Archiving Caribbean Identity
Records, Community, and Memory
Edited by John A. Aarons,
Jeannette A. Bastian, and
Stanley H. Griffin
First published 2022 by Routledge
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003105299
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JOHN HUNTE vi Contents
6 Concert Dance in Barbados as Archive: Dancing the National Narratives 79
7 Remembering an Art Exhibit: The Face of Jamaica, 1963–1964 97
MONIQUE BARNETT-DAVIDSON
8 Traditional and New Record Sources in Geointerpretive Methods for Reconstructing Biophysical History: Whither Withywood
THERA EDWARDS AND EDWARD ROBINSON
9 Resistance in/and the Pre-Emancipation Archives
TONIA SUTHERLAND, LINDA STURTZ, AND PAULETTE KERR
10 Postcolonial Philately as Memory and History: Stamping a New Identity for Trinidad and Tobago
DESARAY PIVOTT-NOLAN
11 Recasting Jamaican Sculptor Ronald Moody (1900–1984): An Archival Homecoming
EGO AHAIWE SOWINSKI
12 St. Lucian Memory and Identity Through the Eyes of John Robert Lee
ANTONIA CHARLEMAGNE-MARSHALL
13 Crop Over and Carnival in the Archives of Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago
ALLISON O. RAMSAY
14 Ecclesiastical Records as Sources of Social History: The Anglican Church of Trinidad and Tobago
JANELLE DUKE
15 Erasure and Retention in Jamaica’s Ofcial Memory: The Case of the Disappearing Telegrams
JAMES ROBERTSON
8.1 Location of Carlisle Bay. Old Parish of Vere shown as grey-shaded area
8.2 Hard brick structure associated with remains of wharf/port at Carlisle Bay. Left: as captured by terrestr ial laser scan.
Right: as captured with
8.3 Aerial photos acquired roughly a decade apart between 1941 and 1971 showing changes to Carlisle Bay coastline
8.4 Main sources of evidence used in reconstruction
8.5 Stratigraphy of maps, aerial photographs, and satellite imagery
8.6 1961 aerial photograph with boundary of Carlisle Estate and course of the Rio Minho from plan done by Greene in 1818 superimposed as a white line
8.7 1953 aerial photo showing submerged and emergent structures of the port and fort
8.8 Left: Fort Augusta in 1961. Right: Fort and Port at Carlisle Bay 1953
8.9 Section of a plan of Carlisle Estate prepared in 1879 showing “Old Fort and Pusey Hall Estate Wharf”
8.10 Google Earth images of Carlisle Bay 2003, 2013, and 2018
8.11 Historical shoreline recession at Carlisle Bay obtained from measurements of distance of Old House relative to shoreline on plans, aerial photographs, and satellite imagery
8.12 Changes in the meander of the Rio Minho – 2019 Sentinel imagery, 1941 aerial photo, and 1879 plan
10.1
10.2
Routledge Studies in Archives
Routledge Studies in Archives publishes new research in archival studies. Recognizing the imperative for archival work in support of memory, identity construction, social justice, accountability, legal rights, and historical understanding, the series extends the disciplinary boundaries of archival studies. The works in this series illustrate how archival studies intersects with the concerns and methods of, and is increasingly intellectually in conversation with, other felds.
Bringing together scholarship from diverse academic and cultural traditions and presenting the work of emerging and established scholars side by side, the series promotes the exploration of the intellectual history of archival science, the internationalization of archival discourse, and the building of new archival theory. It sees the archival in personal, economic, and political activity; historically and digitally situated cultures; subcultures and movements; technical and socio-technical systems; technological and infrastructural developments; and in many other places.
Archival studies brings a historical perspective and unique expertise in records creation, management and sustainability to questions, problems and data challenges that lie at the heart of our knowledge about and ability to tackle some of the most difcult dilemmas facing the world today, such as climate change, mass migration, and disinformation. Routledge Studies in Archives is a platform for this work.
Series Editor: James Lowry
Contributors
Elsie E. Aarons, a librarian, worked as Manager of Technical Information Services of the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (1980–2000). She also served as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Library and Information Studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica between 2001 and 2008, teaching the course Special Libraries and Information Management. Very involved in church activities, she worked for 15 years with the Anglican Church, serving as the administrator at St. Andrew Parish Church (2000–2005) and secretary/personal assistant to the Bishop of Kingston (2005–2015). In retirement, she pursues her many interests, including genealogy, for which she has developed an extensive family history. She holds a BSc in geology and geography (1972), a postgraduate diploma in library studies (1976), and an MA in theology (1997), all from the UWI, Mona.
