Re-articulating the Repertoire for a Generation Removed

Abstract

I address the complex trauma of slavery’s descendants and the haunting unknowns regarding subjective enslaved memory, examining quests taken by descendants to access memory by engaging with knowledge located in bodily practice. I take as the backbone to my approach a philosophy called Bigidi, developed by Guadeloupean choreographer and scholar Lénablou. Bigidi is a term spoken when someone slips but stays upright. This process is enacted continuously, according to Lénablou, by dancers of Gwo-ka, who adapt their movements to lively drum riffs. To do so, they must lean on all possible points of contact between the ground and the feet, throwing the entire body into conscious disequilibrium. Such a bodily state, for Lénablou, is well adapted to the upheavals and uncertainty of the postcolonial island context. Indeed, she posits that Bigidi evolved from resistance strategies on plantations and is inscribed in everyday ways of Guadeloupean life. My dissertation aims to expand the philosophy beyond Guadeloupe, by looking at works from the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, France, and West Africa, given that material and epistemological uncertainties pervade for black communities throughout. I also look at a variety of media as different modes of “performance,” which engage with the past in ways laid out in the philosophy of Bigidi yielding access to positive inheritance.

Keywords:

• Slavery
• descendant
• embodied knowledge
• memory
• testimony
• movement

Notes

1 Information from the following: Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, NYC, Columbia UP, 2012, p. 33.

2 Milo Pòkò Mò was directed by Fabienne Kanor and Jean-Michel Casérus in collaboration with La Lanterne in 2008, and Fabiene Kanor’s 2009 Des pieds, mon pied is a self-production.

3 The distinctions also illustrate two somewhat dichotomous strains of thought on Bèlè which coexist in Martinique today. In “Reputation in a Musical Scene: The Everyday Context of Connections between Music, Identity, and Politics,” Julian Gerstin refers to two groups as “traditionalists,” typically rural, elder practitioners who still live in close communion with other “Bèlè families,” and “renewalists,” a younger generation that is more urban and more focused on analyzing Bèlè and relating it to a more political message of resistance to assimilation. To access the article, refer to: Ethnomusicology, vol. 42, no. 3, 1998, pp. 385–414, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/10.2307/852848.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hadley Galbraith

Hadley Galbraith is a fifth-year doctoral student in French and Francophone World Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on performance, material culture, literature, and critical theory of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean.

Anny-Dominique Curtius

Anny-Dominique Curtius is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at The University of Iowa.