New World Plaza

… 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 death, it is thought,

is there "true" freedom.
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 Page | 1
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)
mourning becomes eclectic
the new world

the plaza is the place
social death
and placemaking
in the new world
- on the dispossessed
and the carnivalesque
- on the role of true culture
and on the work of mourning
when all the world is a stage
compiled by
amma birago
‘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
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’.
… 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 plaza … a place where there is a permanent shrine or kiva

or religious marker of some sort. It is a kind of open-air room
with the religious activities of the house clusters surrounding it."
Page | 2
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.
The work of mourning helps us reconsider one’s relation to

another as a source of transformation. As she puts it, “one
mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will
be changed, possibly forever”; it is a question, she says, of
“submitting to transformation” (PL, 21).
Making Sense Of Traumatic Events:
Toward A Politics Of Aporetic Mourning
Michalinos Zembylas
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
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.
Cities of the Dead:
Performing Life in the Caribbean
Jossiana Arroyo
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.
Cities of the Dead:

Jossiana Arroyo
Meaning resided and coexisted with forms of labour power. If the enslaved were things and/or property Page | 3
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
… 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.
And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death,

& Heaven in the Slave Community 1700-1865
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.

David R. Roediger
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.
The Social Shaping Of Emotion:

The Case Of Grief Page | 4
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 modern
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.
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).
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.
“A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory, and the Middle
Passage - Ramesh Mallipeddi
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.”
…. 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 Page | 5
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.
Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage
Ramesh Mallipeddi
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
Vincent Brown
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:
Culture as Counter-Culture
The funeral began with the mourners making “loud lamentations” and ended with
“noise and laughter.”
Jazz Funerals and Second Line Parades -
Matt Sakakeeny
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:

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 Page | 6
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
And a defined central square, a clear precedent of the later Plaza Mayor. During the fourteenth, fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries these open spaces on the outskirts of many Christian towns and cities became
slowly Incorporated as irregular squares into the urban centre. Their civic Significance became increased
by the building of many town halls in These public spaces during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth
centuries.
All the town is a stage:
Civic ceremonies and religious festivities in Spain during the golden age
José Antonio Mateos Royo
The site of a community’s most important architecture -

church, government buildings, and marketplace - the plaza
is both sacred and secular space and thus the very heart of the community.
Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza
From Primordial Sea to Public Space
Logan Wagner, Hal Box and Susan Kline Morehead
The plaza has been a defining feature of Mexican urban architecture and culture for at least 4,000 years.
Ancient Mesoamericans conducted most of their communal life in outdoor public spaces, and today the
plaza is still the public living room in every Mexican neighborhood, town, and city - the place where
friends meet, news is shared, and personal and communal rituals and celebrations happen. The site of a
community’s most important architecture - church, government buildings, and marketplace - the plaza is
both sacred and secular space and thus the very heart of the community.
Plazas, Performers, and Spectators

Political Theaters of the Classic Maya
Takeshi Inomata
Page | 7
Theatrical performances not only communicate preexisting ideas but also define political reality as it is
experienced by participants. Theatrical events thus constitute a critical process of integration and conflict
in a wide range of societies and have particularly significant effects on the maintenance and
transformation of premodern centralized polities. The study of performances allows archaeologists to
explore the interrelations between political, social, and cultural factors and provides an approach to action
and meaning different from the one that views the material record as text.
The analysis of plazas in Classic Maya society (AD 250–900) suggests that the performances of rulers
depicted on stone monuments involved a large audience and that securing theatrical spaces for mass
spectacles was a primary concern in the design of Maya cities. Such events gave physical reality to a
Maya community and counteracted the centrifugal tendency of nonelite populations.
Andre´s Ciudad Ruiz and Jesu´ s Ada´nez Pavo

