Leyneuf Tines is a performer and performance scholar whose work explores memory practices and diaporic subjectivities. By activating the kinaesthetic imagination, she explores the politics of migration, ancestral histories and determined spirits to formulate new ‘transpostcolonialities’. Working at the crossroads of political reality, postcolonial imaginations, expressive cultures and ritual processes, she collects superstitions and rituals in order to re-write the ‘body’. Her practice and writing is informed by the poetics of spirituality, mythology, and rhythm cultures. She devotes herself to reinstigating embodied consciousness of the uprooted and colonized body to understand new forms of post trauma, diasporic beings and the postsovereign body.
As part of the Modern Moves team, her PhD thesis, Vodou Temporalities: Haiti, Rhythm and Afro-diasporic Imaginaries, examines Haitian vodou as a point of departure from the past and present, and as a parallel reality for Afro-diasporic subjects from which we may meditate on Haitian and Afro-diasporic futures. Vodou beliefs and practices manifest themselves through embodied repertoires and cultural imaginaries, which in turn form a subjectivity and collectivity that are able to sidestep a compulsory narration conducted within a linear temporality conceived of as progressive and Western within constructions of modernity. Illustrating the key role of rhythm and vodou in the construction of Haiti’s blackness, her thesis demonstrates this blackness as an inauguration and complication of modernity. She therefore examine the embodied expressions of vodou and its rhythm cultures as manifestations of diasporic diffusions in space and as a synthesis and mutation of traditions through time. Vodou rhythms map and contest a historically premeditated idea of “blackness” in Haiti, thereby serving as apertures through which Afro-diasporic futures can be formed. This approach allows the emergence of what has been articulated by Gina Ulysse as necessary “new narratives” for Haiti.
As an infinite scholar of the body in all its forms, she wants to understand new forms of trauma, diaspora and the body through constant innovation. Apart from this, she’s obsessed with music and dancing.
