Académique Documents
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Culture Documents
Colonial Inventions:
Landscape, Power and Representation
in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad
By
Amar Wahab
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-1922-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1922-0
For my mother
For my father
For my family
TABLE OF CONTENTS
viii
Table of Contents
Colonial Inventions
ix
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
xii
List of Illustrations
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
xiv
Acknowledgements
most encouraging about their work, is that they comprise a group scholars
whose commitment to the Caribbean region and its academic importance
has provided for me, a platform from which to make or contest claims
about the region and at the same time engage in a deeply personal project
of self-knowledge. This is also perhaps what makes me feel humbly
indebted to all the scholars I have employed in this manuscript
conversation as I see it as reflective of the many modes through which
intellectual community is threaded across time, space and discipline. To
all my colleagues in the fields of postcolonial and Caribbean Studies I
would like to express my gratitude for the work you do and which
continues to inspire others in the fields.
I would particularly like to thank Mr. Geoffrey MacLean, without
whom all of the images in chapter three would not have been possible to
include. Geoffrey has been a continuous supporter of this sort of work and
it is to him that I feel that chapter three owes much of its inspiration and
direction. It is dedicated to him. My gratitude also goes out to the Harris
Trustees and Andrea Davies at Belmont House (UK) who also provided
permission to use the images in chapter three. In addition I would like to
thank the staff at The University of the West Indies Library (West Indiana
Division, St. Augustine) and The National Archives of Trinidad and
Tobago who bore patience with me as I meticulously searched their
archival collections. I cannot stress how much one`s access to these sorts
of archival institutions determines the scope and shape of one`s work, as it
did in my case. The use of the rare image set by Richard Bridgens in
chapter two is under kind permission from The Victorian and Albert
Museum, London, United Kingdom, and I would especially like to thank
Chrysanthe Constantouris for helping me to access copyright permission.
A support grant from the Faculty of Arts and Science, Nipissing
University, Canada was invaluable for the purchase of Bridgens images,
and I am deeply indebted to Dr. Craig Cooper for supporting my research
in this way. Thanks also to the York University Library, Canada which
provided me with access to the sketches used in chapter four. Added to
this list is Mr. Gerard Besson, of Paria Publishers, Trinidad and Tobago,
who was very generous in providing me with the first image of chapter
one and permission to use the image in this publication.
As with all academic labour, there is often a sphere of support that is
often hidden though it is crucial to, and probably the real product of
writing through community; this refer here to my circle of friends and
colleagues who have been invaluable to this publications life-support
system. I must express special gratitude to my friends and colleagues:
Beverly-Jean Daniel, Eve Haque, Michelle Rowley, Gabrielle Hezekiah,
Colonial Inventions
xv
the Coventry Crew, the Brub family, Dwaine Plaza, Nalini Mohabir,
Lynette Hubah, and Gerard Araujo-Tangchoon who have supported me
with their words of encouragement and their willingness to listen with and
without prejudice.
While much of this project was completed within the space of
academia, it is no doubt grounded in my own personal journey to see
myself reflected and refracted in my academic work. It is in trying to make
the linkages between these at times conflictual worlds, that I must thank
my family for helping me to bridge the distance, literal and imaginative,
and for giving me a starting point and a frame of reference that permeates
this publication. Especially my mother and late father, who worked from
extremely meagre beginnings in a tin shack, their dedication and
compassion towards each other and life in general, nourished me with an
approach to knowledge and self in the world that always makes me feel
like writing away my freedom, declaring myself to an ever-changing
horizon. To my sister, Shelly, my brothers Saeed and Siddiq, and my
grandmother, Violet, this work has benefited much for your emotional
support as well as the points of reference you provided in my life that
made the project evolve in the way it did. Thanks also to my Canadian
family, The Hoseins; without their support this project would not have
even begun, especially as I tried to make sense of my diasporic life
between Canada and the Caribbean.
