No Burial for the Undead

Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, October 23–December 30, 2022 Curatorial Essay No Burial for the Undead Claire Tancons 1 Such a premise, magnified by Alain Resnais’s cinematography and politicized by Chris Marker’s anti-colonial script, animated the iconic eponymous Présence Africaine commission in the film Les Statues Meurent Aussi, 1953. 2 Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 235 Burials are for the living and the dead. They allow the dead to be remembered alive, and the living to remember the dead. Burials are not for the undead. The burials of the undead are usurpations. The undead have crept in, assimilating the civilizational codes and mimicking the rituals of the living that were killed under their dominion. Let the old queen of England be buried and saved by her god. The gods of the dead, roaming amidst these words, only meddled with her former Catholic god, however reformed, out of historical contingency, spiritual necessity, and ideological expediency. Statues also die, as do the civilizations and people from which they were stolen.1 When humans and inanimate objects are given agency, to die a queen is to have been desecrated in a sarcophagus in the most secret of her chambers, killed twice at the hands of her own people, recycled as a media fetish in the Pharaoh’s parade. To be dead is also to have died a disemboweled statue, stripped bare and pedestaled; to be dead is to have been a bronze soldier in the palace of the kings of Benin and to have fallen prey to the bullets of the British Army and the theft of German archeologists, only to be relegated to the storage rooms of restitution diplomacy. To be dead is to live in the over-lit limbo of unvisibility. To be dead is to speak in the unforgiving tongues of forgetting, or not. Sylvia Wynter has come the closest to finding a rhyme and a reason for the burial of the world that still refuses to die. Is the ceremony she calls for indeed a burial? Or has our own exhaustion with living in this world made such a ceremony the only option to which we have come to surrender, accompanying our own individually apocalyptic end to life? What then of the dead worth keeping alive: the alleged caretakers of “The Ceremony Found”? A corollary question then becomes: Shall we parse through the corpses of colonial modernity to select those undead that need unburying or shall we instead tend to those dead that were never given a proper burial and ensure that the living worth burying will be given one? Or shall we not enter into the trap of dysselecting those who have dysselected others? This essay inverts Orlando Patterson’s classic characterization of slavery as a “living death,”2 which implies that the enslaved on the Caribbean plantations were the undead. The undead were in fact not the enslaved but the enslavers. And the undead of the Plantationocene are not the progeny of the incompletely decolonized present, but of its 3 “Ceremonial television” is my translation into English of the French “télévision cérémonielle” from the book, La télévision cérémonielle. Anthropologie et histoire en direct by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998, itself the French translation of “media event” from the American original Media Events : The Live Broadcasting of History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. It is interesting to note how the French translation which adjectivizes the notion of “ceremony” in its relationship to “television” is far more evocative of the genre of the televised ceremonies analyzed in this study than the English original which mobilizes the more mainstream concept of “media” and conflates ceremony with “event.” 4 I use the term “dispossessing” here in the aporetic sense developed by Judith Butler in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political by Judith Butler and Athena Athenasiou, Bristol: Polity Press, 2013. In the book, Butler articulates dispossession as something to be at once feared—as in the case of material dispossession or loss of life due to migration or war—and desired—the dispossession of the self as part of a psychoanalytical process. capitalist overlords. Within the realm of Sylvia Wynter’s “New Sciences,” the undead stand in for Man(1) (rational Western Man) and Man(2) (secular Western Man) while the dead are their Human Others. To overturn the premise and promise of the “burial of an undead word”—the exhibition about to open at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and the subtitle to the present accompanying volume—to deny burial to the undead, means to recursively restore, that is to inaugurate anew, a cosmogonic order in which a burial is the outcome of a retinue of rituals ensuring life as part of an “oecumenically human” cosmological order. To do so entails bringing into the fold the situated scholarship of the many ceremonies I have experienced with co-humans, and the few spectacles of “ceremonial television” 3 for the burials of Man(1) and Man(2) I have witnessed in the last/lost years of the current pandemic era. To posit that the undead shall have no burial—while they grandiosely offer themselves their own, disrespectful of the true rites of passage this entails—means repossessing the ceremonials of the living for the living and the dead, and proposing the necessarily diasporized and dispossessing4 “aesthetemes” or “reproduction arts” of the Americas as the public ceremonial culture within which they can flourish, and that of Europe and its mimetic postcolonies as that within which they can die. If the ceremonials of death die of their own overinflated mimicry, if death does indeed die— that is, if the undead drive the death of death—then certainly burials are no longer possible. I begin this labor of refusal, the refusal to bury the undead as a means of salvaging the lives of the dead whose burials came too soon or never came at all, in New Orleans—home to some of the greatest “cities of the dead,” to call on Joseph Roach’s characterization of the burial grounds of circum-Atlantic cities, and the ground for many ceremonial rituals of sending them off. A Library in New Orleans 5 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten “Base Faith,” e-flux, vol. 86 (November 2017): p. 7. A procession moves unmoved by the world. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten “Base Faith”5 What kind of political movement is the procession? What is its footstep? 6 Homi K. Bhabha, “Processional Ethics,” Artforum, vol. 55, no. 2 (October 2016): pp. 230–92. 7 Rolf Gehlhaar, “Leap of Faith: A Personal Biography of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Prozession,” Perspectives of New Music, vol. 36, no. 2 (Summer 1998): pp. 53–62, here p. 55. Homi K. Bhabha, “Processional Ethics”6 The notation of Prozession alone encapsulates a process of parametric transformation which is to be invented in real time according to a symbolic notation. Rolf Gehlhaar, “Leap of Faith”7 My library is in a bad place. New Orleans is a bad place for a library: moist and hot, with wind, rain, and flooding during the hurricane season. At the time of writing this essay we are still two months away from the end of the hurricane season, which, under normal climatic circumstances, begins in June and ends in November. I hope it’s not premature to write that my library has already survived four hurricane seasons since I boxed it up and entered into monthly debt-bondage to pay for allegedly climatecontrolled storage in the Lower Garden District. I lived there for nearly a decade, before crossing the Atlantic and resettling in Europe between Berlin and Paris—and back again to Berlin now for this ceremony—the exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. But wait! My library is not in a bad place after all! Where better but in New Orleans could a library on Carnival, civic rituals, public ceremonial culture, and processional performance be kept? I left it on the streets of New Orleans along with 236 No Burial for the Undead Fig. 1: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Pageant of the Random, 2022, drawings on paper, 29.7 × 21 cm (single sheet) Fig. 2: From: Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2013. Parade route data by Deborah Cotton, cartography by Ben Pease, design by Lia Tjandra 8 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke Uuiversity Press, 2016, p. 18. 