John A. Aarons, an archivist and librarian, worked at the Jamaica Archives as assistant archivist from 1972 to 1976 and as government archivist from 2002 to 2008. Between 1977 and 2002 he worked at the National Library of Jamaica serving as the executive director from 1992 to 2002. He was appointed university archivist at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2009 and served until his retirement in 2014, although he continued until 2018 as an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Library and Information Studies at UWI, Mona, where he was involved in the development and teaching of the archives and records management programme. In retirement, he continues to research and write and serves as the Honorary Archivist of the Anglican Church in Jamaica. He holds a BA (Hons.) in history, postgraduate diplomas in both archives and librarianship, and an MA in heritage studies.
Kai Barratt is a lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Jamaica. Her research focuses on the performances of female soca artistes on and of the stage. Another aspect of her research includes exploring social media platforms as a space for carnival representations. She also looks at the extension of the Trinidad-style carnival to other sites in the Caribbean. Some of her writings have been published in
peer-reviewed journals, and others are under review. She is currently working on projects related to the Trinidad Carnival as a transnational product and the self-presentation strategies of soca artistes on social media.
Monique Barnett-Davidson, an interdisciplinary visual art professional, has worked in various aspects of the visual arts in Jamaica, including art education, exhibition programming and development, museum education, and research. Currently the Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica, as well as a part-time lecturer at the UWI, she presents on various topics on Jamaican art movements and has contributed to publications, including the books A-Z of Caribbean Art (2019) and De mi barrio a tu barrio: Street Art in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean (2012).
Jeannette A. Bastian is Professor Emerita at the School of Library and Information Science, Simmons University, Boston, Massachusetts, where she directed their Archives Management concentration from 1999 to 2019. A former territorial librarian of the United States Virgin Islands, Jeannette holds an MPhil from the UWI and a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Information at the UWI. Her books include West Indian Literature: A Critical Index, 1930–1975 (Allis, 1982); Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (2003); Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory, ed. (2009); Archives in Libraries: What Librarians and Archivists Need to Know to Work Together (2015); Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader, ed. with John A. Aarons and Stanley H. Grifn (2018); and Community Archives: Community Spaces, ed. with Andrew Flinn (2020).
Stephen Butters is a recent graduate of the Archives and Records Management Master’s programme at the UWI, Mona. He was among the frst cohort to have graduated from Mona in that discipline. He was born in Guyana but now calls the island surrounded by 356 beaches – Antigua and Barbuda – home. A lover of history, he pursued his bachelor of arts in history at the University of Guyana. He worked for over 20 years at the Antigua and Barbuda National Archives beginning as a binder and rising to the post of archivist in 2017. He is now the investigations ofcer (ag) at the Ofce of the Ombudsman where his primary role is assisting the Ombudsman in research.
Antonia Charlemagne-Marshall is a records management professional and certifed archivist. She holds an MA in archives and records management (distinction) and MSc in international management. She has also worked with the records of the UWI, UNICEF, and the National University of Samoa. In addition to the John Robert Lee Papers, she has also worked on the Rubin S Davis Papers (digital preservation), Floyd Coleman Papers (initial processing), and auditing of Latin American papers/collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. She was awarded the
Society of American Archivist Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award in 2019. Currently, she is embarking on the preservation of the Diocese of Bridgetown (Roman Catholic) ecclesiastical records.
Janelle Duke has been a research ofcer at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago since 2012. She earned her bachelor of arts in history and psychology with international relations in 2009 from the UWI, St. Augustine. She pursued a master of arts in history (2012), a certifcate in records management (2014), and later a master of arts in archives and records management (2019) from the UWI, Mona, Jamaica. Janelle is currently pursuing an MPhil/PhD in information Studies at the Mona Campus. She is involved in numerous organizations including the Lions Club of Port of Spain North. Her research areas include the Anglican Church in the Caribbean, Family Genealogies, and the History and Records of the Sugar Industry in Trinidad and Tobago.
