Toward a Phenomenology of Epic Memory

Abstract This chapter begins with a description of the author’s lived experience of their first time seeing Kariamu Welsh’s Bokolafini (1994) as a path to unpack epic memory in sentient, identifiable terms. The author’s analysis of his actual memory and the observance of other choreographed memories emerges from conversations with Kariamu Welsh in an effort to derive more clarifying language around this phenomenon that arguably serves as a metaphysical muse for contemporary art among diasporan African people. The idea that an artist can draw on a memory that they themselves have not had as a lived experience usually confounds students because this epic memory “is nonspecific, pertaining only to the illusion of experience and not the actuality of it.” Yet, among African American communities, the idea that a precocious young person “has been here before” adheres to a cultural logic that usually goes unquestioned. But what is the experience of manifesting a cultural product that does not reside in the experience of the artist? What is the phenomenology of choreographing an African retention? The chapter then considers Black imagination as the methodology through which epic memory is manifested in art, namely choreography.