Marked,Remembered,Defiant: Ritual Geographies and the Spatial Politics of Black Performance

Abstract

This article examines how Black ritual performance operates as a spatial method through which communities reconfigure place, enact memory, and assert presence amid racial-capitalist constraint. Grounded in ritual geographies, it analyzes the Mardi Gras dawn procession of the North Side Skull & Bone Gang in New Orleans as a practice that remaps urban space, sustains intergenerational knowledge, and stages spatial justice through embodied performance. Drawing on Rawle Gibbons’s Third Theatre, Clyde Woods’s blues epistemology, and J. T. Roane’s concept of dark agoras, the article situates the Skull & Bone Gang’s ritual within a diasporic analytics shaped by Trinidad’s Jouvay and the spatial and sensorial logics of Soca. Through ethnographic description and performance analysis, it illustrates how the Gang’s choreography of sound, repetition, and moral interruption constitutes an insurgent cartography rooted in Afro-diasporic temporalities. The article concludes that Black ritual performance functions as a generative spatial practice that produces orientation, world-making, and forms of sovereignty that unsettle the dominant geographies of the U.S. South.