Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean Basin by Valérie Loichot (review)

The past decade has been marked by ecological and humanitarian crises that bear on the twinned fates of the planet and humankind. With her latest book, Loichot carves an interdisciplinary path that connects longstanding questions of memory, trauma, and the history of slavery with enduring forms of systemic racism and environmental disasters dispro portionately affecting communities of color. As the title suggests, Loichot examines artistic creations that evoke the "underwater nation" (224) formed by the countless migrants, refugees, and enslaved who were lost in the waters of the Mississippi River, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic. The introduction and five chapters bring together these seemingly disparate waters to elucidate the notion of the "unritual," which Loichot defines as a privation of official rites and acts of mourning that serve to recognize the humanity of the dead. Neither living nor dead since they have been deprived of the rituals that allow them to pass from life to death and, subsequently, into a space of sacred remembrance, the "unritualized" specters of aquatic disasters permanently haunt the living. Using Glissant's theory of Relation as a touchstone, Loichot guides readers through depictions of Katrina, the Middle Passage, and forced migrations in the Caribbean in the poetry, video production, fiction, underwater sculpture, and mixed-media art of twenty-first-century artists such as Radcliffe Bailey, Kara Walker, Jason deCaires Taylor, and Beyoncé. Loichot is indeed at her best when she threads postcolonial and cultural studies theories through her close readings of the art that her book showcases. Moreover, her presentation of the unritual marks the book's two-fold ethical stance. On the one hand, Loichot confronts the thorny issue of creating art out of disaster. Using spiritual figures such as Mami-Wata, Loichot argues that the artists under study in fact "reconnect victims […] to the sacred" (125), despite what some have criticized as capitalizing on catastrophe. On the other hand, rather than absolving the traumas associated with the unritual, Loichot instead examines how contemporary "aesthetic creations" (223) sacralize sites of aquatic tragedies without obscuring the history that severed countless people from ritualized deaths in the first place. In this way, she underscores the tensions surrounding art that reproduces suffering and trauma, and offers an original means of navigating irrevocable loss and the existential threat of climate change. Water Graves is, in short, a timely and compelling intervention in humanitarian questions that have gained new urgency in the era of ecological disasters and transglobal calls for racial justice. It not only successfully contributes to a broader understanding of the shared histories of the waters, cultures, and peoples of the greater Caribbean basin, but also to ecocriticism, and Francophone and Visual Culture studies. Its ambitious range of theoretical and cultural readings provide new moorings for established scholars of the Caribbean, at the same time that Loichot's accessible pedagogical voice anchors newcomers to key strands of thought in the field of postcolonial Caribbean studies.