where slaves assumed greater control over burial services they were not satisfied unless there was a
"second funeral"?" a pageant … arranged for a long time ahead … marked by the gathering of kindred
and friends from far and near ... a vast and excitable crowd."
John Jasper, the famous black preacher, to the effect that, "There was one thing which the Negro greatly
insisted upon and which not even the most hard-hearted of masters were willing to deny. They could not Page | 23
bear that their dead be put away without a funeral."
David R. Roediger
These basic postures involve the perception of the death ritual as "a
veritable climax to life [which] … through the ancestral cult, links the
living with the dead."
Herskovits is correct in stressing that "whatever else has been lost of aboriginal custom, the attitudes
toward the dead … have survived." These basic postures involve the perception of the death ritual as "a
veritable climax to life [which] … through the ancestral cult, links the living with the dead." The funeral
acquires deep significance (and elaborateness) in such ancestor-worshipping societies because it acts to
integrate "living and dying with the concept of an after-life and, above all, with eventual deification."
At Aunt Dicey's funeral, for instance, "before the preacher could finish his benediction, some of the women
got so happy they just drowned him out with their singing and hand-clapping and shouting." So intense was
their combined grief and religious ecstasy that some of the shouters had to be carried away from the burial.

Post-burial activities, likewise communal and African-influenced, were generally more lighthearted and
faster paced than the solemn interment. Just as the Mandingoes' funerals went from crying to singing, and
dancing, so the funerals of the slaves now turned to conviviality.
And Simon Brown remembered the "sad songs with happy endings." In most cases, this joyous aspect of
the slave funeral did not end with the dinner following the burial. Rather, the ceremony was suspended
for a time, until a "second funeral" could be arranged. Some slaves, in fact, regarded this second event
"held days, weeks or even a year after interment" as the real "funeral" and all that had gone before as
merely "burial."
Even where slaves assumed greater control over burial services they were not satisfied unless there was a Page | 24
and friends from far and near ... a vast and excitable crowd." With deep roots in Africa, this practice of
holding elaborate memorial services is a continuing tradition among Afro Americans which has long
outlived the harsh necessities of slave life.
The Wake. Having gathered for the "settin' up," usually held at the
house of the deceased, the crowd of mourners began a ritual which was
to last the entire night. This protracted display of intimacy and communal
sorrow, which so powerfully impressed white observers, took the form of
singing, chanting, praying, clapping and a highly personal bidding of
farewell to the corpse in which each mourner paused at the coffin to say
goodbye.
David R. Roediger
The Social Shaping Of Emotion:

The Case Of Grief
Lyn H. Lofland
The most sophisticated rendering of this point of view is to be found in the works of scholars concerned
with the relationship between grief and mourning and critical of the de-ritualized character of much
modern public mourning. Aribs (1974) and Gorer (1965), for example, argue that among modem
Westerners, the decline of well-developed death rituals has pathologically extended grief’s “normal
course.” Humans in other times and other places know the same grief feelings that modem humans know.
But because of effective public ceremonies, these feelings persist for a much shorter period of time.
Wiredu captures this well in the following statement: In Africa it is anthropologically verifiable that
with large kinship circles. This solidarity starts from the household and radiates outward to the lineage Page | 25
and, with some diminution of intensity, to the clan at large. The normative meaning of this bonding for an
individual is that she has obligations to large groups of kith and kin.
Culture influences people ostensibly because it provides them with an identity and a worldview through
which they understand or interpret the cosmos. …
Traditional religions are not primarily for the individual, but for his community of which he is part. … in
traditional society there are no irreligious people. To be human is to belong to the whole community, and
to do so involves participating in the beliefs, ceremonies, rituals and festivals of that community. Mbiti
Conjuring the Ghost: A Call and Response to Haints

Drea Brown
Home, for many Black folks, is a loaded concept. Going home is a crossroads inhabited by lives and
afterlives, a free and fettered space that feels (im)possible and full of promise, that must be confronted in
order to move through. It is the low hum of spirituals and codified melodies where going home, or home-
going, means freedom, or death, or finding freedom in death and a heavenly by and by.
‘Acknowledgement of their own “social death”

shored up the slaves’ resistance as in the rebel chant:
“We have no mother, no child, what is death?”’.
In Zombie Theory. A Reader,
ed. Sarah Juliet Lauro
Cities of the Dead:

Jossiana Arroyo
… blacks had stolen the scene: 'multiple batuques... in every plaza and public places, all
day and sometimes until late in the evening, …. 'a foreigner arriving in the city would
believe he had before him an African village, so numerous and noisy were those
batuques!' … … The African appropriation of the festive space meant they had won a
battle in a symbolic war. But the politics of symbols would not distract the Correio from
a possibly more serious political outcome, … Page | 26
Batuque: African Drumming and Dance between Repression and Concession, Bahia, 1808-1855
João José Reis
“We have no mother, no child, what is death?”

The concept of social death … the dehumanization of enslaved
Africans related to the enforced erasure of their culture and
deprivation of what are now more widely considered universal
human rights constructed a slave as a “socially dead person.”
Ramesh Mallipeddi
… the ways in which enslavement effects what Black sociologist Orlando Patterson terms as social death.
Within slavery, while significant cultural distortion was inherent in being severed from one’s home
country, enslavers also imposed various forms of internal isolation to maintain a structure of dependency
that prevented the enslaved from forming self-empowering social relations and such debilitation marked
the social death of the enslaved.
In his book, Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson notes that the “natal alienation”
intrinsic to enslavement, that is, the “incapacity to make any claims of birth or to pass on such
claims, is considered a natural injustice among all peoples,” and thus millions of people of
African descent who were obliged to suffer such natal alienation had to be regarded as somehow
socially dead.
Material Culture and Social Death:

African-American Burial Practices
Ross W. Jamieson
Orlando Patterson has proposed that the institution of slavery caused the
“social death” of slaves, in that the inherited meanings of their ancestors
were denied to them through control of their cultural practices by slave
owners and overseers.
Page | 27

