2025/01/17 by Cheyenne Zaremba · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Public Spaces through Art #Theatre and Performance Studies
paper · doi:10.1177/13678779241310460
openalex publication_date 2025/01/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/19
This study utilizes performance and cultural citizenship as rhetorical frameworks for examining the power of spaces of death in shaping civic identity in urban spaces. Utilizing invisible rituals as a point of entry, I examine the urban cemetery as a space for reinforcing, challenging, and reshaping the identity of citizenship through performance, ritual, and possession. Through a combination of on-site observational research and digital ethnographic interviews, this study explores urban cemeteries as community spaces that reify hegemonies of cultural citizenship in life and death. Utilizing literature from the study of space, performance, possession, cultural citizenship, and ritual practice, I argue that performances of ritual in cemeteries are more than just acts of mourning or remembrance. Rather, resting on the dynamics of visibility, performances of ritual are also claims of possession of the space that assert belonging and shape the frame of reference for acts of meaningmaking in cemeteries.