Life-in-Death: Raising Dead Sons in New Orleans

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe social and religious work of African-American women in New Orleans who mourn and memorialise the dead attends primarily to sons and grandsons, the young black men who are most frequently the victims of homicide. Based on ethnographic and historical research in two Christian congregations, this article examines the forms of relatedness that women have developed to support and advocate for each other, the displaced, and the deceased. Tracing more broadly the development of vulnerability and violence at the urban margins, I argue that this work unfolds in a continued context of social death, predicated on dominant and still racist determinations of human value. I thus examine the transformative potential of African-American religious women’s relational practices, highlighting in particular their assertion of black social and spiritual value, in the kingdom of God if not yet in the inclusive, just, and sustainable city and world they envision.