Vincent Brown

The Chaneysville Incident
By Marouan Maha
Many scholars have explored the concept of death in African societies, explaining that death among
certain groups simply marks a passage from one realm of reality to another. Idowu, for instance, talks
about the concept of the ancestral cults which derives from the belief of Africans that death does not write
finish' to life, that the family or community life of this earth has only become extended into the life
beyond in consequence of the 'death' of the ancestors. Thus the cults are a means of communion and
communication between those who are living on earth and those who have gone to live in the spirit world
of the ancestors. (Idowu 186)
Idowu's words also resonate with Margaret Washington Creel's findings about the Gullah community in
South Carolina in "Gullah Attitudes toward Life and Death." Creel looks at the influence of African
traditional religion on the attitude of the Gullah community towards death. She notes, "Death was a
journey into the spirit world, not a break with life or earthly beings. [It] was not the end of life nor the
cemetery a final resting place; it was a door (mwelo) between two worlds" (Creel 81-82).
What both Creel and Idowu articulate here is the idea that death is just a transitory state, and that
communication and connection with the ancestors continues after their death. This emphasis on the bond
with the ancestors remains highly significant to the novel's engagement with the past. Death in this sense
is not so clearly separated from life. Death is a fluid notion that undergoes a cyclical process, thus
allowing for a connection and communication with the ancestors beyond death.
Page | 28
Orlando Patterson refers to this natal alienation as "social death" (Patterson 5).
He argues that the slave is a "socially dead person" because he has been extracted
from his community and culture.
What this paragraph refers to as "death" is not only physical death resulting from the slave trade, but the
spiritual, cultural, and social uprooting caused by it. This passage condemns the discontinuity and rupture
resulting from the alienation from the homeland for enslaved Africans. Orlando Patterson refers to this
natal alienation as "social death" (Patterson 5). He argues that the slave is a "socially dead person"
because he has been extracted from his community and culture. . . . The slave trade thus meant death for
those who survived because it alienated them from their communities, but not for those who committed
suicide, because they were "able to return home."
Congo Square
… the precincts of Congo Green. This is a large level square, including more than a dozen acres, situated
not far from the Basin, and set apart by an ordinance of the city for the Sunday amusement of the Africans
exclusively. It is enclosed in strong iron railings, has a gate of the same metal on each of the four
sides, and is adorned with many beautiful trees, scattered here and there at irregular intervals, which gives
it the appearance of a forest rather than a park.
The Anonymous Story of

“The Singing Girl of New Orleans” (1849) `
Jeroen Dewulf
… the dazzling apparition. She sung, with the accompaniment of

most appropriate gestures, a merry bacchanal song, and the
listeners cheered with shouts of laughter. At a signal from the old
hunchback she took up a martial lyric and every eye gleamed
with the red light of battle. Then she trilled a mournful dirge - a
wail of love and death;

(ikria) for seating and a cleared area of the market for a stage. … Page | 29
Conjuring the Ghost: A Call and Response to Haints

Drea Brown

David R. Roediger
"Of death the Negro showed but little fear, but talked of it
familiarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters,
perhaps back to his ancient forests again."
W. E. B. DuBois
"second funeral" … "held days, weeks or even a year after interment"

as the real "funeral" and all that had gone before as merely "burial."
morning. … Rather, the ceremony was suspended for a time, until a "second funeral" could be arranged.
Some slaves, in fact, regarded this second event "held days, weeks or even a year after interment" as the Page | 30
real "funeral" and all that had gone before as merely "burial."
David R. Roediger
The Missing Link between Congo Square and the Mardi Gras Indians?
The Anonymous Story of “The Singing Girl of New Orleans” (1849)
Jeroen Dewulf
… the dazzling apparition. She sung, with the accompaniment of most appropriate gestures, a merry
bacchanal song, and the listeners cheered with shouts of laughter. At a signal from the old hunchback
she took up a martial lyric and every eye gleamed with the red light of battle. Then she trilled a mournful
dirge - a wail of love and death; and a thousand ebony cheeks were wet with tears as with summer rain,
while sobs and even shrieks resounded at a funeral! In truth she could not have selected a more
impressible audience; for the southern negroes have an insatiable passion for music, and sing themselves
almost continually.
Carnival: Fighting Oppression With Celebration

Karolee Stevens
Carnival is the glorification of things that occur from the waist down, in opposition to the repressive and
hierarchical world of the bourgeoisie, where the soul has a hypocritical primacy .../n Carnival, in its
typical space, an instant overcomes time and the event becomes more than the system that classifies it and
gives it a normative meaning.
Although elements of ancestral European roots persisted, such as the pre-Lenten time period and the
masquerading in elaborate garments, Carnival developed a flavour uniquely Creole. Rituals played out,
such as 'Canboulay' from the French 'cannes brule, meaning "burning canes" (Stewart, 1986:302), in
direct reference to the end of enforced sugar cane production. It entailed a "procession at midnight on the
Sunday of carnival celebrating in a veiled, symbolic form the deliverance of the black population from the
yoke of slavery" (Burton, 1985:183). It visually and physically expressed the moment of liberation from
the grasp of the European colonists. Even components of the Carnival which appeared to be appropriated
from the European traditions, acquired more than a hint of Creole spirit. The ritual adornment of lavish
costumes depicting various characters carried a rather satiric tone, mocking the white upper class and
their materialistic ideals. Perhaps it is for this reason, as well as an unsubstantiated fear of violent Page | 31
outbreaks, that the elite community attempted to suppress the celebration.
Attempts by the European colonists to halt Carnival arose in other forms, as well. The traditional sound of
the drumbeat, a protege of African tribal customs, was silenced by government legislation.
Renu Juneja makes a similar comment by stating, "It (Carnival) retained both elements of celebration and
protest, and it also became an expression of a distinctively black culture by drawing on cultural forms
brought over from Africa" (1988:88). Reinforcing one's culture in the face of an oppressing people is,
perhaps, one of the strongest and most intelligent protest against subjugation. The Afro-Caribbean people
asserted this power by turning the factors of domination into the elaboration of revitalization (Manning,
1978:202).
Bahian carnival and social carnivalesque in trans-Atlantic

context
Piers Armstrong
All of the very different approaches of the contributors to this
special issue read the relationship between the carnivalesque and
the carnival as they do the social and the political, that is, as two
sides of the same coin. Carnival traditions, along with other
traditions, can be considered embodied arguments. But carnival
may be different, as a restless yet timeless geist.
Reassessing the “Sankofa Symbol” in New York's African Burial Ground

