Chat to Mi Back: Meditation on body archive

Abstract

This article addresses the concept Body as Archive in the context of contemporary Jamaica, a nation simultaneously grounded in Christian Religiosity and rooted in African Cosmology. Body as Archive is identified here as an understanding of the body that recognizes bodily artefacts as stored in individual and collective bodies for future generations to excavate, critically interrogate, re-craft and/or restore and deploy in the fashioning of present-day individual and community identities, life possibilities and future world imaginings. At its core Body as Archive is the work of the imagination to manifest the body as both archive and artefact, both a space for the collection and recording of historical memory and remembrance and itself an expression of memory and re-membrance. In contemporary Jamaica Body as Archive encompasses notions of beauty, the role of dance, and the significance of performance around and about the Jamaican female body. Embedded in this current exploration is an interrogation of the ways in which the bio-political imagination of past generations inform the excavation and deployment of bodily artefacts in the present.