Joseph R. Roach

Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance along the Atlantic rim from the eighteenth century to the present, Cities of the Dead explores a rich continuum of cultural exchange that imaginatively reinvents, re-creates, and restores history. Enriched with fifty-five illustrations, including spectacular photos of New Orleans's famed Mardi Gras Indians, Joseph Roach's work employs an entirely unique approach to the study of culture. Rather than focusing on one region, Cities of the Dead describes broad cultural connections over place and time, showing through myriad examples how performance can revise the unwritten past. Through illuminating discussions of social events ranging from burials to sacrifices, from auctions to parades, encompassing regional traditions as diverse as Haitian Voudon and British funerals, the book looks at the synchretic performance traditions of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Exploring processes of substitution, or surrogation, as enacted in performance, Roach demonstrates the ways in which we fill the voids left by death and departure. Cities of the Dead proposes a new way to think about the relationship between history and memory as well as between document and performance. It details patterns of remembrance and forgetting, of communities forging their identities and imagining their futures.

Circum-Atlantic Performance

Cities of the Dead

Mary Harlow

Roberta Milliken

Edith Snook

Margaret Ketchum Powell

Sarah Heaton

Geraldine Biddle-Perry

How have our attitudes to hair changed over time? In what ways have new technologies influenced hair-related practices and beliefs? Is hair just about fashion or does it express social, spiritual, and cultural meanings? In a work that spans nearly 3,000 years these ambitious questions are addressed by 60 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. With the help of a broad range of case material they illustrate trends and nuances of the culture of hair in Western societies from ancient times to the present. Volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make the set as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the reader the choice to gain an overview of a period by reading one volume, or to follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter in each volume.

A Cultural History of Hair: A cultural history of hair in the Age of Enlightenment

Janelle G. Reinelt

The first comprehensive survey of the major critical currents and approaches in the lively field of performance studies

Critical Theory and Performance

Explores the historical and cultural evolution of the theoretical language of the stage

Joseph R. Roach

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