THE PAST IS MADE BY WALKING: Labor Activism and Historical Production in Postcolonial Guadeloupe

Abstract

The act of walking represents an important (yet underexamined) element of political protest and collective action, as well as an increasingly common form of historical commemoration. In this article I examine the development of a series of “memory walks” by labor activists in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. I argue that these peripatetic practices constitute a particular spatial, kinesthetic, and sensorial form of historical and archival production. Along the way, I consider what these events reveal about postcolonial forms of archival production and the importance of historical praxis to the formation of political subjectivities.

Ecologies of Investment: Crisis Histories and Brick Futures in Argentina

“…As a result, the history of Argentine economic life is under a constant process of (re)narration as Argentines reflect upon their rocky economic past in films and documentaries; comic strips and comic monologues; and memoirs, art, and stories told among family and friends (e.g., Page ; Kovensky ; Langer and Mira ). Stories such as Mariela's become part of this popular economic historiography, in which Argentines engage in a praxis of memory not unlike those practiced with regard to the country's violent political history (Taylor ; Taylor ; see also Bonilla ). Anthropologists such as Anna Tsing () have described the dense imbrication of materialities and knowledge in the lives of people like the Meratus Dayaks, who develop rich taxonomies of relatedness as a means not only of knowing but also of living with the forest around them.…”

Globalization and Race: Structures of Inequality, New Sovereignties, and Citizenship in a Neoliberal Era

“…Anthropologists, ethnographic sociologists, and critical legal scholars have taken up these issues within a range of urban migrant destinations within the United States and Europe, investigating nationalism as a process of racial formation within which labor markets, immigration law, and welfare policy work in tandem to generate notions of legitimate citizenship and criminality (Anderson 2000;Angel-Ajani 2002Calavita 2005;De Genova 2005;Ong 2003;Padilla 2011;Small 1994; see also Silverstein 2005). Interestingly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, these processes of immigrant exclusion through racialization also obtain in contexts in which the "migrants" in question are actually citizens, as in the case of French Antilleans in Paris (Beriss 2004) and Puerto Ricans in the United States (Duany 2011; for both historical and contemporary accounts of the relationship between imperialism and racialization, also see Bonilla 2011, Wilder 2005.…”

Revolution, Occupation, and Love: The 2011 Year in Cultural Anthropology

“…Fitz‐Henry, in turn, traces the processes by which transnational peace activists opposed to a U.S. military base in Ecuador engage in a politics of “scale‐making” that resulted in city residents viewing the activists as being “more imperialist than the U.S. Air Force” (2011: 323). To these could be added a number of additional studies that took protest and direct action events as their principal focus, such as Willow's (2011) examination of the importance of place among indigenous anticlearcutting activists in Canada, Bonilla's (2011) study of “memory walks” among labor activists in Guadaloupe (to which I will later return), Dave's (2011) consideration of lesbian activism in India (also discussed below), Murphy's (2011) discussion of political dissent among youth in France, and H. Weiss's (2011b) exploration of the ways that the logic of gift giving moves through—and forecloses—forms of social activism in Jerusalem.…”

“…The study of place‐making and spatial mobility commonly, if not inevitably, intersects with themes of time and temporality. Bonilla (2011), for instance, situates her study of political protest in Guadeloupe at just such an intersection of place, mobility, and temporality. Through an examination of the development of “memory walks” by labor activists in Guadeloupe—a form of political walking that aims to reanimate as it retraces salient moments of historical action—Bonilla argues that particular arrangements of political mobility and movement can be conceived as constituting spatial, kinesthetic, and sensorial forms of historical and (postcolonial) archival production.…”