Project lead: Prof. Hadley Galbraith (Assistant Professor of French)
Vivero Fellow (2024-2025): Valery Mayorga
This digital project is intended as an extension of the book I am drafting. The book focuses on the memory of slavery and colonization in the French-speaking Caribbean and Indian Ocean. It uses dance, and specifically a philosophy inspired by a Caribbean dance known as gwoka, as a tool for thinking about how bodies store and pass on memory. Since gwoka has evolved from dancing that was done on plantations, it theoretically reproduces memory of the plantation experience when it is danced today. With this idea in mind, I look at creative writing, film, and performance that pay close attention to bodies and bodily knowledge to reconstruct stories about the past that can inform Afrodescendant identities.
To help ground this work in reality today, I want to tie it to current views, in the places I’m studying, on memory, performance, and identity. I also want to draw attention to practices like gwoka—to their deep social ties, and different ways they are being passed on today. For that reason, in Summer 2023, I traveled to Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that were once colonized by France, where I participated in dance workshops, visited « memory sites » (museums, cemeteries, monuments, etc.), and interviewed a number of musicians, dancers, students, and historians. My goal is to create an online « gallery » to showcase video, photos, and either audio recordings or quotes from what was generously shared with me.
I would like to work with a Vivero Fellow to choose a digital platform for the gallery, by reviewing together the materials I have, and considering the goals of the project and the audiences I hope to reach. It would be great to have a partner in thinking through the accessibility of the « gallery » and best practices for making it user friendly. I also need to figure out how to transcribe and potentially translate my materials. All of this would ultimately lead, I hope, into planning the actual design of the « gallery » and creating metadata for its contents. Looking ahead, I would then value the Fellow’s input on planning roles for potential student collaborators in the future.
