Ecologies of marronnage as self-repair in Guadeloupe

Abstract:

The French Caribbean offers a particular Black Atlantic lens that allows for a fuller understanding of racial capitalism’s multiple “holds” on those who have persisted in revolting against it since the colonizers’ initial crimes. The latter were the conditions within which Guadeloupeans’ cultivated a radical imagination, an enduring ability to resist, to defy, to maroon, to “remix”, to create a spirituality and corresponding cultural practices grounded in their Caribbean environment at the antipodes of the colonizer’s logic of possessive individualism, enclosure, and maximizing of profits. The export-oriented monocropping production for European market economy reduced Guadeloupe’s natural diversity, its original capacity for self-subsistence, while near-slavery conditions persisted after abolition. So-called “decolonization” via assimilation (1946) turned Guadeloupeans into full-fledged citizens of France–albeit confined to the ‘other’ category of the French imaginary. The Gwoka drum dance complex—born on the colonial plantation, of stigmatized, mixed African origin—is a set of dance and music-based collective practices constitutive of the institutions and lifeworlds of the laboring classes in Guadeloupe since slavery. Here I show how cultural/environmental activists seize Gwoka’s transformative potential–for awakening of both individual and collective consciousness of their wounded “vivant” (all living things, beings). The multiple, unrepaired crimes that continue to materially affect Guadeloupe’s people, its land, and its water–are most flagrantly obvious through the case of chloredécone (kepone) poisoning. In this presentation, Mouvman Kiltirèl Voukoum (Voukoum cultural movement of Guadeloupe) allows me to demonstrate how Gwoka practices–formerly demonized by the status quo–have always also been a means by which Guadeloupe’s people reconnect with their natural environment and create their own spirituality, as well as a medium to denounce crimes (such as the chlordécone-ecocide). Here I discuss how Voukoum’s mobilization of specific Gwoka rhythms and practices–grounded in a mixed ancestry and militant anticolonialist forms of marronnage–constitute a powerful form of self- repair for Guadeloupe.

Bio:

Laura Bini Carter, PhD candidate in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, is currently teaching at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She has conducted research in the Caribbean since 2004. Life and work in Martinique, Dominican Republic, Haiti and New York City, helped her to make connections between the African diasporic traditions, and her own practice of these has pushed her to study their particular histories as well as the broader implications of social movements and groups that use ‘subaltern’ expressive forms (music, dance, story-telling, carnival). With support from Wenner Gren, NSF and Fulbright, she went on to undertake dissertation fieldwork in Guadeloupe and Paris. Her research focuses on diverse forms of cultural politics, nationhood and belonging generated within the ‘French Antillean (post)colonial’ that testify to the persistence of race, class, and gender-based inequalities on the one hand; and to creative resistance through artistic production and social mobilization, on the other.