Black Caribbean archive: Sites, methods and imagination

Speaker: Olivier Marboeuf (ULIP)
19 March 2024
How to approach and account for the forms of presence - political, cultural, material and immaterial, visible and invisible - of the Caribbean diaspora in the cities of Paris and London and their circulation between these two capitals? How to approach the traces of an emancipation project carried by Caribbean communities in spaces born of the imperialist economy and still governed today by the powers of coloniality? How to build forms of representation and alliances capable of responding to systemic violence and producing reparations?
The work that Olivier Marboeuf is currently developing, as part of the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship hosted by the University of London Institute in Paris, attempts to answer this set of questions by showing that they require reconsidering disciplines such as architecture and urbanism and developing new epistemologies and research methods in order to relate to the particular materiality that makes up the archives, forms of life, spaces of transmission and resistance of the Caribbean diaspora at the heart and margins of Europe’s urban centres.
During this presentation, Marboeuf will discuss a method of sharing - and inventing - of the diaspo-Caribbean archive. Inspired by a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (Savacou n°5, 1971), Marboeuf imagines this particular archive no longer as a series of stable artefacts to classify but as a transdisciplinary, collective and dynamic composition; a weaving of plots, fragments of events, traces and voices. This living archive, which is constantly being reformulated, is the result of the performance of an interpretive community - composed of families, activists, artists and researchers - capable of giving a sense of narrative continuity beyond the apparent dispersion, in space and time,of diasporic narratives. This weaving establishes a negotiated and partially secret place, below the great story of the plantation. Archive and place of memory then become common responsibility and knowledge.