9 “The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters.” This is a well-known passage by Willard von Orman Quine which imagines the binary notation of Morse Code being applied to answer the question of the in/finity of the library in Borges’s text “The Library of Babel.” Quine sets out his reflections in Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 223. 237 my potholed memories of all the Mardi Gras Indian parades, second lines, and jazz funerals in which I’d danced and occasionally caught the Holy Spirit, with souvenirs of Carnival in Salvador de Bahia, mas in Port of Spain, Junkanoo in Nassau, and all variations thereof in Kingston, Brooklyn, and Notting Hill, in which I’d samba’d, chipped, and rushed, having taken all manner of footsteps in between, and relayed them into the equivalent of the kilometers of books I read, papers I wrote, and volumes of words I spoke, often extempore, adding unrecorded word mileage to the inner carnival procession of my mind. Missing my library while rummaging about on the topic of ceremony, daunted by the task of bringing my knowledge and experience within the fold of Sylvia Wynter’s incommensurable “ceremony work”—a form of “ecumenically human” “wake work” beyond the Black Lives Matter prism conjured by Christina Sharpe in In the Wake, I came to wonder: If “wake work” is (in Sharpe’s words) “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives […] in the wake of slavery”8 then what might “ceremony work” be and do and which ceremonies might actualize or derealize its promise for the new “ecumenically human” paradigm? Sylvia Wynter’s The Ceremony Found is playing a relentless tune in the foreground of my mind, whilst Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Prozession won’t allow itself to be relegated to the background. In the intervals between Wynter’s words and Stockhausen’s silences, I come to think that if the Morse code of dots and dashes with which W. V. O. Quine sought to resolve the impossible mathematical equation of Borges’ “Library of Babel” approximates the “+” and “–” signs of Stockhausen’s Prozession notation, then ceremonies are Babylonian libraries of steps and gests approaching the parametric chance perfection of a pre-algorithmic electroacoustic score.9 In turn, processional performance is an aleatory template for cosmological immanence that “moves unmoved” (to quote Harney and Moten)—a political movement in search for its next footsteps (Homi Bhabha). This essay is a processional recombinant, in the way in which Kobena Mercer envisions the “recombinant elements” of carnival arts culture as “the very building blocks on which new futures are yet to be Claire Tancons Fig. 3: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Prozession, score for viola and electronium, detail, 1969 10 “Viewed in retrospect, masking returns us to the virtual realm the human inhabits prior to the separation-ind viduation that socializes us as subjects. Viewed in prospect, the performative pleasures of carnival arts encourage expenditure without possessive gain, thereby revealing that culture’s recombinant elements are the very building blocks on which new futures are yet to be assembled.” From: Kobena Mercer, “Theorizing Carnival: Assemblages, Becomings, CrossCultural Machines” in En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, ed. Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and Independent Curators International, 2015, p. 68. 11 I borrow the expression “public ceremonial culture” from Susan Davies in Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, to account for an incipient democratic era fostered by parades as expression of civic ideals or civil disobedience in nineteenth century Philadelphia even as I apply it liberally in contexts that ought to give pause to defenders of the democratic ideal of governance. 12 “No prior translation of the symbols into sound-events and no preparation is required other than a thorough acquaintance with some of the previously composed music of its author, which serves as a resource for the sound-events that are to be subjected to this process [of parametric transformation],” writes Rolf Gehlhaar in “Leap of Faith,” here p. 55. May this thought of Gehlhaar’s serve as a liner note of sorts to the reader of this essay, which, as regards bibliographical and biographical references, is scored in much the same parametrical fashion. 13 “Thirty-Nine Sundays: The Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs Take it to the Streets” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, ed. Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedecker, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013, map. 15. 14 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 15 Ibid., p. xx, my emphasis. 16 D. Eric Bookhardt, the long-time art critic of the New Orleans free weekly Gambit Magazine, coined the term “geopsychic” with John Clark in The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto published circa 1989 by Clark under the pseudonym Max Cafard. Bookhardt recounted that they did not intend to make any direct reference to, nor did they even have any knowledge of, The Letterists early 1950’s psychogeographic exercises or of Guy Debord’s later expansion of the concept through the Situationists. According to Bookhardt, New Orleans’s public ceremonial culture had an innate psychogeographical or, as it were, geophsychic, sensibility. 17 “Non-objects” is used here in the sense given the term by Brazilian critic Ferreira Gular and expanded upon by Mónica Amor in Theories of the Non-Object Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela 1944–1969, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016. 239 assembled,”10 a theory of procession as the epitome of ceremony and, possibly, as a template for The Ceremony Found, a score for a procession as a summation of all processions. Processions will appear in disorderly, transhistorical fashion, through the videographic lens of contemporary public ceremonial culture11 and the artistic productions that have come of that culture, each of which I treat as a parametric transformation and a potential source for the next measure of this processional score of scores.12 A map of New Orleans second line parade routes was produced as part of a meta-cartography project conducted by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedecker (which Sylvia Wynter’s post-1492 world-mapping would not disown from its genealogical line).13 Stretching from the urban plan of Anglo New Orleans, Uptown, where I once lived, to Creole (Spanish and French) downtown New Orleans, where I somehow didn’t live as could have been expected of me as a neo-French Creole of sorts— both gridded neighborhoods in quiet conflict with the sinuous curve of the Mississippi River, the map simultaneously resembles Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Pageant of the Random (2022) and Stockhausen’s score for Prozession, while also calling to mind David Freedberg’s introduction to The Power of Images.14 (Fig. 1; Fig. 2; Fig. 3) There is nothing accidental about this resemblance. In his introduction to The Power of Images, a book allegedly not about art history but, in essence, everything else within the realm of image-making that art historians have long disregarded, Freedberg writes, I could not abandon my belief that it should be within the historian’s range to be able to reclaim precisely those kinds of responses that are not usually written about and that it was possible to do more than leave the apparent haphazard evidence for recurrence as the random detritus of history.15 In drawing a score for the assembly of random exhibition detritus to be used in “a slow pageant