Sugar Water:a Creative-Critical Approach to Caribbean-British Death Culture

My practice-based PhD explores the violence and death wrought by Empire in Caribbean history and the integral role of grief practices in Black cultural identity, to intervene in critical race theory and Black literary studies through an encounter between theory and the creative practice of writing a novel. The project takes up Christina Sharpe's model of 'wake work', through which Black people can restructure and resist the afterlives of slavery, and formulates it as both creative practice and critical strategy in order to ask new questions about the cultural specificities of grief. The research will draw on archival history and collaborative storytelling emerging from narrative interviews in order to reanimate a lost archive of Caribbean diasporic voices. Examining the relationship between the dead and the living, cultural identity and transnational heritage, the research will interrogate identity debates and develop anew aesthetic and critical understanding of mourning.