To Follow Bousaadiya: Mobility and Memory in Libyan Cultural Politics

This article takes the figure of Bousaadiya, once performed in varying iterations throughout central North Africa, as an entry point to approach the problematics of mobility and memory in Libya. Bousaadiya performance, a multidimensional set of practices that I read critically as dance, produces an embodied social ground upon which Libyans have enacted and contested racialized practices of belonging and a mobile gravesite where it is possible to interrogate regional histories of enslavement and their material and symbolic legacies. While reading Bousaadiya performance enables an excavation of the trans-Saharan slave trade and its ghostly e/affects, performing Bousaadiya enabled the incomplete burial of these through surrogation, easing particular losses. In this article, I explore both of these aspects of the performativity of Bousaadiya's dance, which is underscored by the forms of remembering it that continue to proliferate. To follow Bousaadiya is to grapple with the ongoing unresolvedness in Libyan cultural politics of the country's histories of slave economies and the hierarchies left in their wake and to gesture toward the prospect of repair.