Phillips, Jordan Marie Elizabeth; (2024) Anti-nation: performance and politics in Martinique, 1981-1993. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis is concerned with performance and politics in Martinique, a French overseas territory in the eastern Caribbean. It is primarily a study of this island community as a strange variant of nation. Drawing on the early work of Édouard Glissant, the concept I develop to describe it is anti-nation. This refers to a neo-colonial, racialized predicament whose strictures, be they material or psychological, circumscribe the efforts made by Martinicans to exist on their own terms. I focus on the period 1981-1993, a decade marked by the decentralizing reforms of the Mitterrand presidency, and a concerted attempt to configure Martinique as a cultural nation in the absence of political sovereignty. Choosing to view performance as a polyvalent phenomenon, this thesis looks comparatively across two modes, carnival and theatre. Using four case studies, it attends to social, aesthetic and political values as they manifest across both forms. I argue that the culture of public performance here is shaped and limited by the anti-nation in which it is generated, but also that it manages to suggest radical alternative visions of Martinique. Part One outlines the historical, political and intellectual foundations of the anti-nation, as well as the evolution of carnival and theatre in Martinique, and the state of the arts sector on the island during the 1980s. Part Two focuses on language, examining how a range of plays and carnival music envisage a Creole nation which, rather than locking itself into a logic of purity and authenticity, is multi-lingual and pluralistic. Part Three engages with memory, as a set of theatrical and masquerade performances recall buried racial trauma through an aesthetic akin to dreams or hallucination. This is a black nation remembering deliriously, an act as political as it is dramatic.

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