Erik R. Seeman
Excluded from the city’s churchyards, black New Yorkers
bury their dead in the rocky ravine of little use to the city’s white residents,
… The funerals there kept white New Yorkers on edge. Twice in the early
eighteenth century, New York city officials passed legislation aimed
at preventing people of African descent from using their funerals
as cover for planning rebellions.
The Correio took advantage of this episode for a vehement defence of the elimination of batuques in
Bahia. Claiming to be the voice of public opinion, particularly of those who attended the coronation
celebrations, the reporter swore that blacks had stolen the scene: 'multiple batuques... in every plaza and
public places, all day and sometimes until late in the evening, …. 'a foreigner arriving in the city would Page | 32
believe he had before him an African village, so numerous and noisy were those batuques!'
Batuque: African Drumming and Dance between Repression and Concession, Bahia, 1808-1855
João José Reis
John Jasper, the famous black preacher, to the effect that, "There was one
thing which the Negro greatly insisted upon and which not even the most
hard-hearted of masters were willing to deny. They could not bear that
their dead be put away without a funeral."

David R. Roediger
The Social Shaping Of Emotion:

The Case Of Grief
Lyn H. Lofland
The most sophisticated rendering of this point of view is to be found in the works of scholars concerned
with the relationship between grief and mourning and critical of the de-ritualized character of much
modern public mourning. Aribs (1974) and Gorer (1965), for example, argue that among modem
Westerners, the decline of well-developed death rituals has pathologically extended grief’s “normal
course.” Humans in other times and other places know the same grief feelings that modem humans know.
But because of effective public ceremonies, these feelings persist for a much shorter period of time.
… "to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction or negation but ... a
planting or fruition of it."

Nevertheless, a general Akan (possibly universal African) belief needs to Page | 33

be stressed at the outset. Death is essentially a continuation of life; the
two phenomena are complementary rather than dichotomous.
… This strong belief that a class of dead people who qualify to be
honoured as ancestors maintains a close, if vaguely formulated,
relationship with its living kinsmen is a marked feature of the social
thought, cosmology, and ritual institutions of many, if not all, indigenous
African peoples (cf. Mbiti 1969: esp. 83-91).
…. attention to how Africans responded to their dislocation from Africa and to their alienation under
slavery, and how “the individual experiences of memory intersected with the interests of community” - in
short, how slaves forged “political life” under conditions of social and physical death - remains
a necessary, if admittedly challenging, endeavor.
“A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage

Ramesh Mallipeddi
The Hannibal, a Guineaman financed by the Royal African Company, sailed with a cargo of 700 slaves
(480 men and 220 women) from the West African kingdom Whydah to the Caribbean on 27 July 1694.
Before the voyage began, as the ship took on slaves at the Guinea coast, more than a dozen captives died
by drowning themselves and self-inducing starvation on account of their enforced removal from home,
their dread of Barbados, and their belief that via death they would return to “their country and friends
again.”
The Hannibal’s subsequent journey across the Atlantic proved even deadlier: upon its arrival in Barbados
on 4 November, after a relatively long voyage of 3 months and 8 days, the ship had lost nearly one third
of its crew and half of its cargo, …
… how slaves forged “political life” under conditions of social and physical death - remains
a necessary, if admittedly challenging, endeavor.
Ramesh Mallipeddi
The concept of social death was originally described by Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death: A
Comparative Study (1982) where he argued that the dehumanization of enslaved Africans related to the
enforced erasure of their culture and deprivation of what are now more widely considered universal human
rights constructed a slave as a “socially dead person.” He writes: “Alienated from all “rights” or claims of
birth, he [the slave] ceased to belong in his own right to any legitimate social order.”
Page | 34
Nevertheless, a general Akan (possibly universal

African) belief needs to be stressed at the outset. Death
is essentially a continuation of life; the two phenomena
are complementary rather than dichotomous.

Although some funeral crowds displayed scant emotion as they stoically stood by listening to the
preacher's words, most gave themselves over to intense feeling. The women, as in Akan societies in
Africa, were particularly given to such displays, often crying, shouting and singing as the preacher spoke.
At Aunt Dicey's funeral, for instance, "before the preacher could finish his benediction, some of the
women got so happy they just drowned him out with their singing and hand-clapping and shouting." So
intense was their combined grief and religious ecstasy that some of the shouters had to be carried away
from the burial. That the mourners sang and shouted is clear, but what they sang is not.
To appreciate Fante funeral practices, it is necessary to set them against the broader background of the
Akan people's general conception of life and death, especially their belief about what happens to man's
immortal part at death. Perhaps only a full study of Akan eschatology, which unfortunately is outside the
scope of this paper, would reveal all of the underlying importance of the elaborate and expensive
mortuary rites for their social ideology and customs in general and for the understanding of the
relationship between father and children in particular. Nevertheless, a general Akan (possibly universal
African) belief needs to be stressed at the outset. Death is essentially a continuation of life; the two
phenomena are complementary rather than dichotomous.
According to Danquah (1968:156), "to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction or negation but ... a
planting or fruition of it." The spirits (asaman, sing. osaman or saman) of the dead depend on the help and
cooperation of their surviving kinsmen to speed them to Samanadze, the ideal eternal destination. It is
from this spirit-world that properly settled spirits, henceforth ancestors (nananom or nsamanfo), play their
widely believed role as primarily benevolent interveners in the mundane affairs of their diligent relatives,
particularly in their interaction with the invisible world of deities and enigmatic cosmic forces. Spirits that
for one reason or another (e.g., nonfulfilment by the living of their obligations to the dead kinsman) have
not yet settled down in Samanadze remain a source of nuisance and danger for the group as a whole and
especially for the closer relatives. This strong belief that a class of dead people who qualify to be
honoured as ancestors maintains a close, if vaguely formulated, relationship with its living kinsmen is a
marked feature of the social thought, cosmology, and ritual institutions of many, if not all, indigenous
African peoples (cf. Mbiti 1969: esp. 83-91).
Page | 35

