Dissertation
Bigidi memory of survival: embodying the inheritance of resilience under slavery in text, film, and performance
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Spring 2022
DOI: 10.17077/etd.006391
Abstract
The subjective experiences of enslavement from the 1600s until 1848 in France’s former colonies are poorly understood today. This circumstance can be traced back to several points of origin. First, the laws and practices governing slavery in the French Caribbean and Indian Ocean from the 17th through the 19th century, arguably, attempted to put enslaved people to a living death. The exploitable element of the enslaved individual—his or her body—was preserved for its monetary value but was placed under constant threat. Along with this, the cultures of enslaved people were targets of suppression, and will and reflection were discouraged. Second, there is a lack of written testimony left by enslaved people in the colonial archives and literatures. Much of what is known about the realities of slavery has been sourced from records authored by slave owners, colonial officials, missionaries, and ship captains. There is thus an imbalance in History, with the enslaved voice being largely absent from narratives recounting this period. Finally, there is a notable degree of silence surrounding the subject of slavery within communities descended from enslaved people. Negative views of Blackness which have long permeated French main-stream media and attitudes, along with the pressures of assimilation and hopes of political and economic betterment, drive desires to leave the past behind.
The subject of my research is a complex form of trauma experienced by slavery’s descendants, stemming from the known repression of Black agency on plantations, the imbalances in the archive, and the silences surrounding memory. This form of trauma manifests in an inability to access positive materials for identity. The works in my corpus present descendants who reach an impasse in “the archive,” a term I use to refer to the actual stores of historical documents, as well as popular, intertwining narratives about slavery, Blackness, and Frenchness. Lacking memory can reinforce negating identity stereotypes, ranging from inherited victimhood to ethnic ahistoricism. It deprives the descendant of a sense of place in history, and feeds seemingly irresolvable doubts regarding agency in the present.
The problem of slavery’s memory, with its beginnings in the colonial ideal of the enslaved body as an unthinking, moldable entity, however, finds an opening towards potential illuminations in the concepts of embodied knowledge, embodied memory, and the body-as-subject. Scholarship in dance, performance, and cultural studies in the past several decades has advocated for consideration of the body as active in shaping subjective and intersubjective reality. In contrast to views arising from a mind/body dialectic in much Western thought in which bodies are reduced to purely reflexive, feeling entities, a view of the body-as-subject attributes the body with enacting individual and community prerogatives. Going further, bodies are thought to preserve the memory of bodily states and endeavors, and the circumstances foregrounding these, through bodily practices and ways of doing which transfer across generations.
The backbone of my critical framework is a philosophy called bigidi, which has been translated into contemporary Caribbean dance by Guadeloupean choreographer and scholar Lénablou. Bigidi is an embodied practice that, in Lénablou’s view, evolved from strategies of subtle resistance to the lack of material control and the “living death” imposed upon enslaved groups on plantations. Bigidi involves adopting a state of permanent disequilibrium, requiring a keen awareness of self and surroundings and a willingness to move as necessary, even when movement is uncertain and, by common beauty standards, undignified. Embodying disequilibrium, rather than striving for balance, prepares one to adapt to unpredictable threats to bodily integrity as they arise. In this respect, bigidi constitutes a means of reclaiming subjective life. Particularly when compared to ballet, in which lying on the floor symbolizes death, bigidi embodies the constant avoidance of death. Lénablou observes bigidi in the Guadeloupean performance practice known as Gwo-ka, as well as in everyday ways of being in Guadeloupe. She advocates for the recognition of bigidi as an embodied knowledge that has been surreptitiously passed down from generation to generation by Guadeloupeans.
My dissertation argues that bigidi, a Caribbean, Afro-feminist philosophy, represents a robust critical framework for studying quests for memory pursued by descendants of slavery experiencing complex inherited trauma. I make the case that corporeality, bodily movement, and bigidi play crucial roles in rearticulating relationships between Black subjectivity and the past. I support my thesis through a close study of twentieth and twenty-first century literature, film, and performance by African diasporic artists of the Caribbean, Reunion, Ivory Coast, and France. Drawing on bigidi’s attention to destabilization allows me, first, to trace the contours of descendant trauma in a variety of contexts. Then, bigidi’s reliance on abundant movement, adaptivity, and bodily awareness allows me to illuminate alternative approaches to memory taken in my corpus that hold promise for filling the voids of the archive. I analyze manifestations of bigidi in the literal movements of descendants and characters, as well as metaphorical manifestations of bigidi in approaches to the memory quest, styles of writing and editing, and interpersonal interactions. Bigidi inverts esthetic paradigms, and in so doing, it uncovers unexpected legacies of resistance, resilience, and agency under oppression. I propose that bigidi represents a model for examining traumatic entanglements as they arise in postcolonial, post-slavery contexts, and, going beyond this, that has wide, trans-contextual and trans-disciplinary applicability.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Bigidi memory of survival: embodying the inheritance of resilience under slavery in text, film, and performance
- Creators
- Hadley Galbraith
- Contributors
- Anny-Dominique Curtius (Advisor)Rebekah Kowal (Committee Member)Marie Kruger (Committee Member)Michel Laronde (Committee Member)Roland Racevskis (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- French and Francophone World Studies
- Date degree season
- Spring 2022
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.006391
- Number of pages
- xii, 283 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2022 Hadley Galbraith
- Comment
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- Language
- English
- Description illustrations
- color illustrations
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 264-283).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
- Memory from the perspective of people who were enslaved on plantations in France’s former colonies is poorly understood today. Enslaved voices were rarely preserved in colonial archives, and racism and shame, have discouraged nuanced discussions of slavery and its reverberations in the present. Some descendants of enslaved people experience a form of inherited trauma driven by the inability to access or come to terms with their ancestral past. A shift in views of what constitutes memory, though, can contend with the notion that slavery’s memory is lost. Some scholars believe that bodies house memory, and that bodily practices such as dance pass bodily memory from one generation to another. In my dissertation, I adopt a philosophy of movement called bigidi (“but do not fall”) that has been developed by choreographer Lénablou, from her study of Guadeloupean dance, as an alternative approach to memory study. Bigidi is thought by Lénablou to have originated on plantations during the slavery period. Lénablou equates its frenetic, unbalanced movements to a survival strategy well- adapted to the plantation’s destabilizations. In my work, I examine manifestations of bigidi within descendant quests for memory by artists from France, the Caribbean, Reunion, and Ivory Coast. Drawing on Lénablou’s celebration of bigidi’s imbalance and disorder, I examine the ways descendants reassert knowledge of enslaved agency through quests that confront uncertainty and pain. These authors and artists model bigidi strategies for reworking the relationship between descendant identity and the past, in the present, and demonstrate bigidi’s relevance to the study of memory, trauma, and resistance more broadly.
- Academic Unit
- French and Italian
- Record Identifier
- 9984271450502771
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