Thera Edwards is Map Curator and Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Geology at the UWI, Mona Campus in Jamaica. Her interdisciplinary research includes landscape change and history, geomorphology, climate change responses, vegetation ecology, and archaeology. Historical maps, aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and geographical information systems (GIS) are key components of her research and analyses. In the past 20 years, her work has focused on environmental management and sustainable development with particular emphasis on biodiversity, forestry, watersheds, agriculture, and protected areas management. Thera has written and co-authored technical reports and papers for several development agencies as well as for presentation at conferences and symposia. In 2016, she coedited the volume Global Change and the Caribbean: Adaptation and Resilience along with David Barker, Duncan McGregor, and Kevon Rhiney.
Stanley H. Grifn is Deputy Dean, Undergraduate Matters (Humanities), and Lecturer in Archival and Information Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Education, Department of Library and Information Studies, at the UWI, Mona Jamaica Campus. Stanley holds a BA (Hons.) in history, a PhD in cultural studies (with High Commendation), from the Cave Hill Barbados Campus of the UWI, and an MSc in Archives and Records Management (Int’l), University of Dundee, Scotland. Stanley’s research interests include multiculturalism in Antigua and the Eastern Caribbean, the cultural dynamics of intra-Caribbean migrations, archives in the constructs of Caribbean culture, and community archives in the Caribbean. His most recent publications include Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader (2018), a co-edited work with Jeannette A. Bastian and John A. Aarons; several book chapters; and journal articles on Caribbean archival and cultural issues.
John Hunte is a practitioner, producer, cultural studies activist, and teacher in creative and cultural studies. He is armed with a diploma in dance theatre
and production from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica, a BS in Dance from the State University of New York – College at Brockport, an MFA in performing arts management from Brooklyn College, New York City, in 2003, and a PhD degree in cultural studies from the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the Cave Hill, Barbados Campus of the UWI in 2014. His PhD thesis, Beyond the Silence: Men, Dance and Masculinity in the Caribbean, interrogates where dance and masculinity intersect for men who dance onstage. Among several things, Hunte is executive director with Barbados Dance Project, a pre-professional programme for budding dancers, and artistic director/principal with the Barbados Dance Theatre Company Inc.
Paulette Kerr is campus librarian at the UWI, Mona, a position she has held since 2015. Prior to this she was Head of the Department of Library and Information Studies, UWI, Mona. She holds a PhD in library and information science from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University and an MA in history from the UWI. Her research areas coalesce around aspects of Jamaican social history, Library and Information Studies (LIS), and in particular information literacy, LIS education, and teaching learning in academic libraries. Her publications in these areas include book chapters, edited works, peer-reviewed journal articles, and conference proceedings.
Norman Malcolm is a senior secondary school teacher of history with degrees in history education and heritage studies and is currently an MPhil/PhD candidate in the Department of Library and Information Studies (DLIS) at the UWI, Mona. He has taught history at a secondary school in Kingston, Jamaica. Additionally, Malcolm serves as Adjunct Assistant Lecturer in Information Studies in the DLIS, lecturing in research methodologies. His research interests lie at the intersection of information studies, cultural heritage, and history education. His MPhil/PhD research aims to investigate Caribbean social media usage and its role in documenting memory, perpetuating social resistance, and enabling individual and collective agency.
Desaray Pivott-Nolan hails from the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Desaray, a graduate of the UWI, Mona, and holder of a bachelor’s degree in LIS, as well as a master’s degree in archives and records management. With a library professional career of over 15 years, she is a proud information specialist with a passion for continued learning.
Allison O. Ramsay is Lecturer in Cultural/Heritage Studies in the Department of History at the UWI, St. Augustine. She holds a BA in history with frst class honours from the UWI, Cave Hill, an MA in history from the University of the South Pacifc, and a PhD in cultural studies from the UWI, Cave Hill. Her research interests include fraternal organizations, museums, festivals, landships in Barbados, Caribbean heritage, and Caribbean history.
Contributors xiii
Her recent publications include “Jamettes, Mas, and Bacchanal: A Culture of Resistance in Trinidad and Tobago,” The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories: Across the Diaspora, from Ancient Times to the Present; “Mapping a Musical Journey of Soca in the Crop Over Festival of Barbados,” Regional Discourses on Society and History Shaping the Caribbean; “First-Day Covers: A Visual Archive of Caribbean History and Heritage,” Journal of Caribbean History 53.1.
