Abstract
This chapter explores the resonances of cloth (as functional and/or imaginative object, acquiring legibility and value as bodily adornment, as commodity exchanged for human life, as idiomatic expression for the absorption of menstrual blood and so on) and its wider associations with pollution, labor and dispossession, on the one hand, and sumptuousness, inheritance and prosperity on the other. Given cloth's associations with the movement of labor (laborers whose worthlessness as social subjects is underwritten by their cheap clothing, or by their low-waged assembly in sweatshops to stich designer clothing), water (as a medium of transportation, loss of value, and also of the propitiation of deities for protection and prosperity) also merits our attention. These are teased out in Caribbean fictional narratives that explore the afterlives of enslavement and indentureship, as well as in re-readings of the body enacted by popular musicians and other contemporary commentators.