Thanatic Ethics [Webinar] Words Sculpted Out of Grief: Unritual in Édouard Glissant
Channel: Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities, The Education University of Hong Kong
Date: 2021-02-24

Words Sculpted Out of Grief: Unritual in Édouard Glissant, M. Nourbese Philip, and Jason deCaires Taylor
Speaker: Valérie Loichot (Emory)

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 'Thanatic ethics: the circulation of bodies in migratory spaces' Webinar is convened by Bidisha Banerjee (CPCH, The Education University of Hong Kong), Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Montpellier 3), Thomas Lacroix (MFO)

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Organized by the Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities (CPCH) from 

CPCH is a research centre at The Education University of Hong Kong focusing on popular culture. Popular culture is a cross-disciplinary area that offers considerable potential for research that bridges language and linguistics, literature, culture and new media within the Faculty of Humanities.

The Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities (CPCH) adopts a broad view of popular culture that covers both the culture of everyday life and its mediation through print (newspapers, magazines, literature), multimodal media (music, cinema,photography and advertising, visual and material culture), and new digital media of various kinds. From the perspective of text analysis, research on popular culture goes beyond established canons of traditional European literary works, to explore a wider range of non-traditional media and texts.