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Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean

By (author) ValÃ©rie Loichot

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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, ValÃ©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 Gravesâ€”an eclectic cast that includes BeyoncÃ©, Radcliffe Bailey, Edwidge Danticat, Ã‰douard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jason deCaires Taylor, Ã‰douard Duval-CarriÃ©, Natasha Trethewey, and Kara Walker, among othersâ€”are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability. In addition to figuring death by drowning in the unritualâ€”whether in the context of the aftermath of slavery or of ecological and human-made catastrophesâ€”their aesthetic creations serve as memorials, dirges, tombstones, and even material supports for the regrowth of life underwater.