in space and time,” Cruzvillegas at once turns to and overturns the history of neglect for what was long considered the garbage heap of art. His line drawings are reminiscent of New Orleans’s map as well as of the cobwebs of the Mangueira favela, its next of kin in the geopsychic carnival genealogical line (heart out to Eric Bookhart, R.I.P.),16 which Abraham followed. Lilac and apple-green, with which Abraham traced the lines between different points of connection for possible angles of assembly, are the colors of the Mangueira Samba School, whose members (heart out to passista Nildo da Mangueira) performed in Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé capes, paradigmatic “non-objects,”17 much like Abraham’s sculptures of recyclable objects, “NOT GARBAGE” as he writes, to be performed by their makers and members of the public. But the volumetric line drawings look like what might have resulted if Stockhausen had thrown “+” and “–” marks around on the page and tried to draw a score freehand from the chaos of the resulting notation, rather than draw his notation on a one-line staff. A Dirge for the Dead Missing the volumes of In the Wake in my library and reluctantly making do with a PDF copy, my mind meanders around Borges’s “Library of Babel” again, while my etheric body simultaneously transports me back to New Orleans where I can relive the many Sundays I spent second lining. In lieu of being able to reread Sharpe or Wynter in the flesh, I looked at one of the drawings of Dapper Bruce Lafitte (AKA Bruce Davenport) which I carried from my last trip to New Orleans back to Paris and onwards to Berlin in a letter-size paper envelope and a cardboard tube, wondering which of the second line season’s thirty-nine Sundays it memorialized.18 Claire Tancons Fig. 4: Dapper Bruce Lafitte, It’s Nation Time, 2022, Archival ink and Faber-Castell markers on acid free paper, original artwork by hand, 30 × 22.5 cm 18 “39 Sundays,” the title of a map from Solnit and Snedecker’s book Unfathomable City, refers to the second line calendar: there are second lines only for thirty-nine Sundays of the year, because second lines are not all-year-round. This is because the second line season ends in summer, when the heat makes it unbearable to parade in the streets. Among Bruce’s large collection of drawings spanning New Orleans’ public ceremonial culture, rooted in the alliance between Native and African American cultures, the colonial impositions and interdictions of the successive Spanish, French and British waves of settlers, and the relation to Haitian, Cuban, and other Caribbean Island neighbors, second lines occupy a pride of place. They are best understood as cultural events and, in an artistic interpretation, by their hierarchical arrangement. The first line is for the members of the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, mutual aid societies with roots in the slavery era, formed to ensure a proper burial for members of the New Orleans African-diasporic community. The second line is for the brass band. And the third line is for everyone. (No geolocalization text needed: you will unfailingly find me between the end of the second and the beginning of the third lines.) I take down the envelope from the empty bookshelf awaiting my library and lay the drawings flat on my desk. This drawing stands out on account of the looser hand and lighter pen grip of which it seems to be the result. It is dated “September 2018” and exhibits, among many other marks, what I will treat as its title: T.D.B.C. Presents It’s Nation Time (“T.D.B.C.” stands for “Taurus da Bull Creations”). The view is not bird’s-eye, but the perspective is from on high—in the community. The person who recorded the scene was up either on a lamppost, a balcony, or a rooftop—all forms of summits climbed in the wake of the parade. 240 No Burial for the Undead 19 Elias Canetti, “Rivers” in Crowds and Power, New York: Seabury Press, 1978, pp. 83–4. 20 Second lines “are in effect a civil rights demonstration [...] demonstrating the civil right of the community to assemble in the street for peaceful purposes. Or, more simply, demonstrating the civil right of the community to exist” as Ned Sublette is quoted as saying in Jordan Flaherty, Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011, p. 8. 241 The movement of the second line begins in the upper-right corner of the page where the road bends and at the junction between the Social Aid and Pleasure Club and its hired brass marching band. The fluid downward motion of the second line is enhanced by loose marks that seem to fly around the bodies of the club’s members. They depict fans made of animal tails, paraphernalia which confers a further festive dimension to an already elaborate show of sartorial excess, where being dapper—as the artist’s moniker proclaims—is the name of the game. On both sides there’s a multicolored crowd of predominantly brown faces with a smattering of pink. The parade and its crowd brings to my mind Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, where he likens a procession or a demonstration to a river that “moves between unmoving banks thus rendering its flux continuously apparent.”19 The apparent stillness of the riverbank-like crowd may have to do with the transitional style of an artist who started out penciling stick figures of Egyptian—or Ethiopian—hieraticism to depict the military formation of the high school marching bands which were his first—and for a long time, his primary—subject matter. During most second lines however, passersby and bystanders—constituting, alongside family and community members, the often-unintended audience for the parade—follow along in a moving multitude engrossing an unquellable flow of raw human power. As the historian Ned Sublette asserts, this power, and the long history of attempted suppression it suffered, with myriad bureaucratic hurdles thrown in its path—route changes, fee increases—as well as actual police repression, confirm the status of second-lining as a de facto form of civil rights demonstration.20 New Orleans offers a case of return/recurse predicated on the already upturned power hierarchy of the modern ceremonial culture of the Americas. A New Orleans second line is a quintessential processional performance in that it is always also a pilgrimage, calling at the many unmarked sanctuaries which punctuate the cityscape amidst a forest of handheld placards commemorating the departed—just as my calling out their names in this essay memorializes the many friends who have gone home—as well as a reenactment of the last Jazz Funeral and a rehearsal for the next one. A dirge will be played along the way. With my mind’s eye I turn to the ceremony that’s beginning or, rather, to the “ceremony work” that’s constantly being undertaken in New Orleans. For the underside of the second line is a culture of violence and oppression festering upon the aftermath of, in short order, genocide, colonization, slavery, segregation, the ongoing struggle for and repression of civil rights from the heydays of lynching to present-day broad-daylight-askquestions-after-police-killings-of-even-twelve-year-old Black-children likewise documented by Bruce in series of drawings that bring this history together as they focus on the Ku Klux Klan’s Old South, the Confederate flag, and the prison plantation complex on the one hand, as well as on Black-on-Black street killings in neighborhood projects representing the internalized violence at the seemingly unending end to the colonial American cycle—the “American dream” for most of the world and, more modestly, for those born in the wretched dregs of it all, a dream still to be had (R.I.P. Martin Luther King). Claire Tancons A Score for Carnival 21 Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik, 1963–70, Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1973, translated by Rolf Gelhaar and quoted in Gelhaar, “Leap of Faith,” p. 57 (emphasis mine). 