ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss the scholarly literature and current research on burial customs, traditions, and the modern-day cemetery. We remember visiting cemeteries of our loved ones and suggest that cemeteries “bind us to the past” (Hall, 2011, p. 317). Cemeteries serve as repositories of historical and personal memories, sites of cultural and social rituals, and foster and sustain relational ways of being. Through cultural-critical, rhetorical, and performative analyses of graveyards and cemeteries throughout the South, we suggest that contemporary cemeteries construct the dead through their individual, familial, cultural, and collective identities. We discuss the ways in which cemeteries epitomize the liminal space where decay and rebirth; living and dead meet, where we can go to be reminded of our identity, our history, and our future.