James Robertson, a Londoner, is Professor of History in the Department of History and Archaeology at the UWI, Mona, where he has taught since 1995, and since 2003 has sat on the National Archives Advisory Committee as the Jamaica Historical Society’s representative. He is a past-president of both the Archaeological Society of Jamaica and the Jamaica Historical Society. His “Gone Is the Ancient Glory!”: Spanish Town 1534–2000, was published by Ian Randle in 2005. History Without Historians: Listening for Stories of Jamaica’s Past is in press from Arawak Press, Kingston. He is currently working on a book on Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design and the resulting mid-seventeenth-century English conquest and settlement of Jamaica.
Edward (Ted) Robinson is Professor Emeritus in Geology in the Department of Geography and Geology at the UWI, Mona, where he worked from the inception of the then geology department in 1961 until his retirement in 2012. He is an author on more than 160 professional publications and still maintains continued involvement in research with academic colleagues. His interests include the geology of the Caribbean region, interpretation of aerial photos and satellite imagery, hazards of the Jamaican coastline, and fossil Foraminifera of the Caribbean and Florida.
Tonia Sutherland is Assistant Professor in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) at Mānoa, where she leads the Archives Pathway. Sutherland, a memory worker, is particularly interested in critical and liberatory work in the feld of archival studies. At UH, she teaches and conducts research in cultural heritage preservation and management (intangible, material, and digital), community engagement, and the unique archival challenges that face island communities worldwide. Sutherland is also the author of Digital Remains: Race and the Digital Afterlife (University of California Press, anticipated Fall 2023).
Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski is an archivist and mixed media artist/designer, currently pursuing a collaborative PhD at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL/ Tate Britain). Her doctoral research places much-needed critical attention on Jamaican-born sculptor Ronald Moody and his niece Cynthia Moody. She holds an MA in archives and record management, international (UCL). She is a member of the Afrofeminist Transatlantic Collaboration, which maps and archives the cultural resistance of Black feminist artists in the United Kingdom and the Twins Cities. Most recently she co-edited Mirror
Refecting Darkly: The Rita Keegan Archive (Goldsmiths Press, 2021). She is particularly interested in developing frameworks for interrogating what it means to advocate and/or archive diasporic archives in the twenty-frst century collaboratively, sharing skills and building capacity within the heritage and memory work sector.
Linda Sturtz is Professor of History at Macalester College in Minnesota. Her publications include a book, Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia, and articles on community-based performances in the Caribbean. Her most recent articles are “Beyond the Nation Dance: Collective Memory as Archive in Olaudah Equiano’s Kingston, Jamaica” in American Cultures as Transnational Performance: Traces, Bodies, Commons, Skills in Katrin Horn, et al. (Routledge, 2021) and “Putting People in Songs: Music, History Making and the Archives,” Jamaica Journal 38 (April/May 2021). She is currently working on the African-Jamaican “Sett Girls” performances, historical soundscapes, and the relationship between public memory and the archive. She divides her time between Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Kingston, Jamaica.
Shawn R.A. Wright is the composer/arranger and musical director of the University Chorale of the West Indies, Mona Campus; a graduate of the UWI, Mona; and a Caribbean history educator at the secondary level. His 6 years of working with the late Noel Dexter and the secretariat of UWI, Mona, have infuenced his research interest into Caribbean/Jamaica choral music history and concert history which, today, stands as an underdeveloped area of Caribbean cultural historiography. His aim is to bring attention to this area of study through research and publication of not just academic work but choral compositions that identify with a Caribbean choral sound and practice.
Introduction
John A. Aarons, Jeannette A. Bastian, and Stanley H. Griffin
As the nations and territories of the Caribbean reclaim their cultures and identities after centuries of colonial domination, archives and records are generally not in the mix. This may be because of the strong connections between archival records and the colonial enterprise. But it also may be because colonizers brought their textual record-keeping practices with them, imposing them upon peoples who had already developed their own archiving traditions albeit more orally based than textual. As the colonizers devalued the bodies of the indigenous inhabitants, the enslaved and the indentured, they also depreciated their cultural expressions and record-keeping traditions. European colonizers imposed their own record-keeping practices upon populations that had formerly fourished with diferent traditions. Caribbean archivist Stanley H. Griffn tracing the Jamaican National Archives from its early colonial beginnings to the present day concludes that “the memory contained within the Jamaica Archives is still framed by colonial thought, racist ideologies, and Eurocentric memory practices” (Grifn & Timcke, 2021, p. 3).