22 Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisonned Ourselves in our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, Boulder, CA: Paradigm Publishers, 2006, pp. 107–69, here pp. 115–17 (emphasis mine). 23 I can’t ask Greg Tate anymore about the meaning of Avant Groidd, which is also the name of Burnt Sugar’s imprint, as Greg passed to the other side on December 7, 2021. Negroid avant garde? His answer would never have been so succinct but a long recital about precisely what made avant-groiddnuss untranslatable— and why it must remain so. 24 See Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory.” 242 In the course of composing Plus-Minus, I consistently endeavored to create the conditions suitable for living organisms, an environment favorable to ‘musical beings’ subject to an irreversible process of absorption and rejection of new material, experiencing mutation or even death. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik, 1963–7021 Because the systematically induced nature of black self-alienation is itself only a function (a map), if an indispensable one, of the enacted institutionalization of our present genre of the human, Man, and its governing sociogenic code (the territory) as defined in the ethno-class or Western bourgeois biocentric descriptive statement of the human on the model of a natural organism (a model that enables it to over-represent its ethnic and class-specific descriptive statement of the human as if it were that of the human itself ), then, in order to contest one’s function in the enacting of this specific genre of the human, one is confronted with a dilemma. Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisonned Ourselves in our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre”22 Scores are, like maps, notational landscapes drawn with the intent of figuring the interstitial spaces left vacant by human cognition, at once vanity projects and markers of transmission for conquerors and composers seeking as much to establish themselves in posterity as to settle a territory. The map is not the territory—as was first established no place other than in New Orleans in 1931 by the mathematician Alex Korzybski—and yet Carnival—as Isaac Julien articulated in his 1984 essay-film Territories, which depicts the height of the carnival-driven Notting Hill riots—is territorial. Hence the inescapable necessity to keep fracturing essentialism with minimalism, “New-Orleans-as-the-birthplace-of-Jazz” born of the streets under the chip-chipping footsteps of the marching bands, and Stockhausen as the master of the processional score subtended by his quest for the emancipation of sound—a fragmentation that the singer, guitarist, and composer Arto Lindsay and bass guitarist Melvin Gibbs of course routinely enact in their randomized sound encounters a.k.a. jam sessions of the third kind, just as Burnt Sugar did at the height of the Vijay Iyer/Greg Tate era (R.I.P. Greg Tate) circa the beginning of this millennium. This could be interpreted as, in effect, an avant groidd23 take on Sylvia Wynter’s own phrasing of “How we Mistook the Map” (the indexation of all people and things black as negative and evil) “for the Territory” (the internalization thereof by said self-proclaimed Black people.)24 Within the carnival diaspora that Peter White and Allon Stallybrass incompletely conceive of in primarily psychoanalytical/literary terms (rather than in post-1492 metacritical world-historical terms), Trinidad offers a distinct sensibility, which, like the Spanish Tinge/Martinican Biguine/Jazz New Orleans link and the Mento/Ska/Reggae Kingston string, operated as brutal a retrocolonial aesthetic conquest in the exponential figuration-capabilities of the human as did the brutally dogmatic colonization of the world made new. This is the point of disjunction at which ceremonial paths diverge, and with them the almightiness of burial rituals and the worthiness of the dead upon which they place the calculus of the ungratefulness of No Burial for the Undead Fig. 5: Anonymous, The Royal Navy State Funeral Gun Carriage with the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II , September 19, 2022, photograph Fig. 6: Anonymous, Pope Francis’s Extraordinary Moment of Prayer and Urbi et Orbi blessing for the pandemic year on March 27, 2020, photograph Fig. 7: Karem Ahmed, The Pharaohs’ Golden Parade, 2021, photograph 243 Claire Tancons greatness. The funeral carnival inflected by retro-historical militaryreligious monarchic symbology and assembled in formation inside Westminster Abbey and out onto the streets of London is the kind of ceremony that makes me wonder about the imperfect understanding of the dead worth keeping alive—those kids killed by straight or stray bullets memorialized in New Orleans’s second lines—and the undead unworthy of burial—those for instance who continue to confuse the Commonwealth with the Ecumene. Egress of the Ghosted Pope, the Fetish Pharaoh and the Dead Queen 25 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 256. 26 Leora Maltz-Leca, “Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of Change,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 95, no. 1 (2013): pp. 139–65, here p. 157. 27 David Wiles, “Processional Space,” in A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 64–7. Wiles does not consider Egypt. 28 Kathleen Ashley, “Introduction: The Moving Subjects of Processional Performance,” in Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001, pp. 7–34, here p. 7. 29 As Maltz-Leca writes: “Kentridge anchors his distinct animation process in the foundational procession of Western epistemology, one whose figures have functioned for millennia as the processional character of thought—what William James famously called the “stream of consciousness”— as well as for the processional structure of narrative,” in “Process/Procession,” p. 152. 244 Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”25 The colonial procession finds its unruly double in the frequently bombastic parades of the postcolony, hypertrophic displays of excess often aimed at showcasing parity with Western Powers. Leora Maltz-Leca, “Process/Procession: William Kentridge and the Process of Change”26 On March 27, 2020, the enthralled throngs who would have in previous years filled the square gave way instead to an unrelenting rain. St Peter’s Square lay empty in the gloom of an undying Passion. The Play was on the leader of the Catholic Church alone, served by a few robed acolytes of various ranks. His solitary egress took him from the center of the square back up the steps of the Basilica, where he moved from the Real Icon of Santa Maria Maggiore to the Miraculous Crucifix, piously meditating in front of each. Rain dripping on the left flank of the crucified Christ across from his wound appeared to get his blood flowing again, irrigating the faith and fear of the televisual audience whose live presence was impeded by the COVID pandemic. Pope Francis’s lone processional course stood in stark contrast with what one can imagine having been the overwhelming motion of the crowds just 500 years ago, when the crucifix led a procession from its traditional repository, the Saint Marcellus Church, on to St Peter’s Basilica in order to quell the pandemic of the day, the Roman plague of 1522. Return/Re-course. Processional space was among the earliest recorded Western performance spaces, instrumental in instituting the power of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman polities through religious rituals, dramatic theater, triumphant ceremonials, and popular festivals—among other occasions involving the moving occupation of space by and with an audience.27 Processional performance was the dominant mode of public display in Europe until the seventeenth century before the loss of the commons and the rationalization of space brought on by the reign of the Enlightenment.28 A cursory overview of iconic European artistic productions from the long Renaissance onwards, from Gentile Bellini’s pictorial depictions of ducal processions in mid-fifteenth century Venice, to Il Bernini’s staging of street processionals in seventeenth-century Rome confirms that processional performance epitomized the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. As the art historian Leora Maltz-Leca argues by way of William Kentridge’s critique of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, processional performance may even epitomize Western epistemology.29 Certainly, the epistemological underpinnings of Plato’s argument, set against the No Burial for the Undead 30 “Mubarak, the ‘Pharaoh’ Toppled by the Arab Spring: Dies at 91,” Reuters, February 25, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/ egypt-mubarak-obituary-int-idUSKBN20J1S6, accessed October 7, 2022. 