Burning Flesh: Performances of Immolation in Neocolonial Havana, Cuba

• In Event: Wading in the Waters of Black Diaspora Memory, Embodied Archives, Performative Resistance

Description for Program

This paper reimagines the archive through a double articulation of the performative, defined as a disruption in the rituals of coloniality, takes center stage. I explore immolation as symbolic of repeated colonial violence through the turn of the twentieth-century Cuba and argue that neocolonial womanist performatives of immolation momentarily transform images of violence and death, their included exclusion, and space itself. Through archival, ethnographic, and popular culture research in Havana, Cuba, I highlight that such acts of self-immolation are public performances that communicate an embodied response to included exclusion and illustrate how the historical purview of and at the archive has further consumed such bodies. In rethinking herstories, I ask how we can traverse new ground with the old through performance to counter the west’s hegemony of knowledge production.

Author

• Lisa Calvente