The Classic Maya city was a complex universe composed of plazas with stelae, altars, sanctuaries,
acropolis, palaces, ball courts, and other specialized buildings, many of them decorated with carved and
painted images - a universe surrounded by myriad domestic units and often integrated by systems of
causeways. Its planning was not random; each space, building, and monument had its own significance
and was placed in the landscape according to that significance.
The Maya architectural landscape was a living entity that
was periodically activated through rituals performed by
the rulers and other actors.

the reporter swore that blacks had stolen the scene: …

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
Reassessing the “Sankofa Symbol” in New York's African Burial Ground Page | 8
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.
Behind the Lines:

The Black Mardi Gras Indians
and the New Orleans Second Line
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.
Carnival: Fighting Oppression With Celebration

Karolee Stevens
Attempts by the European colonists to halt Carnival
arose in other forms, as well. The traditional sound of Page | 9
the drumbeat, a protege of African tribal customs, was
silenced by government legislation.
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 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. … 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.
Vincent Brown
There is one thing about pueblo plazas that makes them unlike Western or other plazas: they have never
been used as a place for public announcements or other official purposes. However, the plaza was "a
place where people watch the dancers and where the dances place; a place where there is a permanent
shrine or kiva or religious marker of some sort. It is a kind of open air room idenrified with the religious
activities of the house clusters surrounding it."

The Case Of Grief
Lyn H. Lofland
… that among modern 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.
Typically such Spring celebrations in early agricultural societies in the Eurasian sphere included
sprinkling the fields with the blood of a freshly sacrificed beast, usually of the domesticated variety like a
bull or a goat. In various places at certain times the sacrifice was human, a virgin or youth - sometimes an
enemy captive, but equally possibly a member of the tribe favoured for this great honour - who was made
'King' or 'Queen' for a ritual number of days preceding the rite: that is to say, indulged and fattened before
being slain.
Paul Mountfort
Archaic and Classical Antecedents Page | 10
Frazer demonstrates that these rites form a direct parallel with similar African and Meso-American
rituals, giving even carnival's distant origins a global dimension.
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.
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.
Karolee Stevens
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.
New Orleans's Congo Square:
An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation
Jerah Johnson
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. Page | 11
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;

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 ... In 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
outbreaks, that the elite community attempted to suppress the celebration.

Karolee Stevens
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).
Page | 12
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.
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
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
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
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, Page | 13
David R. Roediger
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…
The Celebration Of Life In New Orleans Jazz
Funerals Sybil Kein
The plaza has been a defining feature of Mexican urban architecture and culture for at least 4,000 years.
Ancient Mesoamericans conducted most of their communal life in outdoor public spaces, and today the
plaza is still the public living room in every Mexican neighborhood, town, and city - the place where
friends meet, news is shared, and personal and communal rituals and celebrations happen. The site of a
community’s most important architecture - church, government buildings, and marketplace - the plaza is
both sacred and secular space and thus the very heart of the community.
And a defined central square, a clear precedent of the later Plaza Mayor. During the fourteenth, fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries these open spaces on the outskirts of many Christian towns and cities became
slowly Incorporated as irregular squares into the urban centre. Their civic Significance became increased
by the building of many town halls in These public spaces during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth
centuries. Throughout the classical elements of its architecture the Plaza Mayor Incorporated the
humanist ideals of the Renaissance and symbolized the Whole town as political power.50 The collective
necessity by many social Groups and institutions after the Counter-Reformation for a social arena to carry
out splendid civic and religious rituals stressed the importance of the Plaza Mayor , as an element that
unified the urban space and Reinforced the identity of the town. Used often as market-place, its
Association with spectacle and social life is clear in the use of arcades and Balconies, crowded with
spectators during the main festivities.
All the town is a stage:
Civic ceremonies and religious festivities in Spain during the golden age
"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 Page | 14
In the deep, dark forests and in the lush green valleys, worshippers of Dionysus celebrated the eternal
cycles of death and rebirth, symbolized in the sacred mask of the wild god. Drunk and intoxicated,
wearing the mask of Dionysus, the actor is at once the shaman and the priest. Channeling the presence of
the fearsome divinity, he drinks the sacred wine and eats the raw flesh of his prey. In this eternal
moment, he becomes one with the god and the beast residing inside of him.
Within Ancient Greek culture, the sacred rites of Dionysus have been appropriated and transformed to
theatre performances.
Ritual, Myth And Tragedy:
Origins Of Theatre In Dionysian Rites -
Nadja Berberović
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.
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
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.

