Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater

Caribbean Basin by Valérie Loichot (review)

Lisa Connell

The French Review, Volume 94, Number 3, March 2021, pp. 238-239 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tfr.2021.0031

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/783714

[ Access provided at 27 May 2021 12:09 GMT from Western Libraries ]

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238 FRENCH REVIEW 94.3

identitaires et littéraires de par le monde, se réappropriera la langue française et

cherchera à s’exprimer en créole, anglais et espagnol. En démontrant que la vitalité de
la littérature haïtienne “invite la langue française à cohabiter avec d’autres idiomes
sans exclusives, et les mondes francophones à repenser les notions d’identité, de
patrimoine, de langue nationale” (68), Lahens explique combien on aurait tort de la
réduire à “une esthétique du délabrement, du désenchantement ou de la catastrophe”
(68). Face à la faille fondamentale d’Haïti qu’est le “nous” national (51) et à “cette
constante familiarité du pire” (68) engendrée, entre autres, par une faille sismique en
2010, Lahens conclut sa leçon en identifiant les écrivains et écrivaines d’aujourd’hui
qui “habitent ce temps où désormais l’espoir n’est pas une réponse sûre” (68). Or, à
condition de connaître ces travailleurs “obstinés et tranquilles,” on découvrira que leur
production garde toutefois “l’urgence de l’ici et maintenant de la beauté” (68–69)
capable de façonner l’imaginaire.

Boise State University (ID) Jason Herbeck

Loichot, Valérie. Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean
Basin. UP of Virginia, 2020. ISBN 978-0-8139-4379-4. Pp. 302.

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 environ-
mental disasters disproportionately 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
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Reviews 239

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.

University of West Georgia Lisa Connell

McCready, Susan. Staging France Between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and
the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon. Lexington, 2016. ISBN 978-1-4985-
2280-9. Pp. xviii + 157.

Carefully researched, this work explores the radical changes in theater set design
and direction that took place in between-the-wars France. Primarily focused on influ-
ential director Jacques Copeau and his fellow modernist directors Gaston Baty, Charles
Dullin, Louis Jouvet, and Georges Pitoëff, signers of a solidarity pact termed the Cartel,
McCready uncovers the evolution of tastes through an examination of critical reviews
and theater receipts. Her argument that the performance of classic works reveals more
clearly contemporary influences and sources, as distinct from the literary, than would
plays written during the time period in question, appears well founded. It allows
her to examine directorial innovations that began in smaller independent theaters
and gradually took hold of the theater world until they succeeded in establishing an
aesthetic in France’s national theater, the Comédie-Française. She begins with the
premise that these directors and their political backers were invested in maintaining
France’s cultural heritage and its international preeminence, with playwrights such
as Molière, Corneille, and Musset as hallmarks of French literature. Beginning with
the Great War, McCready details how Copeau, like Sarah Bernhardt, toured abroad,
notably in North America, in order to stage well-received performances of French
theater and poetry and to disseminate French national values in an effort to activate
international alliances. Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier Theater, whose troupe included