Join Clare Finburgh Delijani (Goldsmiths) for a special lecture “A Way to Inhabit the World”: Decolonial-Environmental Resistance in Dance from the French Caribbean.
For Martinican author Édouard Glissant, colonial history ‘wiped out’ the collective memory of indigenous and Afro-descendant people, preventing its transmission. By ‘digging deep’ through the ‘dead tissue’ of colonial history and ideology, hidden memories can be retrieved, however incompletely, to tell new collective narratives, on which societies and values can be founded (Caribbean Discourse, 1981). Glissant, along with Caribbeanists including DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley (Caribbean Literature and the Environment, 2005) argue that this memory retrieval might be achieved via Caribbean literature. Little attention is directed, however, at live performance as an archive of collective memory. I analyse a repertoire of embodied performance practices from the French-speaking Caribbean, notably Martinican lasotè and bèlè, and Guadeloupian gwoka, seeking to ‘dig deep’ into their intergenerationally embodied collective commemoration of loss, and their celebration of survival. Significantly, I ask how they might contribute towards reconstructing decolonial notions of identity and community, as well as non-exploitative – one might say ecological – relationships with the land.
Clare Finburgh Delijani is a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her latest book, A New History of Theatre in France (2024), is winner of the Theatre and Performance Research Association Edited Collection Prize. She has written many other books and articles on theatre and other forms of performance from the French-speaking world and the UK, and is particularly interested in questions of racial, social and climate justice. She is currently holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, during which she is writing about theatre that addresses France’s colonial past, and postcolonial present. This book, Spectres of Empire: Staging Postcoloniality in France, will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2027.