An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation Page | 15
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.
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 Page | 16
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
made a reference to little bells attached to the dancers’ bodies.
The Missing Link between Congo Square
and the Mardi Gras Indians?
Jeroen Dewulf
In the zombie the relationship between labour, social death, and freedom get complicated …
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.
Ramesh Mallipeddi
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 Golden Age in Spain

The Plaza Mayor And The Unity Of The Civic Space

… the narrow and irregular medieval Square was no longer considered appropriate to represent this
concept of Civic pride. After several attempts during the late sixteenth century, at Valladolid in 1619 the
first Plaza Mayor was set up with a regular pattern and rectangular structure and created the decisive
Castilian model that was to be adopted by many important towns and cities: Madrid, Segovia, Lerma and Page | 17
León, among others. The final realization of this model was adopted in la Corredera, at Cordoba in 1687:
the unity of the civic space was stressed by the covering of the streets that gave access to the Plaza
Mayor. This closed structure was followed as a model in building other main squares in the eighteenth
century, as in Salamanca And Vitoria. Despite the occasional use of decorative baroque elements, the
concept of civic space favored the preservation of the original Classical and sober style that characterized
the Plaza Mayor.
civic ceremonies and religious festivities in

Spain during the Golden Age
Finally, the religious festivities and civic ceremonies in Spain became Elevated during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries by their splendor and magnificence to the category of art. During the feast, not only
was the urban space entirely transformed by pageantry, but the inhabitants collectively experienced a
common exaltation, a great catharsis. In striking contrast, the strict order was combined with more
passionate and even irrational feeling. Pagan and Christian symbols shared a common space. ‘Popular’,
‘learned’ and ‘official’ culture became integrated. This continuous mixture and integration contributed to
make Spanish towns and cities during the Golden Age a whole stage, a social arena always ready for the
next spectacle and a defined central square, a clear precedent of the later Plaza Mayor.
During the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries these open spaces on the outskirts of many
Christian towns and cities became slowly Incorporated as irregular squares into the urban centre. Their
civic Significance became increased by the building of many town halls in These public spaces during the
late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Throughout the classical elements of its architecture the Plaza
Mayor Incorporated the humanist ideals of the Renaissance and symbolized the Whole town as political
power. The collective necessity by many social Groups and institutions after the Counter-Reformation for
a social arena To carry out splendid civic and religious rituals stressed the importance Of the Plaza Mayor
, as an element that unified the urban space and Reinforced the identity of the town. Used often as market-
place, its Association with spectacle and social life is clear in the use of arcades and Balconies, crowded
with spectators during the main festivities.
The Golden Age in Spain
The Plaza Mayor And The Unity Of The Civic Space
The zombie … 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.

“A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory,
and the Middle Passage - Ramesh Mallipeddi
Page | 18
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
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.
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.
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.
… 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)
Page | 19
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 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.
Michael P. Smith
"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”: Page | 20
Ramesh Mallipeddi
… 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
‘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:
and capital production. Their bodies are instrumentalized in the labour
Cities of the Dead:
Jossiana Arroyo
Orlando Patterson refers to this natal alienation as "social death" (Patterson 5). Page | 21
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
Joao Jose Reis
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
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 Page | 22

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
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.

Page | 23
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.
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.