245 alienation of an undetermined bunch of imprisoned cavemen, leaves much to ponder regarding the definitions of and the relationship between reality and representation in the Western world. In terms of visual representation, religious processions have always ranked high among processional performances—as this genre of collective performance has come to be labelled by historians of theater and of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance—followed by carnival merrymaking, as exemplified by the Younger and Elder Brueghel’s Flemish marketplace motifs. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Exodus—the errant exile of the Hebrews from Egypt—provided the template for migrations and pilgrimages, and was itself for most free and forced migrants to the Americas a founding narrative of new diasporic worldings or cosmological formations, chief amongst whom were the members of the African diaspora. Herein lies the aporia at the heart of Sylvia Wynter’s call to find a ceremony and proposal for a ceremony found. For if processional performance, a label which I extend across times and cultures beyond the West, is possibly the ceremonial genre toward which Wynter’s “The Ceremony Found” tends, the potentially ever-morphing, always-becoming indeterminacy of its spectator-protagonists makes it just the kind of unstable object with which she contends throughout her humanist oeuvre—ultimately leaving it up to us to fulfill. Take the Pharaoh’s Golden Parade, convened by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on April 3, 2021. A five-kilometer route provided the scene for a moving tableau of rare magnitude, a choreographed revue for a Broadway-ready cast of over 700, with children opening the show, female participants following on foot, male members of the cast on horseback, one in a horse-drawn carriage, others in a motorcade opening the way for the Pharaoh’s vehicles—which were intended to look like waterborne vessels, but resembled a mix between a sports utility and a military vehicle—and a hearse. The motorized, mediagenic, spectator-less parade of twenty-two mummies, comprising four queens and eighteen kings, traveled to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization from the old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square. As the main stage and stronghold of the Egyptian Revolution (initially mediatized as the “Arab Spring”), an initially non-violent popular uprising that cast off then president-for-life Hosni Mubarak—a ruler so autocratic he was referred to as “Pharaoh” and so despotic he declared “Egypt and I shall not be parted until am buried in her soil”30—the parade’s point of departure may have seemed politically incongruous, ideologically incautious, and historically illiterate. But when one remembers that Mubarak himself landed the job after a political assassination at a military parade, one can begin to understand how both pharaohs and parades—and all the more so the parades of the pharaohs—keep fulfilling the unchanging scheme of the postcolonial Egyptian cosmo-script, whose founding animist cosmogony was stirred to assert the monotheistic, autocratic power of post-Spring Sisi. Sponsored by the Egyptian Government through the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, produced by the MediaHub communications agency with Mohamed El Saadi at the helm, Ahmad Al Morsi as artistic director and director of photography, and Mohamed Attia as production designer, the parade required a year and a half of research into source materials, which ranged from actual artistic elements stemming from the era of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt during which the mummies were prepared, to the myriad contemporary spectacles—cinematic, operatic, Olympic—for which Egypt has served as an opportunity for pastiche. This was the latest, scaled-up installment in the series, dedicated to the open confirmation of a de facto pharaonic political power unbent by democratic resistance. One wonders if the pharaoh-pornotropic prism through which the Egyptian government wanted world audiences to Claire Tancons 31 David Graeber, Twitter, February 8, 2013, https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/ status/299964794616807424, accessed October 7, 2022. 32 Wiles, “Processional Space,” pp. 68–9. 33 “The commandement itself aspires to be a cosmogony” quoted from Achille Mbembe, “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony,” Public Culture, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 1992): pp. 1–30, here p. 12. 34 Ibid., p. 5. 246 see Tahrir Square wasn’t meant to erase the lingering afterimages of another kind of spatial occupation and image production, that of the occupation of Tahrir Square and the resulting hopes for emancipation that, with recourse to popular theater, it yielded, a style of theater that David Graeber (R.I.P.)—ever the observer, when not himself the instigator of such upheavals—summarized in a knowing tweet: “all right! Egyptian protests now have Black Blocs and colorful giant puppets!”31 Do not the Pope’s spectral Passion processional and the Pharaoh’s spectacularized parade continue to provide emblematic renderings of ancient processional genres—pilgrimage and parade—leading back to Greek ceremonial fundaments in the case of the former, and its Ptolemaic colonial implementation for the latter? As Wiles writes: This procession along Delphi’s Sacred Way can be contrasted with the grand procession of Dyonisus which rolled through the broad, rectilinear avenues of Alexandria in 275/4 BC as part of Ptolemia, a festival celebrating a regime of the Greek Ptolemys.32 What do the present-day iterations of these false-twin, non-linear lineages suggest in terms of the recursivity of ceremonial forms for the dominant systems of power beyond the fact that neither are “The Ceremony Found” but are instead symptomatic of just why other contemporary ceremonies of ecumenically human dimension need to be found? Moreover, is it necessary to return to Upper Egypt’s Greek settler-colonial history to ascertain the region’s perennial purchase on an ever-evolving system of colonial maskings, at the current end of which the contemporary Egyptian Republic abides by many of the trappings of a postcolony? In terms of the Cameroonian archetype set out by Achille Mbembe, the commendement—in this case Egyptian—made of the Pharaoh a fetish as part of its own cosmological aspiration.33 Surely, “The Ceremony Found” cannot reside in the “process of mutual ‘zombification’”34 of the commandement and those he commands over, a ghosting process made evident in the absent crowds at the Vatican, dispensed with on account of the COVID pandemic, and those of Cairo, disappeared as part of an ongoing process of state repression. For all the ceremony inherent in the recent ceremonial Trinity of the Vatican’s Pope (2020), Egypt’s President Sisi (2021), and the funeral of England’s Queen Elizabeth II (2022), none are doing “ceremony work.” Rather the ceremonies of Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth II enforce precisely the Catholic ideology and colonial history that divides the world between those who can preside over a ceremony of might and those who need “ceremony” work for bereavement and indeed, burial, each one often inhabiting at the opposite ends of the other’s cosmological spectrum. Contrast this with an earlier model