This volume of 15 chapters, originally presentations at a 2019 conference at the University of the West Indies (UWI), continues the editors’ eforts, initiated in Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader, to move Caribbean archives away from these colonial beginnings and towards a defnition that refects the dynamic cultural life and lived experience of the region. Although these chapters focus primarily on the English-speaking Caribbean, postcolonial and decolonial concerns about archival representations touch the entire region. For archives and records in the Caribbean are no longer just those textual records of the colonial masters but rather the oral, performative, intangible, and tangible products of Caribbean peoples.
Origins
In October 2019, the Department of Library and Information Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, held its frst Symposium on Archives and Records. Titled “Unlocking Caribbean Memory, Uncovering
New Records: Discovering New Archives,” the focus was twofold. The frst was to celebrate the graduation of the frst cohort of students from the new Master of Arts in Archives and Records Management Programme, which began ofcially in the department in 2015. The second was to highlight and reimagine the “Caribbeanization” of archives in the region and explore the potentials for new records in new formats.
The symposium organizers recognized that refecting both the heritage and the dynamic cultures of the Caribbean was essential if archives were to have relevance within the region. They encouraged participants to “unlock” their perceptions of what constitutes a record, rethink, and redefne enduring values and actively seek those materials that represented the widest possible social and cultural diversity. This included not only ever-evolving tangible formats (audiovisual, digital) but intangible ones as well – oral, perfomative, musical, artefactual.
The legacies of colonialism and colonial record-creating and -keeping have presented archival challenges for formerly colonized countries and territories, nowhere more so than in the Caribbean region. The identifcation of recordkeeping with political control and domination is one legacy that might help explain the paucity of ofcial archival records of the post-independence era in many national archival institutions in the region. However, even if these ofcial records survive, they are often only replicas of the types of records of the colonial era and not fully representative of the lives and memories of the newly liberated Caribbean peoples. Implicit in this is the realization that for developing countries, such as those in the Caribbean, reliance cannot be entirely placed on the record forms produced and archived in the countries of the colonizers. The challenges are multifold: how to identify and archive records in the forms and formats that refect the postcolonial and decolonized Caribbean; how to build an archive of the people, one that documents contemporary Caribbean society and refects Caribbean memory; and how to repurpose the colonial archives so that they assist in an interpretation of the past from the viewpoint of the colonized.
Defining the Caribbean Archive
Since colonial records are primarily the documentary legacy of colonial conquest, hegemony, and wealth extraction, what constitutes the archival records of the pre-colonial and postcolonial Caribbean? The answer lies in the information and communication practices of the peoples whom Europeans found in the Caribbean and those who were brought to the region at the bidding of these colonizers. Writing was not the primary form for creating and documenting memory used by non-Europeans. In their examination of the destructive forces of colonialism in postcolonial societies, literary theorists Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifths, and Helen Tifn suggest,
In many post-colonial societies, it was not the English language which had the greatest efect, but writing itself. In this respect, although oral culture is by no means the universal model of post-colonial societies, the invasion of the ordered, cyclic, and “paradigmatic” oral world by the unpredictable and “syntagmatic” world of the written world stands as a useful model for the beginnings of post-colonial discourse.
(Ashcroft et al., 2002, p. 81)
Accordingly, the Caribbean archival record can be found in non-written forms, in expressions thought of only as cultural – that is, exhibits of ways of life – yet imbued with informational content, historical evidence and context, and sociocultural structures that are fxed in meanings and expectations of form. For example, a calypso has distinct instrumentation, sounds, and rhythms which are expected to be considered part of the genre, even though the lyrics difer and convey situational meanings.