The concept of social death … the dehumanization of enslaved
Africans related to the enforced erasure of their culture and
deprivation of what are now more widely considered universal
human rights constructed a slave as a “socially dead person.”
“A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory, and the Middle
Passage - Ramesh Mallipeddi
As Sarah J. Lauro has argued, originate from the violent histories of colonisation, slavery and plantation
society in the Americas. The first rebellions against British and French colonialism, as well as the Haitian
Revolution made of ‘death a rallying cry in the history of rebellion’. As Lauro argues, ‘Acknowledgement
of their own “social death” shored up the slaves’ resistance as in the rebel chant: “We have no mother, no
child, what is death?”’. Thus in the zombie the relationship between labour, social death, and freedom get
complicated to the point that the zombie presents a double negotiation between agency and submission.
For African-Americans (and perhaps other marginalized groups) death remains a queer dyad, consisting
of the social death in addition to the physical death. The concept of social death was originally described
by Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982) … writes: “Alienated
from all “rights” or claims of birth, he [the slave] ceased to belong in his own right to any legitimate
social order.” In other words, an individual who does not possess capacities that are conventionally seen
as common to all living humans cannot be rightfully considered to be alive in the typical sense.
Conjuring the Ghost:

A Call and Response to Haints
Drea Brown
Wiredu captures this well in the following statement: In Africa it is anthropologically verifiable that Page | 36
with large kinship circles. This solidarity starts from the household and radiates outward to the lineage
and, with some diminution of intensity, to the clan at large. The normative meaning of this bonding for an
individual is that she has obligations to large groups of kith and kin.
"Death was a journey into the spirit world, not a break with life or earthly beings.
[It] was not the end of life nor the cemetery a final resting place; it was a door
(mwelo) between two worlds" (Creel 81-82).
The Chaneysville Incident By Marouan Maha
Culture influences people ostensibly because it provides them with an identity and a worldview through
which they understand or interpret the cosmos. …
Traditional religions are not primarily for the individual, but for his community of which he is part. … in
traditional society there are no irreligious people. To be human is to belong to the whole community, and
to do so involves participating in the beliefs, ceremonies, rituals and festivals of that community. Mbiti

David R. Roediger
… the acquiescence of the master was ultimately

responsible for the strength of the slave funeral as an institution.
To stress the funeral as an institution deriving its impetus from the strength of the slave community is at
odds with earlier studies which make the human, even paternalistic, feelings of the masters responsible
for the ability of chattels to hold impressive funeral ceremonies. For E. Franklin Frazier the acquiescence
of the master was ultimately responsible for the strength of the slave funeral as an institution. Frazier
approvingly quotes John Jasper, the famous black preacher, to the effect that, "There was one thing which
the Negro greatly insisted upon and which not even the most hard-hearted of masters were willing to
deny. They could not bear that their dead be put away without a funeral."
Post-burial activities, likewise communal and African-influenced, were generally more lighthearted and Page | 37
faster paced than the solemn interment. Just as the Mandingoes' funerals went from crying to singing, and
dancing, so the funerals of the slaves now turned to conviviality. In the low-lying coastal areas of South
Carolina and Georgia, where the density of black population and the incidence of Africanisms were
greatest, this change to a festive atmosphere was sometimes markedly African.
morning.
Slaveowner Marie Schoolcraft perceived the rationale behind

such feasting, commenting that slaves eat "a sumptuous hot
supper ... on the principle that eating a great deal will mollify
any grief that flesh is heir to."

David R. Roediger
And Simon Brown remembered the "sad songs with happy endings." In most cases, this joyous aspect of
the slave funeral did not end with the dinner following the burial. Rather, the ceremony was suspended
for a time, until a "second funeral" could be arranged. Some slaves, in fact, regarded this second event
"held days, weeks or even a year after interment" as the real "funeral" and all that had gone before as
merely "burial."
In those areas where masters insisted that burials be cursory,

or where itinerant preachers visited only periodically, this "second funeral"
received emphasis out of exigency, as it was indeed the only real funeral service.
Even where slaves assumed greater control over burial services they were not satisfied unless there was a
and friends from far and near ... a vast and excitable crowd."
With deep roots in Africa, this practice of holding elaborate memorial services is a continuing tradition
among Afro Americans which has long outlived the harsh necessities of slave life. The above discussion
of slave funeral practices focuses upon the slave community's concern for a proper burial as well as its
specifically African use of various burial customs.
Merely to point out the continuation of African burial customs, in various degrees, among American
slaves seriously understates the African aspect of slave behavior concerning death and funerals. What is
involved is not only the practice of African rituals in an American context, but the continuation, albeit in a
changed form, of basically a West African understanding of the meaning of death. Herskovits is correct in
stressing that "whatever else has been lost of aboriginal custom, the attitudes toward the dead … have Page | 38
survived." These basic postures involve the perception of the death ritual as "a veritable climax to life
[which] … through the ancestral cult, links the living with the dead." The funeral acquires deep
significance (and elaborateness) in such ancestor-worshipping societies because it acts to integrate "living
and dying with the concept of an after-life and, above all, with eventual deification."
that the dehumanization of enslaved Africans related to

the enforced erasure of their culture and deprivation of
what are now more widely considered universal human
rights constructed a slave as a “socially dead person.”
Ramesh Mallipeddi

Cities of the Dead:

Page | 39
The Anonymous Story of ‘The Singing Girl of New Orleans’ (1849)

Jeroen Dewulf
Originally, only white members of society participated in New Orleans Mardi Gras and the first
documentation of a black celebration comes from Timothy Flint in 1823.
Also, in this entry, Flint recounts a dance featuring the crowned “King of the Wake,” a traditional staging
that appeared in early black Mardi Gras gatherings. Every year the negroes have two or three holidays,
which in New Orleans and the vicinity, are like the “Saturnalia” of the slaves in ancient Rome. The great
Congo-dance is performed. Everything is license and revelry. Some hundreds of negroes male and
female, follow the king of the wake, who is conspicuous for his youth, size, the whiteness of his eyes, and
the blackness of his visage… he produces an irresistible effect upon the multitude. All the characters that
follow him, of leading estimation, have their own peculiar dress, and their own contortions. They dance,
and their streamers fly, and the bells that they hung about them tinkle.
The Wake. Having gathered for the "settin' up," usually held at the house of the deceased, the crowd of
mourners began a ritual which was to last the entire night. This protracted display of intimacy and
communal sorrow, which so powerfully impressed white observers, took the form of singing, chanting,
praying, clapping and a highly personal bidding of farewell to the corpse in which each mourner paused at
the coffin to say goodbye.