for funerary ritual representation, the so-called Bersha Procession from the Middle Kingdom, which preceded the New Kingdom that provided the historical referent for the Pharaoh’s Golden Parade. A wooden model of four figurines in processional formation, it represents three female offering bearers preceded by a male priest. All carry luxurious riches meant to provide for the deceased in whose tomb it was found. The model is one of the most refined sculptural representations of the genre which has been recovered. The forward motion of its figures, modest and resolute in their stance, hieratic in their style, makes palpable the ineluctability of their destination. Yet, by being neither unjoyful—a wooden rictus in one cheek seems to evince a smile— nor self-important and triumphant—by contrast with their distant living relatives cast for the Golden Pharaoh’s Parade—they point toward just the kinds of standards of self-assured dignity that were lost over millennia of the misappropriation of power. Yet the Bersha Procession and the Golden Pharaoh’s Parade resemble each other also when it comes to the No Burial for the Undead fate of the deceased who is served: the museum is their final place of repose. Despite all that has been written about the museum as mausoleum, never is this made more evident than in the case of the cultural exploitation of human remains elevated to the rank of artistic objects for the supposed sake of their preservation, with little regard to the spiritual, and indeed cosmological disturbance such a displacement entails. These are the Underbelly of the Undead: Djehuty-nakht, for whom the wooden processional model was made, and all twenty-two Kings and Queens— from King Sequenenre Tao and Queen Ahmose-Nefertari, to the last of the Rahmses—whom the Golden Pharaoh’s Parade transferred into the realm of the undead, having once more had their umbilical cord cut to the underworld of the dead, where one they had resided. Fig. 8: Anonymous, Model of a Procession of Offering Bearers (“The Bersha Procession”), Egypt, Middle Kingdom, late Dynasty 11–early Dynasty, 2010–1961 BCE, Findspot: Deir elBersha, Egypt, wood, 66.4 × 8.6 × 42.5 cm Photo: © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston No such restraint, as expressed in the Bersha procession, and usually attributed to true faith in ancient religions or endangered cults, was in effect in the different kinds of burials recounted above—the Urbi et Orbi Papal Address at St Peter’s Square as a cyclical, symbolic burial of Jesus Christ; the Pharaoh’s Golden Parade as a vehicle for a symbolic mass re-burial, the relocation of Egyptian mummies from one museum to another; and an actual burial, the Queen of England’s. The royal funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London was the trinitary capstone in a threeyear series of momentous mass ceremonials, with the Queen herself as God the Mother, General Sisi as the Son, and the Pope, naturally, as the Holy Spirit. All three gave the world recent examples of worlds refusing to die even while burying themselves, literally and figuratively, under much pomp and circumstance signaling an autopoetic Return/Recurse— rather than the autopoetic Turn/Overturn sought after by Sylvia Wynter. Yet their various states of burial seem only to comfort their staying/dying power in the unending genealogical retinue of their ancestry and progeny. None of it partakes of the “ceremony work” the rest of the world has to undertake so that their power can, in essence, remain alive. La reine est morte, vive la reine? 247 Claire Tancons Historical Line vs Cosmological Arch—or the Formation of (Processional) Ethics 35 Peter Minshall’s Callaloo An De Crab. A Story by Minshall, Trinidad and Tobago: N. P., 1984, p. 90, is a short story accompanying the formation of the Callaloo masband of the same year around the central figure of Madame Hiroshima, which anticipates its further elaboration as The Adoration of Hiroshima in the masband Calabash of 1985. The passage from which the quote is taken depicts a scene that children should indeed not see: Madame Hiroshima as a monstrous whore about to rape Callaloo, a personification of nature in the way of the destructive power of the nuclear bomb. Children however were not spared by the atomic bomb and Minshall made sure to materialize the gruesome loss of infantile like with the piece Burnt Baby (1985), also on view in the exhibition Ceremony. 36 The quote is taken from “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge’s Implicated Aesthetics,” the third chapter of the book by Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019, pp. 87–119. The quote from Martin Luther King Jr. itself is a paraphrase from an 1853 sermon by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. Parker’s full segment, from which King’s quote stems, is somewhat more nuanced: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” No Hiroshima! No! Not in front of de children! Peter Minshall, “Callaloo an De Crab”35 The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Martin Luther King, Jr.36 The aporia at the heart of “The Ceremony Found,” and the resulting tension over the burial rights of the undead and the dead, can only be resolved ceremonially. And that is indeed how it is resolved, in a street warfare played out between the spectacular spasms of the undead, laid to rest on the spoils of secular and religious empires, and the violent display of bloody trails, starved smiles, and flooded faces that too often precedes the death and dying of the dead. Artists can only attempt to re-score the cosmological charts upon which earlier celestial calculations were made—calculations which gave us maps for the Indies on the wrong side of the world, territories expanding from flags hoisted everywhere a ship dropped anchor, countries wherever rape could be mustered into demographics. Among these attempts, two scores offer contrasting codexes within which the ceremonial aporetic is given the full complexity of its delicate representational valence. Though the two works I will now turn to examine may not have been devised as scores, they do offer an open interpretational field and can be performatively reenacted above and beyond the law of the language of the foundational books that gave way to the historical traditions from which we must depart. Fig. 9: William Kentridge, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, 1990, charcoal and pastel on paper, 245 × 750 cm (displayed) Begun a mere ten days after William Kentridge’s participation in the first legal march in Johannesburg following Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island in 1989, Arc/Procession: Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass (1990), a monumental drawing nearly eight meters long, complicates some of the perspectives taken on the new democratic agenda and expressed in progressive propaganda for regime change by suturing together a fragmented landscape that eschews the march-to-progress narrative seemingly warranted by the seismic historical shift from apartheid to democracy. In her magisterial essay “Process/Procession,” as part of a larger reflection on the function of the processional in Kentridge’s work, Leora Maltz-Leca writes that, for Kentridge, following Walter 248 No Burial for the Undead 37 Maltz-Leca, “Process/Procession,” p. 159. 