Cities of the Dead: Performing Life in the Caribbean

Abstract

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. This essay will analyze the narrative script of Juan de los muertos (Juan of the Dead) and Eduardo Lalo’s documentary La ciudad perdida (2005) along with the funeral rites performed by Funeraria Marín in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, whose ‘performative funerals’ or collages, have circulated in journals and the Internet, creating what appear to be ‘living tableaus’ or original wakes since 2010. 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. I will be cautious to read these actions merely as forms of agency against the state or neoliberal economies. These necropolitics to use Achille Mbembe’s term 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.