Although some funeral crowds displayed scant emotion as they stoically stood by listening to the
preacher's words, most gave themselves over to intense feeling. The women, as in Akan societies in
Africa, were particularly given to such displays, often crying, shouting and singing as the preacher spoke.
At Aunt Dicey's funeral, for instance, "before the preacher could finish his benediction, some of the
women got so happy they just drowned him out with their singing and hand-clapping and shouting." So
intense was their combined grief and religious ecstasy that some of the shouters had to be carried away
from the burial.
Batuque: African Drumming and Dance between

Repression and Concession, Bahia, 1808-1855
João José Reis
Page | 40
The Correio took advantage of this episode for a vehement defence of the elimination of batuques in
Bahia. Claiming to be the voice of public opinion, particularly of those who attended the coronation
celebrations, the reporter swore that blacks had stolen the scene: 'multiple batuques... in every plaza and
public places, all day and sometimes until late in the evening, …. And he imagined what a foreign tourist,
a European of course, would think in the face of such music and dance: 'a foreigner arriving in the city
would believe he had before him an African village, so numerous and noisy were those batuques!' … The
African appropriation of the festive space meant they had won a battle in a symbolic war. But the politics
of symbols would not distract the Correio from a possibly more serious political outcome, …

La Place Publique. Congo Square
… in the early decades of its French colonial period, … one of the city's public markets. The famous
dancing, playing, and singing represented by-products of the square's market function.
The open ground upon which the slave vendors spread their wares and set up their market stalls stretched
along the edge of the City Commons at the end of Orleans Street, just beyond where it abutted the low
earthen breastworks and borrow pit that formed the city's limits and served as its primitive defense line.
John Smith Kendall noted that the Place des Negres lay in the "vicinity" of a spot which local Indians had
long used for celebrating their annual corn feast or fete du ble.
An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation

Jerah Johnson
… the precincts of Congo Green. This is a large level square, including more than a dozen acres, situated
not far from the Basin, and set apart by an ordinance of the city for the Sunday amusement of the Africans
exclusively. It is enclosed in strong iron railings, has a gate of the same metal on each of the four
sides, and is adorned with many beautiful trees, scattered here and there at irregular intervals, which gives Page | 41
it the appearance of a forest rather than a park.
Benjamin Latrobe had stumbled into New Orleans's old Place des Negres, better known for most of its
history as Congo Square. And from his time to ours, observers and scholars, particularly music history
scholars, have continued to describe and analyze the beat of the bamboulas, the wail of the banzas, and
the congeries of African dances that became the hallmark of the square.
Congo Square: La Place Publique

The African American culture nurtured in New Orleans’
Congo Square was, and is, unlike any other.

Jerah Johnson
Congo Square, nestled at the foot of the towering facade of the New Orleans Municipal Auditorium on
Rampart Street and surrounded by a high new fence with a locked gate, looks today more like the
landscaped frontage of a public building than it does a public square. Only its eighteen large live oaks hint
at its age. And even those are young compared to their setting. They were planted in 1893 when the city
fathers, in an ironic move, renamed the square in honor of former Confederate General P. G. T.
Beauregard, who had just died. For most of its history before that time the square had been simply an
open, grass- covered field with only a few trees. It always remained different from New Orleans's other
squares because it was never really laid out by the city's planners as a public square. Instead it took its
shape gradually and informally out of George W. Cable: A Biography (Baton Rouge, 1966),
It was, in its origins as in its development, always of the people, an aspect of its character that was
recognized when the spot was, for a brief time after the American purchase, officially designated La Place
Publique. Congo Square, however, originated not in the early American decades of New Orleans's
history, but nearly a hundred years before, in the early decades of its French colonial period, and not as a
spot where black New Orleanians gathered to dance, play, and sing, but as one of the city's public
markets. The famous dancing, playing, and singing represented by-products of the square's market
function.

An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation Page | 42
Jerah Johnson
Shortly after he completed repairs on the national capitol, which the British had burned when they
captured Washington during the War of 1812, Benjamin Henry Latrobe proceeded to New Orleans. There
he was to oversee construction of the waterworks he had designed for the century-old French city,
recently acquired by the United States as part of the massive Louisiana Purchase.
One Sunday afternoon in 1819 exploring the "back-of-town" of the city of New Orleans away from the
river, Latrobe, going up St. Peters Street and approaching the Common, he heard in the distance an
extraordinary noise, which he "supposed to proceed from some horse mill, the horses trampling on a
wooden floor." …The thunderous din that Latrobe had mistaken for the thumping of horse hooves came
from the echoes of percussions hundreds of hands and sticks on drums, gourds, and hollow, cotter-shaped,
wooden blocks, all backed by the plunking of a variety of banjo-like instruments made from calabashes
affixed to long fingerboards unsupervised slaves drumming and dancing of the “Bamboula,” , Congo,”
and ... ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller wild beasts, with fringes, ribbons, little bells,
and shells and balls, jingling and flirting about the performers’ legs and arms.
Benjamin Latrobe had stumbled into New Orleans's old Place des
Negres, better known for most of its history as Congo Square.

Jerah Johnson
On Sunday afternoon a fortnight or so later, while exploring the "back-of-town" of the city, away from
the river, Latrobe heard in the distance an extraordinary noise, which he "supposed to proceed from some
horse mill, the horses trampling on a wooden floor." But he found, as he approached, the sound be "5 or
600 persons assembled in an open space or public square." All those "engaged in the business seemed to
be blacks," for he "did not observe a dozen yellow faces" in the crowd. The crowd he discovered, when he
moved into it to see what was going on, comprised not a single mass, but a series of clusters. The
members of each cluster crowded around to form a rough circle, "the largest not ten feet in diameter." In
the middle or on the edge of each circle sat or squatted two or three musicians, and, in most circles,
around or in front of the musicians, from two to a dozen dancers moved to the rhythm the circle's music,
song, and chant.
Quite remarkable are the many parallels to Timothy Flint’s well-known description of a Congo dance
from the year 1823. He too used the term “saturnalia,” observed the presence of a “King of the wake” or
“King of Congo,” described the king’s crown as a series of paper boxes in the form of a pyramid and Page | 43
made a reference to little bells attached to the dancers’ bodies.
The Missing Link between Congo Square and the Mardi Gras Indians?
Jeroen Dewulf
Behind the Lines:

Michael P. Smith
The Place des Negres (in later years known as Congo Square), located behind the old city, was a place
where slaves, Maroons, and Indians gathered during their free time; it rapidly became one of the city's
most important public markets (Johnson 1992, 42). It may have existed as early as the late 1730s, but
more likely became established in the late 1740s or 1750s, when the population of New Orleans was
around two thousand (Johnson 1991, 125). The marketplace was the primary domain of the slave's
spiritual recreation: not only could one participate freely in all forms of social and economic activities to
make life more bearable, but, during the Spanish period (1763-1803), one could earn money to purchase
freedom. The weekly processions to and from the market, and the legendary dance and drumming
celebrations there, were joyous occasions indeed.
After the Louisiana Purchase (1804) these traditional African-

American celebrations were increasingly suppressed and
displaced by an in- coming Anglo-American society that feared
and despised it (La Cour 1952, 17; Kinser 1990, 200-205; Paxton
1822, 40-41; Durell 1845, 34-36).
Behind the Lines:

Michael P. Smith
By the 1840s or 1850s African-American culture had been driven into hiding and obscurity and was being
reported as traditional social and pleasure clubs (the more established groups) are now usually
incorporated, and they abide by all city regulations. They register for parade permits, hire bands, and
allow their parades to be routed and monitored by the city. The largely underclass black Indian gangs
remain outlaws. They remain tribal and anonymous, perform their own music, and march through the city
on the back streets, where they come and go as they please. Being the carriers of the Maroon tradition, the
black Indians refuse to subject themselves to the humiliation of being monitored and controlled by hostile
authorities. To do so would betray the function and historical meaning of their independent spirit. These
clubs and gangs conserve a broad range of African cultural concepts, celebrations, and folkways.
Page | 44
It is interesting that, among all these mutual aid groups, one cultural expression, which incorporates music
and dance in a ritual parade format and normally includes elaborate dressing (if not masking) of the
principal members, has come to be known as the New Orleans "second line." The etymology of this term
is obscure. The earliest mention I have found is in a 1939 publication describing New Orleans music:
"The funerals and parades always had a second line which consisted of kids who danced along behind....
The boys joined in the general tumult they shimmied along, and sang, yelled, and clapped. Many had tin
flageoles [sic] or home-made whistles cut from stalks of reed on which they played the tune. Only the
tough kids joined the second line" (Russell and Smith 1939, 27-28).
Jelly Roll Morton, on the other hand, remembered the second line as leading the parades: "And out in
front of everybody-the second line, armed with sticks and bottles and baseball bats and all forms of
ammunition ready to fight the foe when they neared the dividing line [between two communities]. It's a
funny thing that the second line marched at the head of the parade, but that's the way it had to be in New
Orleans. They were our protection" (Lomax 1950, 15).
Even jazz funerals, the ultimate freedom celebrations, are called "second lines." Jazz funerals, especially
for noted musicians, draw thousands of supporters, including many who do not know the deceased
personally. The celebration is an opportunity to honor the spirit of the departed and to experience death
and freedom vicariously or sympathetically. Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom. Such
funerals also constitute a spiritual homecoming that is reflected in the music; the band begins with hymns
well known to Western tradition, but as the ritual proceeds, the spirit of the celebration becomes more
African. After the mourners leave the burial grounds, or the hearse moves off to the graveyard leaving the
second line behind, the funeral shifts from the sacred to the profane. The deceased is honored first for his
or her good family life (the mournful ceremony preceding the body's burial), and then for his or her "low-
down," "bad," or "sporting" life- commemorated by the jazz celebration after the body is "cut away" (see
Fig. 2).
In African consciousness the sacred and the secular are often inseparable.
Just as jazz combines disparate elements into a harmonious whole, jazz
funerals merge church life with street life. They are rites of passage with
profound spiritual resonances: more than just burying the dead and
celebrating eternal freedom, they serve as a ritual of community
affirmation.
Behind the Lines: The Black Mardi Gras Indians and the New
Orleans Second Line
Michael P. Smith
The second line is characterized by unrestrained expressions of African-American dance and song and a
rejection of the "destiny" of the white establishment to govern black society. As ritual African-American
celebrations, second-line parades remain distinctly different in character from white parades in New
Orleans-as far as I know, from any other parades in North America (see Fig. 3-6). Second-line parades
serve to cleanse and renew the spirit of the community. They also function to disseminate information. It
is from this source-not television or the newspapers controlled by the white establishment - that blacks Page | 45
learn what is taking place in the city. These events intricately link the greater African-American
community of New Orleans historically, economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually and are
considered freedom celebrations in New Orleans.
Since this was right after Mass at St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter on a Sunday afternoon, it is
probable that this second line was headed for Congo Square. Such marches gradually become associated
with the cause of freedom and political advancement for blacks in New Orleans (Schaffer and Allen 1977,
12). Now long submerged in an inner-city "wilderess," their true nature obscured by racism and outsiders'
simplistic definitions, the black Indians, and a few other renegade groups such as the Skull and Bone gang
and the Baby Dolls, pursue a heritage rooted in what most know only as a "mysterious" past. Their own
history is little known beyond its oral tradition, which for the oldest organized gang surviving today
begins about 1885 (see Fig. 7).
Behind the Lines:

