Thanatic Ethics Winter Webinar Series: Valerie Loichot on Words Sculpted Out of Grief

Title: Words Sculpted Out of Grief: Unritual in Édouard Glissant, M. Nourbese Philip, and Jason deCaires Taylor

Speaker: Valérie Loichot (Emory University)

Date: 12 February, 2021 (Friday)

Time: 14:30 – 15:30 GMT 

Please register for the talk via Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.hk/e/137902358667). Zoom details will be emailed to you.

This talk focuses on a paradox: in the aftermath of what the author calls the unritual (Water Graves, 2020) poets, like sculptors, use words like rocks; conversely, sculptors let their statues disintegrate. Unritual, the book demonstrates, “is a state more absolute even than desecration or defilement, since the latter imply the existence of a previous sacred state or object—a temple, a grave, a ceremonial. Unritual … is the obstruction of the sacred in the first place.” Focusing on Martinican writer Édouard Glissant’s Philosophie de la Relation, Trinidad and Tobago poet M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong!, and Scottish-Guyanese Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures, this talk will examine ways in which artists provide aesthetic rituals, hard as rocks or unpredictably nebulous, in the aftermath of water deaths caused by massive human-made events such as the Middle Passage, environmental racism, and climate change. 

The relevant chapters of her monograph (Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean, University of Virginia Press, 2020) from which Professor Loichot will present, are included here.

For more details on the “Thanatic Ethics: the circulation of bodies in migratory spaces” Project:
http://www.cpch.hk/thanatic-ethics-the-circulation-of-bodies-in-migratory-spaces/
https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/valorisation-partenariats/programmes-européens-et-internationaux/thanatic-ethics
https://mfo.web.ox.ac.uk/event/webinar-thanatic-ethics-circulation-bodies-migratory-spaces
Convened by Bidisha Banerjee (CPCH, The Education University of Hong Kong), Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, University Paul Valery Montpellier 3) and Thomas Lacroix (MFO, Oxford).