Introduction

Hi everyone. I am a PhD candidate in French & Francophone World Studies at the U of I. I defended my prospectus last semester, so I am just beginning the writing process of my dissertation. During camp, I am hoping to work on turning my prospectus into the introduction of my dissertation, and starting on the first chapter I am writing, which I plan to make my third chapter...My dissertation focuses on contemporary performances, films, and texts by artists from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean and their diasporas and focused on the memory and legacies of slavery. I am working with the philosophy of Lénablou, a choreographer and dancer from Guadeloupe, which she calls bigidi. The philosophy of bigidi derives from her study of the Guadeloupean dance tradition gwo-ka and describes a way of living that has come about in Guadeloupe involving being out of balance, accessing all of one's possible bearings, and adapting to constant uncertainty. Blou posits that bigidi evolved from creative means of performing one's agency and thus preserving one's humanity during slavery, including dancing. I am proposing that the criteria of this philosophy apply beyond Guadeloupe to other former French slave colonies. I plan to analyze the works in my corpus to show that bigidi is a tactic inscribed in the strategies of characters or artists on a quest that reimagines struggle and overcoming in the context of colonial slavery, and that it is inscribed in the approaches of descendant artists to creating/accessing memory from the slavery period. I believe these works create an "anarchive" which helps to counter the silences of the colonial archive, recognizing the power of descendants to rework their sense of self in connection to the past.