38 See fn. 106 in Leora Maltz-Leca, “Process/ Procession.” Benjamin and Theodor Adorno “such an exploding view of history is rooted in a crisis of sequencing historical time.”37 I want to also suggest, on the basis of arguments put forth by Maltz-Leca herself, that the sequencing crisis that is at stake, and that Kentridge addresses, concerns cosmological time, in addition to and maybe even more than historical time. Such a presentiment can be tested by taking a closer look at the conjunctions established between the work’s text and images, the former carefully distributed over and across the latter in a syncopation of its own, adding points of connection that at once elucidate and obfuscate. Above, a man in what appears to be a sailor’s hat, bent over on a crutch to support his mutilated leg, taunted, or aided by—it is not clear—men with helmets resembling miners or policemen—it is likewise unclear—the word “Develop” hovers in cursive like an ironic omen. At the other end of the arc, the words “Even Surpass” are etched over the shadow of a man under an umbrella, hurrying as if escaping his own invisible double. Slightly off-centered, the words “Catch up” are mangled into the boots of a miner/ policeman who seems to be punching a naked woman in the groin. He has a baby hyena strapped to his back. Harry, as he is known, is a recurring character in Kentridge’s work, his arms here outstretched toward the sky, forming the arc’s central and focal point. The hyena mother prowls about close by, her udders stretched down in an unequivocal resemblance to La Lupa Capitolina (The Capitoline Wolf )—a bronze sculpture, housed in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, depicting the female wolf who saved the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, future founders of Rome. Additionally, the work’s subtitle, Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass references a sentence from a 1960s speech by Haile Selassie which brings into perspective the colonial alienation which the Negusa Nagast inherited and in turn visited upon Ethiopians during his reign, and further derails the assumed emancipatory meaning of Arc/Procession.38 In his quest for a foundation myth worthy of Johannesburg’s rebirth as the postcolonial capital of the new South African democracy, Kentridge mines antique Rome, as he did revolutionary Paris in his epic film Johannesburg: 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), which develops an enigmatic, rebus-like formation of signs and figures, as if surrendering the future of history to a face-off with the Sphinx. But for all their indigenization—in Wynter’s employment of the term—by means of South African motifs and metaphors—the hyena for corruption, the megaphones for labor strikes, the miners and the policemen, processions of the dispossessed versus the Great Trek, Mandela’s Long Road to Freedom and The Last Mile—do the European foundation myths to which Kentridge turns really uproot Western historical and artistic modern colonial tradition? And while the Ethiopian episode complicates the already intricate web of narratives woven into multiple timelines, does Arc/Procession succeed in concatenating this cacophony of signs into a novel cosmological compendium by the suggestive power of a jagged curvature? Does the assemblage of toe-stepping and belly-punching characters of the old regime and the new one inaugurated by the struggles against apartheid manage to recycle their contrary ebbs and flows into a non-teleological retinue? ◆ The tradition to which Peter Minshall’s preparatory sketch for The Adoration of Hiroshima (1985) introduces us is another one altogether, (Fig. 19) a tradition born of the post-independence Caribbean context that Trinidadian artist and critic Christopher Cozier, making a positive reappropriation of the absence of monuments in the Caribbean, summarized thus: “Outside of geological phenomena, there are no monuments in the Caribbean islands such as pyramids, domes or towers but we have 249 Claire Tancons Fig. 10: Peter Minshall, The Adoration of Hiroshima, preparatory sketch, 1985, 21.6 × 27.9 cm 39 Christopher Cozier, in “Trinidad: Questions about Contemporary Histories,” in Caribe insular: exclusión, fragmentación, paraíso, Madrid: Casa de América; Junta de Extremadura: MEIAC, Museo Extremeño y Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, 1998, p. 348. 40 Christopher Cozier, typescript of a talk given in 1998, later published without this excerpt in Caribe Insular, p. 2. 250 our people; their particular stories as defined by their language, gestures and vision.”39 Pursuing his epistemological redefinition of the concept of art and effort to explicate the terminology of artistic practices from a Caribbean standpoint, Cozier coined the word “roadworks” to characterize Peter Minshall’s artworks, “since many of the activities surrounding our lives are street activities, I thought it interesting to replace the word art with road.”40 Roadworks, or works made for the road march at carnival time, offer another timeline, and another way of figuring historical time and of scoring events in succession in Man’s long march toward the final catastrophe—or relief—of his own self-made demise. In this score, the strokes of the artist’s hand on the sheet are fast and confident, the pen sharp, the order of things sorted. Three horizontal lines form a broken frieze of figures in a compositional manner not dissimilar from that of the Egyptians. Stick figures alternate between frontal and profile views, walking, carrying themselves and other things, alone—an incense burner on the bottom line—or in a group—a giant puppet on the upper line— striking and shaking instruments, drums, bells, maybe shack-shacks, the final line ending in the leaky ink trail/train of a female bell-ringer. Forward motion is indicated by the diagonal lines of legs and arms, or of the skirts or dresses and veils above them, following the same direction. The dynamic impression conveyed by the drawing as an ensemble of signs and notations—a partition, part score and part script at once, Egyptian indeed—resides in the contrary direction of the figures’ steps in relationship with the left-to-right reading direction of the Latin script. Amidst all this linearity, one figure on the bottom line of the score stands out due to its sheer formal excess. It seems like an explosion on the page yet doesn’t exceed the bounds within which the staffs confine it. A figure penciled with jagged lines in a star formation emerging mid-center between fumes and a cloud, its sheer volume contrasting with the lanky figures surrounding it and connoting a higher-pitch, even a deafening sound, as if a dramatic change of key had occurred halfway through the melody This is essentially what happened to the music of the spheres that had governed the Western cosmos when on August 5, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. JST the bombing of the coastal city of Hiroshima by Americans in the protracted Pacific War destroyed humanity’s last bit of remaining innocence. Forty years after one of the events closest to apocalypse that Man had ever conceived, an event wrought by the necropolitics of nuclear warfare, Trinidadian artist Peter Minshall penned this sketch as a score for his masband Port of Spain yearly carnival parade. I do not know how legible the central motif of the score is, or the entirety of the motifs as score for that matter, to those who have not seen the real-life rendition or photographic documentation of Peter No Burial for the Undead Minshall’s The Adoration of Hiroshima. A neo-baroque obscenity of gold and feathers holding a missile in one hand and the globe in the other, a personification of the nuclear bomb, portrayed by a man in drag with more than one claim to camp fame, aspiring to the title both of King and Queen of Carnival as a monstrous figure of history, it first appeared on the Savannah—Trinidad’s open-air Carnival stadium on the grounds of a former plantation—amidst a sea of costumed revelers in the final moments of a millenary danse macabre. It was to acquire international fame as PROJECT MAS, a pun on mas, short for masquerade, and the English-speaking Caribbean colloquial term for “carnival,” and the acronym “M.A.S.” for Mutually Assured Survival, itself a play-on-words with “mad” and “M.A.D.,” or Mutually Assured Destruction. I do not have a single book to turn to, this time by no fault of my missing library for there is no monograph of Peter Minshall’s work to this day. But there is a treasure trove of archival material preserved at and sent from the Callaloo Company, Peter Minshall’s former mascamp and current archive, presented to the public for the first time in Ceremony. It contains further sketches