Candi Cann

This bibliography on African American deathways examines the role of death, dying, and disposal from a variety of different perspectives. Studies focusing on the intersection between death and history survey a wide range of materials, ranging from general histories that contextualize the importance of death culture to more specific studies of prominent burial grounds and cemeteries. Scholars focusing on cemeteries and material culture tend to highlight the importance of burial customs in African American remembrance and mourning, while also examining some of the intellectual divides that archaeological excavations of these cemeteries have created. Additionally, many burial customs and traditions retained markers of identity tying them to West African traditions and pan-African identity, in general. Cemeteries function as signifiers of belonging and exclusivity, with many cemeteries in North America either segregated or unmarked. Cremation, on the other hand, remains a less popular form of disposal in a culture with a deep respect for embodied funeral traditions, even though it is a far more affordable option than burial. Regarding the economic dimension of African American deathways, studies of the funeral home industry highlight its role as a nexus for cementing cultural identity in the African American community, since, historically, funeral homes were one of the few businesses that blacks were allowed and encouraged to run without interference from the white community. The funeral home thus became an important center for commerce, building equity, funding education, creating political action, and providing infrastructural support, causing the funeral home business to prosper. Similarly, funerary traditions often formed an important part of African American culture, and the body was, and remains, the locus of funerary traditions, often with long wakes (in which families and friends sit with the body telling stories and remembering the deceased), and equally long funeral processions, in which entire communities come to pay respect to the dead. Recent research on the dying experience among African Americans reveals disparities between whites and communities of color, with unequal access to medical care and a history of gross abuse and experimentation by medical professionals. Those studies focusing on mourning and culture tend to address larger cultural frameworks of death from a qualitative perspective, while gender-critical analyses of African American deathways examine the role of women and LGBT folk in the funeral business. Unfortunately, like many businesses, women’s roles were diminished as the industry professionalized and men became the primary faces of the business, while death studies in general remained heteronormative in its focus. Finally, the political dimension of death represents a significant area of research within African American death studies. These works examine the politics of mourning and the ways in which death and mourning create agency for the African American community. Death, funerals, and a politics of mourning were all essential to political movements in the United States, and evidenced through collective responses found in both the anti-lynching movement and the civil rights movement. More recently, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has highlighted the continued killing and spectacle of black bodies, and can be viewed as a powerful contemporary resistance against the ongoing oppression of people of color in the United States.

This chapter examines QR codes and the impact of smartphone technology on tombstones and column bariums. It briefly surveys Human-Computer Interaction related to smartchip technology in the funeral industry in Japan, Korea, China, the United Kingdom and the United States. Then it examines how tombstone technology impacts the way people think about death and remember the dead, particularly in terms of religious expression.

“Sweetening Death” presents a comparative analysis of the role of sugar and its transformation in funeral foods, remembrance rituals, documenting the ways the dead are perceived and understood as active or passive actors in their afterlives. Sugar, though widely available in the contemporary world, was initially utilized in memorialization and funereal practices because it connoted a particular status to the dead, though it is now ironically a staple of the lower classes and a symbol of malnutrition. The comparison in food bereavement and memorialization rituals highlights a distinct difference between the function of food on the American table in comparison to the Mexican or Chinese context, revealing that while food functions to largely aide the bereaved and reintegrate the grieving into their social network without the deceased in the American context, it literally functions to feed the dead in Mexico and China.

This bibliography on African American deathways examines the role of death, dying, and disposal from a variety of different perspectives. Studies focusing on the intersection between death and history survey a wide range of materials, ranging from general histories that contextualize the importance of death culture to more specific studies of prominent burial grounds and cemeteries. Scholars focusing on cemeteries and material culture tend to highlight the importance of burial customs in African American remembrance and mourning, while also examining some of the intellectual divides that archaeological excavations of these cemeteries have created. Additionally, many burial customs and traditions retained markers of identity tying them to West African traditions and pan-African identity, in general. Cemeteries function as signifiers of belonging and exclusivity, with many cemeteries in North America either segregated or unmarked. Cremation, on the other hand, remains a less popular f...

Black Deaths Matter: Earning the Right to Live—Death and the African-American Funeral Home recounts the history of black funeral homes in the United States and their role in demanding justice for bodies of color and the black community. Through funeral pageantry and vigilant support for local communities, the African American funeral home has been central to ensuring that not only do Black Lives Matter, but black deaths count and are visible to the larger community. This paper is a slightly expanded version of the plenary talk for the Centre for Death and Society’s Politics of Death Conference at the University of Bath on 9 June 2018. This research and talk were supported by The Louisville Institute under the Project Grant for Researchers.

concepts’ so that a variety of topics are brought into discussion: the inevitability of death that generates fear, avoidance and over-protectionism, the negative and positive sides of death, the afterlife possibilities. What characterizes children’s approaches is flexibility and personal adaptation of cultural interpretative patterns. Notwithstanding the book’s merits, sometimes the author appears to overestimate children’s capacity to understand things related to death, equating their narratives of death with authentic responses to death and the grasp of its meanings. Not too often though, there are times when the author’s desire to empower children and erase the culturally imposed distance between them and the adult world risks becoming if not ideological, at least uncovered by facts (see the concept of small deaths). Coombs seems often to focus more on their creative and critical approaches to death and overlook the traditional, stereotypic or shallow ones. Also, seeing any popular culture source of death as automatically being a trigger of death awareness might not be the best option. However, these points do not overshadow the excellent research findings of this book, which makes clear not only that children can and should talk about death, but also that adults – parents, societies, academics – should (carefully!) listen to them.

Abstract The different countries that death and dying researchers reside within often shape not only research agendas but also research methodologies. The United Kingdom and the United States are two examples of countries that share a common language and intellectual history but their discourses on death have been very different. These differences are partly explained through cultural practices, and also government funding of research, definitions of death and end-of-life planning education. In this article, we argue that early death scholarship in the United States impacted death research and outcomes in both the US and the UK, but that recent scholarship in both countries has caused the two countries to diverge in two major areas: (1) the methodological approaches to death studies and (2) the educational training of medical and hospice personnel in direct contact with the dying. We argue that in order for death studies to fully benefit from trans-Atlantic dialogue on death, both countries need to move towards a more integrated trans-disciplinary model.

This chapter examines QR codes and the impact of smartphone technology on tombstones and column bariums. It briefly surveys Human-Computer Interaction related to smartchip technology in the funeral industry in Japan, Korea, China, the United Kingdom and the United States. Then it examines how tombstone technology impacts the way people think about death and remember the dead, particularly in terms of religious expression.