Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds

Cemetery Citizens explores the ethical and practical challenges of cemetery reclamation, highlighting how volunteers build community, craft new ideas about citizenship and ancestry, and expose injustices. It argues that an ethic of reclamation must honor the presence of the dead, treating them as fellow cemetery citizens.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 286 pages
Publication date: 30 April 2024
Publisher: Stanford University Press

Across the United States, groups of grassroots volunteers gather in overgrown, systematically neglected cemeteries to offer care to individuals who were denied basic rights and forms of belonging in life and in death. Cemetery Citizens, the first book-length study of this emerging form of social justice work, focuses on how racial disparities shape the fates of the dead and asks what kinds of repair are still possible. Drawing on interviews, activist anthropology, poems, and drawings, Adam Rosenblatt takes us to gravesite reclamation efforts in three prominent American cities. Cemetery Citizens dives into the ethical quandaries and practical complexities of cemetery reclamation, showing how volunteers build community across social boundaries, craft new ideas about citizenship and ancestry, and expose injustices that would otherwise be suppressed. Ultimately, Rosenblatt argues that an ethic of reclamation must honor the presence of the dead—treating them as fellow cemetery citizens who share our histories, landscapes, and need for care.

Weight: 422g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781503639119