and notes of single characters and motifs from the band as well as of The Adoration of Hiroshima herself and of her previous incarnation as Madame Hiroshima in the band of the previous year. More interestingly still, from an historical standpoint, is the typewritten correspondence between Minshall and various private and public entities to facilitate the organization of the enterprise, including the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago for the authorization to deposit funds; the U.S. Embassy for visa applications; the British West Indian Airlines for sponsoring flights, and the Hiroshima/Nagazaki Memorial Committee as the project’s main partner for the participation of the Peace Protest on the Mall in Washington D.C. Does Minshall’s score, the retroprospective figuration of the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago’s aspiration to assume a place on the world stage, actually succeed in accomplishing the autopoietic Turn/Overturn, even from within carnival or protest traditions known for just this built-in upturning—anymore than Kentridge’s, a contemporary re-imagining of the millenia-old medium of processional performance as a vector of democratic consciousness? If not, then what could accomplish this? ◆ Close comparative analysis of the ceremonial trinity of the Queen, the Pope, and the Pharaoh (Western Man[1] and Man[2] and its postcolonial offspring) have brought to light through the mechanisms through which the “theo-cosmogonically chartered” and “sociogenic” replicator codes function at the beginning of the second decade of the third millennium After Death—with the very fact that, as the usual gloss on the initials A.D. underscores, the Western world enunciates its cosmogony as one born in or of the aftermath of death alerting us to its foundational and terminal undead status and stance. In contrast, processional performances such as Kentridge’s Arc/Procession series born of the immediate post-apartheid victory marches and Peter Minshall’s Hiroshima-themed masband as commemoration of the nuclear catastrophes, provide counter-models for rescoring linear teleologies of a hitherto apocalyptic modernity. As this bio-biography of ceremonies as Babylonian libraries of steps and gest comes to a close, I want to pursue my investigation into actual ceremonies in Wynterian ceremonial philosophical thought processes. This means convening further Caribbean ceremonies as originary sources. As Aaron Kamugisha reminds us, the crux of Sylvia Wynter’s work and indeed, the “zenith,” as he calls it, of her reflection comes from the Caribbean, not simply philosophically, but experientially. If her theatrical work, such as Maskarade (1973), but also her scholarly essay 251 Claire Tancons on indigenized forms of African folk theater, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica” (1970), are obvious places for retrospective insights into Sylvia Wynter’s Caribbean ceremonies, it is now these new aesthetemes conceived by Caribbean artists in recent years that I want to share with you, in homage and as tribute to Sylvia. Folklore, Frozen Monuments, and the Coming Ceremony: A Coda It is true that they [the Negroes] have several ceremonies. 41 Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of the Folk Dance as a Cultural Process,” Jamaica Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (1970): pp. 34–48. 42 Aaron Kamugisha, “Sylvia Wynter’s Caribbean Ceremony,” this volume, pp. 25–8. Sir Hans Sloane41 Wynter’s ceremonies are not indebted to the Caibbean—they are constitutive of Caribbean thought and experience. Aaron Kamugisha, “Sylvia Wynter’s Caribbean Ceremony”42 We propose to offer a thesis with regards to, and attempt an interpretation of, the Jonkonnu folkdance as agent and product of a cultural process which we shall identify and explore as a process of indigenization. Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica”43 43 Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” p. 34. 44 Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015, pp. 184–252, here p. 241. 45 In Miscegenated Family History (1984/1990) Lorraine O’Grady inserted herself and her family into Egyptian pharaonic history by way of diptych compositions comparing and contrasting sculptural and bas-relief portraits of Nefertiti and her family with photographic likenesses of the artist’s recently passed sister Devonia and her family. See https:// lorraineogrady.com/art/miscegenated-familyalbum/, accessed October 7, 2022. 252 Unfathomable as the steps of history in the making, incommensurable as the flow of an untamed river, unreal as the Caribbean and the fantasies and fictions of Empire from which it was born, Hew Locke’s The Procession is a tributary critique of the slave-owning founder—Henry Tate—of the very edifice—Tate Britain—between whose columns it parades into a “space of otherness” of its own making, into which it invites the public to step. (Fig. 11) It is precisely because The Procession cannot be disentangled from its built-in historical premises, as it unravels their intricacies one banner after another, dishevels one masquerader after another, and unseals one statue after another, that it offers an incredibly acute example of the “Ceremony Found’s new (meta-Western (neo)Liberal-monohumanist) Account of Origin […] whose projected class of classes origin model of Autopoetic Institution will be able to contain the magma of all ‘local’ origin stories/accounts.”44 Here penitents from la Semana Santa—after whose model the whole processional was structured—chip along with Junkanoo masqueraders and carnival revelers, there the Dance of Death rushes cheek-by-jowl with Egungun lookalikes, themselves reminiscent of Pitchy-Patchy a step further away, while hawkers of bonds for Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line stand in line with Antillean cane-cutters. What makes Locke’s The Procession such a remarkable, novel, ecumenically human aestheteme within the processional genre which the ceremony puts forth amidst these words, is how it demonumentalizes European history while creating a monument out of the very humanity that was cast out of mankind. Likewise, archetypal figures of epic European history meet Junkanoo stock characters in Lorraine O’Grady’s Announcement of a New Persona (Performance to Come!), a photographic series of highly choreographed performances for the camera in which the artist embeds herself in the historical/ceremonial maelstrom, much as Hew Locke’s The Procession does with its myriad characters. O’Grady, however, does so on the small, intimate scale of her life persona, which develops from her starting point as an Egyptian princess—which, considering one of this essay’s premises regarding the return/recurse of origin myth, is worth noting—to No Burial for the Undead Fig. 11: Hew Locke, The Procession, installation view at Tate Britain, 2022 46 Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” p. 211. 47 Ibid. 253 hybrid armored medieval-knight-cum-Jamaican-folk-mask.45 In one of the family portraits (so-called) that form the series, Family Portrait 1 (Formal, Composed) O’Grady brings together figures drawn from the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and of Don Quixote, whose faithful if ever-stumbling horse Rocinante is recast as a hobby-horse of the Junkanoo tradition—“Jamaica’s Carnival” per Wynter’s own reckoning—and whimsically renamed Rociavant, alongside Pitchy-Patchy. The result is a daring act of cultural hybridization in which it appears that the goal of “our being able to lawlikely performatively-enact ourselves as being hybridly human” has been attained.46 Even putting O’Grady’s generational proximity with Wynter and her Jamaican heritage aside it should come as no great surprise that the work of an artist who by her own account has made a method of hybridity should so closely respond to Wynter’s call to “performatively enact ourselves as the only auto-instituting species of hybrid living-beings—that is to say to enact ourselves as uniquely human.”47 Claire Tancons