Description
Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures. From sunken slave ships to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Val rie Loichot investigates the lack of official funeral rites in the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, waters that constitute both early and contemporary sites of loss for the enslaved, the migrant, the refugee, and the destitute. Unritual, or the privation of ritual, Loichot argues, is a state more absolute than desecration. Desecration implies a previous sacred observance--a temple, a grave, a ceremony. Unritual, by contrast, denies the sacred from the beginning.
In coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Miami, Haiti, Martinique, Cancun, and Trinidad and Tobago, the artists and writers featured in Water Graves--an eclectic cast that includes Beyonc , Radcliffe Bailey, Edwidge Danticat, douard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jason deCaires Taylor, douard Duval-Carri , Natasha Trethewey, and Kara Walker, among others--are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability. In addition to figuring death by drowning in the unritual--whether in the context of the aftermath of slavery or of ecological and human-made catastrophes--their aesthetic creations serve as memorials, dirges, tombstones, and even material supports for the regrowth of life underwater.
Author: Valérie Loichot
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 01/15/2020
Pages: 302
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9780813943794
ISBN10: 0813943795
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Caribbean & Latin American
About the Author
Valérie Loichot is Professor of French and English at Emory University and author of The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature and Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (Virginia).