The successive waves of peoples who came to the Caribbean have shaped the ways in which Caribbean people document, preserve, and share their enduring memory in the very same ways that their identities have been crafted and expressed. After all, their memories shape their identities. Cultural theorist Shalini Puri ofers a perspective that seeks to account for the contributory presence of all identities in the Caribbean. She contends that Caribbean cultural identities are hybrids of the cultural experiences/expressions of all persons within the region, writing that “[t]he Caribbean has some of the earliest and richest elaborations of cultural hybridity. . . . The Caribbean has had to negotiate its identities in relation to Native America; to Africa and Asia, from where most of its surviving inhabitants came; to Europe, from where its colonizing settlers came; and to the United States of America, its imperial neighbor” (Puri, 2004, p. 2). These Caribbean cultural identities are not mere imitations of former ancestral customs or pure replications of traditional habits. Instead, Puri maintains, the identities that emerged in the Caribbean “elaborate a syncretic New World identity, distinct from that of its ‘Mother Cultures’; in so doing, they provide a basis for national and regional legitimacy” (Puri, p. 45). Undoubtedly these infuences can be seen in the documentary and memory practices found in the Caribbean, yet syncretic forms and practices have emerged that are distinct from other inherited memory expressions. Hence, Caribbean records can be described as diverse, dynamic, and delicate.
The Caribbean’s diversity of records is rooted in its contextual history with its pre-Columbian genesis. The indigenous civilizations that lived throughout the western hemisphere created records. Caribbean historians acknowledge that the various indigenous communities left evidences and traces of their existence throughout the islands and territories they inhabited. Historian Karl Watson observes, “The Amerindians occupied [the region] for some forty generations prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. During this period of time, their
societies produced a vibrant material culture as the archaeological evidence attests” (Watson, n.d., p. 2). These materials, on rock and cave etchings, have given us glimpses into the complex civilizations that Columbus encountered and decimated. Their material cultures and legacies are multilayered and multidimensional and continue to infuence contemporary Caribbean life. Watson afrms that, even though the formal indigenous societies Columbus met are now long gone,
their presence lives on among us, either through some genetic inheritance, as can be seen among the population of the Dominican Republic, or in the features of individuals from Guadeloupe or St Lucia, in our language and cuisine, or from the large quantity of artifacts strewn across our islands. Field walking or even garden forking can produce Amerindian artefacts on every Caribbean island.
(Watson, p. 2)
The challenge then is not a lack of evidence of material culture but a failure to recognize the information and enduring values these materials convey.
The various mindsets, languages, expressions, memory forms, and practices that came across the Atlantic were also part of the “cultural equipage” that travelled with the peoples who were enslaved, indentured, or otherwise encumbered on the plantations of the region (Nettleford, 2003, p. 2). This diversity continues to adapt and conform to the socio-political and technological advances made and expected of twenty-frst-century living. Thus, from territorial home languages and dress styles to digital art works, these memory materials bear Caribbean aesthetics which are imbued with informational detail, situational context, and cultural structure that are individually unique yet are interrelated to the entire region in ways that a record item fnds relational meaning with its creator-fonds.
Caribbean records are dynamic. Cultural theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s description of Caribbean identities as products of the eruptions of the dynamics of the plantation – the crucible cradle of Caribbean society – could easily defne Caribbean records. The Caribbean, he writes,
is the product of the plantation . . . whose slow explosion throughout modern history threw out billions and billions of cultural fragments in all directions – fragments of diverse kinds that, in their endless voyage, come together in an instant to form a dance step, a linguistic trope, the line of a poem, and afterward repel each other to re/form and pull apart once more, and so on.
(Benitez-Rojo, 1990, p. 55)
Our buildings, cuisine, dances, fashion, landscapes, rhythms, songs, stories, and even tweets are as creative and vivacious as their antecedent forms. Culturalist
Rex Nettleford, in his refection on Jamaican dance, afrms that our contemporary cultural expressions are evolving articulations of previous generations of expressions yet bearing strong infuences of its past. Dance, he writes, “has given to the cultural heritage of Jamaica such enduring life sources as kumina, pukkumina (popularly known as pocomania), etu, tambu, gerreh, dinkimini, Zion revivalism, and Rastafarianism,” which can be seen and experienced in the movements of religious worship and the popular cultural phenomenon, dancehall (Nettleford, 1993, p. 99).
This dynamism marvels the visiting tourist and is a source of pride to the citizen, both at home and abroad. Yet, somehow, the enduring informational values of these expressions have generally escaped the policy defnitions of regional archives simply because they do not subscribe to the rigid strictures of format and static fxity. These expressions are living, changing in informational content, yet bearing particular strands of structure that binds them to their creative communities.