Michael P. Smith
New Orleans Jazz Funerals are public burial services for prominent
community members; traditionally African American males. After the
funeral service, a procession of musicians, funeral directors, family, and
friends moves from the site of the funeral to the cemetery while
marching to the beat of a brass band.
Matt Sakakeeny
New Orleans is a city of parades, most famously the Mardi Gras processions that roll down the wide
boulevards of St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street during Carnival season, but in all the seasons and in
every neighborhood there are jazz funerals and parades known as second lines that fill the backstreets
with a joyful noise. On Sunday afternoons from September through May, African American forms of
music, dance, and dress are put on display in parades that have become symbolic of New Orleans and its
association with festivity and pleasure. The upbeat tone of second line parades originates in the distinctive
local tradition of jazz funerals.
Page | 46
The funeral began with the mourners making “loud
lamentations” and ended with “noise and laughter.”
Matt Sakakeeny
Though funerals would seem an unlikely source for such a festive tradition, the jazz funeral celebrates life
at the moment of death—a concept common among many cultures until the twentieth century. In New
Orleans and elsewhere, Europeans and Anglo-Americans attended funerals with music that featured a
brass band playing “solemn music on the way to the grave and happy music on the return.” There is also a
history of rejoicing at death through music in West African burial traditions. In 1819, architect Benjamin
Latrobe witnessed a continuance of this tradition at a black funeral in New Orleans. The funeral began
with the mourners making “loud lamentations” and ended with “noise and laughter.” With the end of
slavery, black funerals with brass bands became commonplace. By the beginning of the twentieth century,
the funerals had become forums for the performance of a new style of music—jazz—eventually becoming
known as jazz funerals. Simultaneously, the popularity of funerals with brass band music waned among
white New Orleanians.
In the traditional jazz funeral, a prominent member of the community - often a musician and nearly
always a black male - is “buried with music.” Benevolent and burial societies traditionally arranged these
funerals, often offering the services of a brass band for an extra fee. The societies collected dues
throughout the year to pay for members’ health care and burial costs. The musicians, funeral directors,
family, and friends of the dead make up what is called the first or main line, while the crowd marching
behind is collectively known as the second line. As the procession moves from the funeral service to the
burial site, the first and second lines march to the beat of a brass band. At the beginning, the band plays
dirges, somber Christian hymns performed at a slow walking tempo. After the body is laid to rest, or “cut
loose,” the band starts playing up-tempo music, the second liners begin dancing, and the funeral
transforms into a street celebration.
Matt Sakakeeny
At the beginning, the band plays dirges, somber Christian hymns

performed at a slow walking tempo. After the body is laid to rest,
or “cut loose,” the band starts playing up-tempo music, the
second liners begin dancing, and the funeral transforms into a

street celebration.

Page | 47
Matt Sakakeeny
At some point in the late nineteenth century, the second line detached from the jazz funeral and developed
its own identity. Organized by social aid and pleasure clubs, second lines wind through the neighborhoods
of club members, making designated stops at their houses and other significant neighborhood sites,
usually barrooms. From September through May, there is at least one parade every Sunday, often held on
the anniversary of a club’s founding. Each club hosts fundraisers throughout the year and collects dues at
regular meetings in order to pay for police permits, brass bands, and the coordinated outfits that members
wear at their parade.
Anthropologist Helen Regis defines a second line parade as a public festival in which club members,
musicians, and second liners come together to create “a single flowing movement of people unified by the
rhythm.” At the head of the parade, club members wear suits and sashes that display the club’s name,
often twirling matching umbrellas above their heads. For approximately four hours, they strut their dance
moves in front of the band while the second liners fall in behind and along the side. Many second liners
show off popular dance steps such as the high step and the buck jump. Others make their own sounds by
singing, clapping, blowing whistles, hitting cowbells and beer bottles, and shaking tambourines.
From September through May, there is at least one

parade every Sunday, often held on the anniversary of a
club’s founding.

Matt Sakakeeny
Second line parades create a sense of community among participants, and the public nature of the
spectacle makes parading a powerful representation of black New Orleans. This has led to debates among
parading organizations and musicians about how parades and funerals should be presented in public.
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

African Diaspora Culture
Survivors of the Middle Passage gave new life to certain African themes, characters, and stories in their
homes and neighborhoods in the New World, and much of the folklore of the African diaspora reflects a Page | 48
dynamic combination of African traditions and New World influences. Folklore often conveyed religious
worldviews and beliefs while relating the more mundane routines of everyday life-from the way families
functioned through the rituals of birth and death, to simple routines of cooking and clothing, and the local
calendar of celebrations.

Sybil Kein
One of the remembered African cultural patterns associated with burial ritual is
the formation of social organizations which assure their members a proper burial
according to religious and cultural dictates.
According to Buerkle and Barker in Bourbon Street Black, these societies were the models for the
benevolent societies which incorporated the use of brass bands in New Orleans. Similarly, Vlabos who
studied African ceremonial life notes: Besides the large associations, there are burial societies whose
members are sworn to attend one another’s funerals and mourn long and loud. There are musical groups
whose members concern themselves with ceremony. (Vlabos, 218-220)
Early 18th century accounts of slave burials in the United States include the addition of singing and
playing instruments as well as large processions to accompany the dead to the graveyard (Epstein, 27;
Raboteau, 31).

Sybil Kein
pattern still present in the Jazz Funerals. The idea of returning to Africa, as expressed in the song already
mentioned, is based on affirm religious belief in reincarnation. ? (Raboteau, 32) Therefore, a funeral is
less a cause for sadness in the Christian sense, than an occasion for celebration in the African sense. One
will be reborn in another life. Related to death and rebirth is the belief that ancestors are the link between
the creator and mankind, equal to and in addition to other gods. Page | 49

Vincent Brown
Cities Of The Dead:

Performing Life In The Caribbean
Life and death defined the historical and temporal dimensions of the plantation. Many of these material,
affective and ritualistic views on life and death haunt contemporary Caribbean cities. …. . I believe that
zombies, the living dead, and the performative dead – are all part of the same process, as they reflect sites
of Melancholia where social action – be it individual or collective, is required. … These necropolitics to
use Achille Mbembe’s terms are more than forms of agency. They ‘frame’ forms of precarious
subjectivity, survival, and existence in contemporary Caribbean societies where melancholia, is pretty
much related to the present.