I would also like to express my loving gratitude to my partner,
Graeme, who has stood by me throughout the multiple phases of this
project, bearing with me at times of confused anguish and celebrating with
me at times of deliverance. As a sort of shadow research assistant, he sent
me countless references and relevant material during my postdoctoral
studies, at times making me feel that he was even more excited to see this
project to publication. His incomparable emotional support has been
tremendous and indispensable to the completion of this project.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the people of Trinidad and
Tobago. They constitute an exciting node of human possibility and energy
on the global circuit and I am most privileged to have emerged from such
a creative space, most so, through its critical impulses. It is my hope that
this publication will make a constructive contribution to the work ahead,
in collaboration with a collective of exciting and provoking agents who
never lose faith in that ever-changing horizon of self-knowledge.
Especially to all those lost and found in the diaspora, this effort
acknowledges the possibility and danger of return, only to find anew
something that awaits.
INTRODUCTION
TOWARD A (POST)COLONIAL
DISCOURSE ON LANDSCAPE
Introduction
Here and there along the roadside miniature waterfalls protruded, the
delicious scent of majestic teak plantations mixed with the fresh forest air,
and the quaint little villages like Morne La Croix, Blanchisseuse and
Brasso Seco seemed so quiet as if all had been abandoned. After stopping
at the Asa Wright Nature Centre and enjoying the natural pool (formed
by a rerouted waterfall), we then continued our car journey into some of
the most beautiful, relatively untouched areas of the Northern Range.
From the sounds of gushing water currents of unseen rivers hundreds of
meters down misty, densely forested precipices to the overwhelmingly
serene vistas of the sun-bathed blue Caribbean Sea along the mountainous
edges this trip was definitely our escape into paradise. Though the
journey was interrupted with signs of government-supported privatesector hillside quarrying, brown-silted rivers, and agricultural deforestation,
the natural scenery made the journey all worthwhile.
As we chatted our way through the meandering North Coast Road
remarking about the scenes or the American tele-series Six Feet Under,
we came to a sight that forced, at least in my mind, the journey to collapse.
In the middle of nowhere it seemed, was a group of Indo-Trinidadians in
their bathing suits, sitting and eating in their car on the roadside and
playing Indian music rather loudly. My friend grew very upset by the
scene, exclaiming this is what I cant take on! Her frustration charged a
strong reaction in me, because I didnt see anything abnormal about what
the group was doing after all it was to me an expected and common sight
as the road drew nearer to the beaches on the coast. Moreover it was
something that even I did with my family on several occasions. Shocked
and confused, I asked my friend what was wrong and told her I felt these
people were enjoying themselves. She replied, yes, but why do they have
to do it like that? My instant response of silence connected with strong
feelings of being erased or edited out of a paradise which itself had already
been assembled from contradictory fragments of the mountain: quaint
villages in the middle of nowhere, quarried hillsides, re-routed waterfalls
all had their place in this set-up, but not the Indians in the roadside car. My
angst about this moment connected to a feeling of conditional belonging,
as the comment, whether intended or not, seemed to enliven a coded
rehearsal of racialized registers within the prison house of this landscape.
Though we both seemed to watch the landscape with different eyes, the
incident raised the question about how we i.e. Afro-Trinidadians and
Indo-Trinidadians came to inhabit the landscape and imagine ourselves
and each other, partly through colonial scripts. My angst fed a desire to
understand how such visions of Trinidads landscape had emerged and
how different groups, especially Africans and Indians were differentially
Introduction
Theoretical Perspective:
Positioning (Post)Colonial Discourse
Caribbean studies scholar, Mimi Sheller (2003, 1) argues that although
the Caribbean lies in an indisputable narrative position at the origin of the
plot of Western modernity the region remains symbolically excluded
from modern conceptions of the West. My employment of (post)colonial
discourse analysis in this book is an attempt to address Shellers concern
by contemplating how Trinidad became discursively produced as a
landscape in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The concern is
related to a wider methodological question posed by David Spurr (1993, 2)
who asks How does the Western writer construct a coherent representation
out of the strange and (to the writer) often incomprehensible realities
confronted in the non-Western world? Spurrs question leads to my first
task of defining the concept of discourse as a structure of knowledge and
power.
