Hadley Galbraith

Specialist of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Sub-Saharan Africa, Hadley's research examines the ways in which memory and the body contribute to identity construction in contemporary literature, cinema, and performance art. Her forthcoming book, Anarchives, Bodies and Creative Memory of the Francophone Black Diaspora: Performing Bigidi After Slavery, focuses on the collective memory of plantation slavery in former French colonies, as it is questioned and remediated in works by Afrodescendant artists. It considers the role played by bodies in movement in these works, in the transmission and inheritance of subjective knowledge of slavery that was never recorded for the archive. The project adapts Bigidi, a theory of embodied adaptation which has been articlated by Guadeloupean dancer, choreographer, pedagogue, and scholar Lénablou, to analyze memory quests taken by Afrodescendant authors and characters that reshape postcolonial identities, relations, and epistemologies.