Cities of the Dead:
Jossiana Arroyo Page | 50
We may think of the space of death as a threshold that allows for illumination as
well as extinction’ (Quoted in Holland, 2000, 4). The plantation as a self-
enclosed system of patriarchal normative power was a necropolis which had its
own ways of dictating how, when and why the enslaved would die.
Life and death defined the temporal dimensions of the plantation. Death, as a form of flight or escape,
was a central contract that the enslaved had for negotiating the violence of slavery. In relation to this
contract Michael Taussig reminds us that ‘the space of death is important in the creation of meaning and
consciousness, nowhere more than in societies where torture is endemic and where the culture of terror
flourishes. We may think of the space of death as a threshold that allows for illumination as well as
extinction’ (Quoted in Holland, 2000, 4). The plantation as a self-enclosed system of patriarchal
normative power was a necropolis which had its own ways of dictating how, when and why the enslaved
would die. As Colin Dayan has argued, not only extreme forms of violence, punishment, and death
created different form of agency from the point of view of the enslaved: to die, but also to perform, to
offer a testimony against a master, or any ‘other contract’ that enslaved bodies under the law, was
conveyed with meaning. But then, the question remains: in a culture of absolute terror, what is meaning
from the point of view of the enslaved?
Cities of the Dead:
Jossiana Arroyo
Meaning resided and coexisted with forms of labour power. If the enslaved were things and/or property
and their labour power and production belong to their masters, they existed in what Patterson (1985) has
described as a ‘living dead’ condition, in the world of the living as agents of production, yet in the world
of the dead by the rule of law. Patterson’s notion of slaves as liminal figures is a useful hermeneutic
device with which to explore the fundamental structure of Caribbean colonial societies inasmuch as it
describes an entity – neither alive nor dead – that crosses over from the world of the living to that of the
dead and vice-versa.
Liminality, an ethnological as well as psychoanalytical term, denotes a concept central to languages of
symbolic power in slavery and plantation societies. It is therefore important to think of the dead, not only
those who passed on due to the terrors of the plantation system, but also of those living dead who
mourned them. … In this context of extreme violence, when violence is the norm, mourning is part of the
psychics of survival.
Cities of the Dead:
Jossiana Arroyo

Renate Lachmann, Raoul Eshelman and Marc Davis Page | 51
Only in the collective, ambivalent laughter of the carnival can the utopia (of reconciliation) develop; in
the festival time it acquires its own “place” on the festival square. In the carnival, dogma, hegemony, and
authority are dispersed through ridicule and laughter. In their stead, change and crisis, which for Bakhtin
constitute the primary factors of life and which represent the consequences of the primordial life/death
opposition, become the theme of the laugh act. The spectacle staged by carnivalesque rituals is not
actually directed against institutions, whose functions and forms are only usurped for a temporary period
of time, but rather against the loss of utopian potential brought about by dogma and authority. The
festival, however, which is not aimed at work and production and which produces only itself, also
releases this utopian potential cosmic laughter dispels cosmic fear.
“The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. They, too, are incomplete, they
also die and are revived and renewed. This is one of the essential differences of the people’s festive
laughter from the pure satire of modern times.
…. Carnival familiarity was reflected in speech patterns. For example: abusive language. “But we are
especially interested in the language which mocks and insults the deity and which was part of the ancient
comic cults”.

Catherine Macmillan
In terms of the carnivalesque, this emphasis on death and rebirth can perhaps best be understood through
Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body. In carnival imagery, death is not perceived as the antithesis of
birth; in contrast, the death of the individual body is viewed as part of a wider cycle of birth, death and
rebirth. According to Bakhtin, then, the opposition of life and death is; completely contrary to the system
of grotesque imagery, in which death is not a negation of life seen as the great body of all the people, but
part of life as a whole – its indispensable component, the condition of its constant renewal and
rejuvenation. Death is here always related to birth; the grave is related to the earth’s life-giving womb.
(1984, 50)
To see social death as a productive

peril entails a subtle but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a
condition to viewing enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved Africans and
their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting,
and regeneration.
Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery Page | 52
Vincent Brown

Second Life - The Plaza Is The Place

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Twice in the early eighteenth century, New York city officials passed legislation aimed at preventing people of African

Only in the collective, ambivalent laughter of

the plaza is the place

The funeral began with the mourners making

Neighbor women acting as mourners - ‘‘old women devoted to

Anthropologists identified the social convergence of this

Thus in the zombie the relationship between labour,

Writing in 1790, Beckford stated that the…

"Ye living men come view the ground," for example,

"to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction

A Coffin for "The Loved One":

… that the earliest theatre in Athens was built

A Serious Kind of Laughter

the collective psychological functions of carnival, as well as its

…the day sets in cheerfulness and the night Page | 4

"Ye living men come view the ground," for example,

And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death,

At Aunt Dicey's funeral, for instance, "before the preacher could

Early 18th century accounts of slave burials in the United States

the… principal festivals of the slaves are at their burials. …

Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture

This was politics conceived not as a conventional battle between partisans,

"second lines." Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom.

The Banda ... a funeral dance, its sexually suggestive

Welcome to the carnival?

Michael D. Bristol emphasizes that the funeral of

Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture

The funeral began with the mourners making “loud

Jazz Funerals and Second Line Parades

"second lines." Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom.

Behind the Lines:

Behind the Lines:

"We had about 12 negroes did willfully drown

"Ye living men come view the ground," for example,

that the dehumanization of enslaved Africans related to

Bahian carnival and social carnivalesque in trans-Atlantic context

Reassessing the “Sankofa Symbol” in New York's African Burial Ground

… blacks had stolen the scene: 'multiple batuques... in every

Michael D. Bristol emphasizes that the funeral of Hamlet's father

‘Acknowledgement of their own “social death”

Thus in the zombie the relationship between labour,

Slavery and Social Death:

Death Is a Festival Page | 12

Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

In those areas where masters insisted that burials be cursory, or where

"Ye living men come view the ground," for example,

And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death,

At Aunt Dicey's funeral, for instance, "before the preacher could

This was politics conceived not as a conventional battle between partisans,

… that the earliest theatre in Athens was built

From September through May, there is at least one

Benjamin Latrobe had stumbled into New Orleans's old

New Orleans's Congo Square:

"to the Akan ... death ... is not life's contradiction

The Stillness That Comes After:

And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death,

"De niggers would be jumpin' high as a cow or mule."

The Celebration Of Life In New Orleans Jazz Funerals

Behind the Lines:

… “King of the Wake,” a traditional staging that appeared in

the vicinity, are like the “Saturnalia” of the slaves in ancient

Behind the Lines:

Behind the Lines:

Only in death, it is thought, is there "true" freedom.

Behind the Lines:

Therefore, a funeral is less a cause for sadness in the Christian sense,