Michel Foucaults understanding of discourse in The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1972) foregrounds the unification of selected statements about
a particular reality united by a set of rules i.e. the structuring of
knowledge, that functions as a form of power. Discursive production
shapes and is in turn shaped by the positioning of human subjects, to the
extent that the constitutive ideas and practices are considered to be
coherent and inevitable (Barnes and Duncan 1992). Attention is paid to the
constructedness of categories of the social imagination based on particular
criteria and multiple modes of dialogue and positioning, which are
projected as an interlocking unified representation (Foucault 1972).
According to Loomba (1998, 97) analyzing discursive production is not
solely about representation but about the social and historical conditions
within which specific ways of seeing and representing difference
construct colonial institutions of control. The work of the proceeding
chapters therefore is not only to understand the representational strategies
through which the landscape and subjects are produced, but also how these
strategies obey certain rules (Foucault 1972, 138) which exert a
naturalizing power over this production. Moreover, it is important to
attend to Foucaults (1980) assertion that discursive production is also an
unstable/disunited process that makes visible other powers that challenge,
transform, negotiate and subvert the prime constructing forces of truth-
Introduction
Young claims that one of the more disturbing aspects of Orientalism was
Saids claim that the texts of Orientalist discourse can create not only
knowledge but also the very reality that they appear to describe (1995,
160). For Said therefore, written colonial discourse concerns the Eurocentric invention of reality through an epistemic violence and a
colonizing will to power the material (Spurr 1993, 3). In this book I rely
on Peter Hulmes (1993, 200) notion of invention - that colonial
discourse has the power to call its categories into being.6 Often, the sites
where colonial discourse is produced are in travel writing, exploration
narratives, memoirs, colonial administration documents, etc., i.e. written
texts that centralize European interpretation, representation and
domination 7 and reify colonial authority. This authority is produced
through the discursive production of essentialized identities through the
naming, marking, and ordering of difference (Spurr 1993, 4). Saids
emphasis on the European representation of supposedly non-Western
cultures and its designation of a cultural Other has enabled a re-order of
the study of colonialism (Loomba 1998, 43) at the same time it has
provoked much deliberation and tension about simplistic positivist binaries.
Loomba claims that Orientalism examined key literary and cultural
texts, consolidated certain ways of seeing and thinking which in turn
contributed to the functioning of colonial power (1998, 43).8 Writing in
the context of the Caribbean Elizabeth Bohls 9 (1994) expands on this
claim in her statement that:
[C]olonial discourse is peculiarly at home in the register of the visible,
predisposed to paint pictures with words, since colonial rule is based on
that most visible and seemingly natural of signs, the color of skin
aesthetic discourse collaborates with colonial power, exploiting the visible
to obscure or naturalize the relationships between the island scene and
the violence that scene both reveals and conceals. (372)10
Introduction
10
Introduction
11
12
Introduction
13
14
Introduction
an effort to turn the written texts and visual images back on these contexts
to question the givenness of the landscapes history to provoke its History.
The question that seems to be underwriting this discussion of
landscape in postcolonial discourse is how have different colonial subjects
come to be constructed and positioned vis--vis each other as natural
constituents of the landscape in the history of colonial nineteenth-century
Trinidad? This is linked to Selwyn Cudjoes (2003) concern about who
possesses the truth of colonial reality? Mitchell (1994, 29) remarks it is
not just the answer, but the question itself that generates a hopelessly
evasive, generalized and equivocal analysis. For Mitchell the quarrel is
already convinced that the landscape is the medium through which
colonial evils are veiled and naturalized, yet remains ambivalent about
whether this knowledge gives us any power (1994, 30). If we are to
consider Pratts and Martins direction about landscape as contact zone
defined through processes of asymmetrical exchange and inter-framing of
colonizer and colonized, then the question of possession I raise above must
be debated within the contestations and struggles of representation. As a
means of apprehending and conveying an idea of a colonial landscape,
postcolonial discourse must therefore question not only what but how
history tells us about the landscape.21 In the context of this particular study
these considerations must be further inflected by a relatively recent
regionalist scholarly impulse in Caribbean postcolonial studies to which I
now turn.