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

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

morning.
After this ceremony the affected tear is soon dried the instruments
resound, the dancers are prepared; the day sets in cheerfulness and the Page | 24
night resounds with the chorus.
The Celebration Of Life In New Orleans Jazz Funerals
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)
The Missing Link between Congo Square

and the Mardi Gras Indians?
… 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.
The Anonymous Story of “The Singing Girl of New Orleans” (1849)
Jeroen Dewulf
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 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 modern
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.
Page | 25
… "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'
I. Chukwukere on J. B. Danquah
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.
… 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 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 Fixed Melancholy”:
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 Page | 26
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.”
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.
A Coffin for "The Loved One":
The Structure of Fante Death Rituals'

David R. Roediger
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.
“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.”
“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 Page | 27
as common to all living humans cannot be rightfully considered to be alive in the typical sense.

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
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" Page | 28
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
"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."
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
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."

Cities of the Dead:
and capital production. Their bodies are instrumentalized in the labour
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 Page | 29
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.

David R. Roediger
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.
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 Page | 30
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.
Cities of the Dead:

Jossiana Arroyo
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 Page | 31
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
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.
Vincent Brown
Plaza Plans and Settlement Patterns:

Regional and Temporal Distributions as Indicators of
Cultural Interactions in the Maya Lowlands
Marshall Joseph Becker
Discussions regarding Maya sites as vacant «ceremonial centers» resulted from a 1927 fabrication for
popular consumption that its author J. E. S. Thompson never used in his own scholarly efforts. The
accompanying arguments for this fable were entirely based on maps of site cores, with any small
structures evaluated as the temporary residences of peasants coming to the «ceremonial center» for ritual
reasons (see Becker 1979a, 1979b).
«In the little we know of the customs and life habits of this ancient period, it is certain that at intervals of
time and especially after the death of great personages they made changes in their structures, remade wall
surfaces obliterated old mural paintings with a coating of hard finish, and made entirely new floors in the
chambers beneath whose floors were the last buried remains. Consequently, it is well within the bounds
of reason that the structure crowning this mound served as a religious shrine or adoratorio (Ku) of some
important personage, and at his death or the death of the last of his line it was razed above his burial vault
as the last mark of reverence to his memory» (E. H. Thompson 1938: 38).
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.
Page | 32


New World Plaza

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

New World Plaza

Uploaded by

Copyright:

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

Only in death, it is thought,

This dance originates in West Africa where death is

mourning becomes eclectic

the new world

The first rebellions against British and French

the plaza … a place where there is a permanent shrine or kiva

The work of mourning helps us reconsider one’s relation to

Cities of the Dead:

… the acquiescence of the master was ultimately

And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death,

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

And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death,

The Social Shaping Of Emotion:

Anthropologists identified the social convergence of this

In his book, Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson notes

“A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage

… how slaves forged “political life” under conditions of social

To see social death as a productive

Only in the collective, ambivalent laughter of

Thus in the zombie the relationship between labour,

Cities of the Dead:

Writing in 1790, Beckford stated that the…

The site of a community’s most important architecture -

Plazas, Performers, and Spectators

Andre´s Ciudad Ruiz and Jesu´ s Ada´nez Pavo

Only in the collective, ambivalent laughter of

the reporter swore that blacks had stolen the scene: …

between Repression and Concession, Bahia, 1808-1855

Behind the Lines:

Carnival: Fighting Oppression With Celebration

The Social Shaping Of Emotion:

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

It was, in its origins as in its development, always of the people, an

The Anonymous Story of

Carnival: Fighting Oppression With Celebration

Carnival: Fighting Oppression With Celebration

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

Writing in 1790, Beckford stated that the… principal

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

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

La Place Publique. Congo Square

Congo Square: La Place Publique

The African American culture nurtured in New Orleans’

New Orleans's Congo Square:

New Orleans's Congo Square:

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

The Golden Age in Spain

José Antonio Mateos Royo

civic ceremonies and religious festivities in

negotiation between agency and submission.

Material Culture and Social Death:

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

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

‘Acknowledgement of their own “social death”

Thus in the zombie the relationship between labour,

Death Is a Festival Page | 22

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

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

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

From September through May, there is at least one

Benjamin Latrobe had stumbled into New Orleans's old

New Orleans's Congo Square: