ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Caribbean immigrants to North America have confronted the challenges of disposing of their deceased in circumstances where the medical, legal, and cultural traditions were alien to Caribbean life. It chronicles how Caribbean people in North America have sought to maintain or re-create Caribbean mortuary practices in North America. And it details how, simultaneously, within the Caribbean itself, new rituals of death have emerged that in some ways are far removed from the funerary practices idealized by Caribbean immigrants in North America. The chapter therefore argues that it is this collision between the tidal forces of an ever-changing present and the gravitational pull of an idealized past that is the peculiar feature of the rituals of death in the Caribbean diaspora.
