Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: In Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression, Gladys M. Francis undertakes an ambitious study of the role of the body in recreating individual and collective memory in the Caribbean.She looks at works by Francophone Caribbean women writers, visual artists, and performers that feature visceral, "odious" representations of embodied praxes and experience."Corpomemorial tracing" is proposed as an interface through which readerspectators engage in an act of conscientious witnessing with such "texts."In Francis's theory, works transgressing generic and aesthetic bounds perform, along with the reader-spectator, the reinstatement of the Caribbean woman as a subject in a larger story.Francis aims to confront the silences within the colonial archive by turning to creative "texts" as alternative sources of knowledge about the legacies of slavery and colonization, focusing on female-identified creators to bring to light often-disregarded approaches to expressing and observing Caribbean subjectivity.She draws, for example, on the work of Guadeloupean dancer and choreographer Lénablou, and her philosophical exploration of gwoka and léwoz, features of a Guadeloupean music and dance tradition, to illustrate methodologies of reading the "fragmented" body within "texts."And she extends as well her own concept of "odious aesthetics," which arise when confronting self-conscious testimonies of bodily transgression.Such aesthetics transgress the boundary between reader-spectators and the body in performance, forcing them into an intersubjective experience.Francis then discerns a process of "corpomemorial tracing," in which a memory of the "text" is formed in the conscience of the reader-spectator, and "gives body to; embodies; gives presence to-a body (whether an individual or a group)" (p.xii).This paradigm presents performatic "texts" as catalysts for the inscription of the real and imagined phantoms of the Caribbean within historical memory.Francis illustrates her arguments through an analysis of the plays Mémoires d'îles by Ina Césaire, Pension Les Alizés by Maryse Condé, and Trames by Gerty Dambury; novels that include Dambury's Les Rétifs, Fabienne Kanor's Humus and D'eaux douces, Gisèle Pineau's Cent vies et des poussières, Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, and Miriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane; paintings by Béatrice Mélina; Sylvaine Dampierre's documentary film Le Pays à l'Envers; and performances and techniques of Kanor and Lénablou.Theory from postcolonial, gender, performance, and trauma studies informs this interdisciplinary study.Francis begins by exploring the body as an extension of its geopolitical and historiographic contexts.Embodied performance within
Author: Hadley Galbraith
Institution: University of Iowa
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2992865592