UC Berkeley

Legacies of colonialism and slavery continue to shape present life in Guadeloupe, a former colony of France in the Caribbean integrated as French overseas department in 1946. Many Guadeloupeans today still express feeling like second-class citizens in a society constituted through plantation economy and still shaped by the afterlives of slavery. Bringing together neurological readaptation, dance practices, and memorial struggles, Postcolonial Repair: Memory, Embodiment, and Therapeutics in the French Caribbean investigates how Guadeloupean health-care providers, patients, choreographers, dancers and activists wrestle with Guadeloupe's structural relationship with France and incessantly strive to transform their conditions of existence. Through an attention to Guadeloupeans practices of repair, this research connects the micropolitics of everyday life and the macroscopic political questions they reveal. This dissertation argues that, in parallel to symbolic and material demands for reparations regarding slavery addressed to the French State, Guadeloupeans actively attempt to repair their conditions of life from within.

I conceptualize these efforts through four movements: Cobbling, Countering, Balancing, and Enduring. Chapter 1 highlights the presence of history in Guadeloupe, takes stock of the current debates on reparations in France, and argues for the necessity of engaging movements of repair beyond the question of formal reparations. Chapter 2, “Cobbling Care,” investigates how patients and health workers in readaptation form and cultivate therapeutic relationships in the crumbling infrastructure of a French public hospital. Chapter 3, “Retracing History,” engages the efforts of activists to unearth historical narratives and presences—including the direct resurfacing of ancestors—against French-centered historical narratives. Chapter 4, “Balancing in Imbalance," explores how to find equilibrium in movement, both in dance practice and in the institutional work that is required to defend readaptation. Finally, chapter 5, “Enduring,” engages with the limits placed on Guadeloupean life yet looks for the liminal spaces where people live with history in the present and redefine their relationship with time, space, and their bodies to reclaim them as sites of freedom, belonging, and relationality. These five chapters are interspaced with three interludes and followed by a final reflection on Movement Politics that attend to the palimpsestic quality of Guadeloupean practices of postcolonial repair.

I argue that movements of repair generate possibilities of transformation beyond the scope of formal reparations. I think of postcolonial repair as an ongoing practice, a near-infinite series of movements and transformations enacted day in and day out. While reparations will never undo the structuration of Atlantic societies through colonialism and slavery, I argue that postcolonial repair contributes to structural transformation.