Focusing on the written word as the only possible mode for creating the archival record has reduced the potential of society and memory institutions to value and preserve the narratives and representations of its constituents. Deborah Bird Rose, in her chapters on Aboriginal Australian epistemology, similarly explains the conundrum Caribbean societies confront in coming to terms with archival memory and colonial documentary heritage. Rose writes, “There is no place without a history, there is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance, and design, no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation” (Rose, 1996, p. 18). Caribbean landscapes were disturbed for the purposes of creating and governing plantation societies. Yet those who laboured on the land formed informational and cultural connections to the environment in ways Rose describes.
Both colonials and subjugates shaped the landscapes and built environments by their histories, narratives, and meanings. Spaces of colonial grandeur are countered and re/presented as places of resistance and triumph to colonial oppression by song, dance, and design. A recreational ground in a small island community such as St. John’s, Antigua, for example, shares similar meanings with the large mass of greenspace in the heart of Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the ways in which these landscapes are memorialized and performed. Accordingly, these felds, like paper records, which were designed to spatially divide and rule, are re/presented in song, dance, and design and imbued with meanings and memories of performances.
Since Caribbean records are embedded in the performative culture, Caribbean memory workers and cultural practitioners must devise new strategies and protocols to ensure that imaginative narratives are celebrated as archival representations of their history and identities. For, as Jeannette A. Bastian explains,
[a]s an aggregate . . . each element, each record, or record grouping . . . contributes to a coherent cultural whole – an archive that is both historical
and at the same time dynamic, one that contains, enacts, and continually reinvents its own cultural existence.
(Bastian, 2018, p. 506)
Finally, Caribbean records are delicate. While these performative materials are central to the living creativity and memory of their communities, they are precarious because they were not conceived to be fxed long-standing articulations of information and culture in the conventional ways records and archives are defned. Although, in their own way they can be seen as those persistent representations that defne traditional Western records. Caribbean records are living, breathing, performative materials and are dependent on continued performance for survival. These performances are crucial to the continued evolution of cultural identity. For, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall maintains,
[i]dentities are about questions of using the resources of history, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are” or “where we came from”, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. (Hall, 1996, p. 4)
Thus, the fragility of Caribbean records is fourfold: these expressions are living materials and are dependent on communal performance. These assets cannot be preserved in conventional ways. Finally, regional institutions lack the confdence and infrastructure to adequately preserve non-paper-based materials. How can Caribbean records meet conventional preservation standards when the assets cannot be placed in boxes and shelves in sterile temperaturecontrolled strong rooms?
If the starting point for archiving Caribbean identity and memory is validating its content and enduring values, the next step is to ensure that deliberate eforts are taken to create enabling environments for their long-term practice and protection. Preservation ought to be reframed as a communal activity rather than an institutional responsibility. Supporting community practices as preservation initiatives certainly unites both institution and community in purpose and value. This unity in commitment is complementary as the institution – invariably the sole government archives with its specifc mandate to focus on the records and archives produced by the state – can support the activism of community documentation initiatives. Both need each other to efectively capture, arrange and describe, preserve and make available the mutually related records of enduring value. Networking with community interests and cultural practitioner groups becomes a critical component of archival services since the institution is dependent on the community eforts in order to efectively form an archival ecosystem that represents all sectors and includes all formats.
There are community groups doing the work of “community archives” in the Caribbean that ofer examples of models of engagement between institution and community even if they may not claim to be archives or even meet archival disciplinary expectations. The “Dancehall Archives and Research Initiative” in Jamaica and the “Caribbean Yard Campus,” which is a regional memory project out of Trinidad, are fne examples of such movements. The former is founded by a university academic “committed to the preservation and spread of knowledge about dancehall culture.”1 The latter is “an educational enterprise that is designed to network traditional knowledge systems in the Caribbean.”2 The Dancehall Archive ofers materials and activities that are not represented in the government archival holdings and is totally independent of the Jamaica Archives and Records Department. The Yard Campus is an informal gathering of enthusiasts and professionals. The National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago is listed as a collaborator and participates as a reference point for archival professional practice and principles. Both community projects have the potential to ofer diferent materials and contexts to their particular national institutions.
However, there is also a third possibility, the example of the Saint Lucia National Archives Authority, which ofers a diferent approach. Archivist Margot Thomas has so imbedded outreach within the services of the national archives that the record-diversity found within that institution is not typical of regional archives. Thomas writes,
The approach to archiving at the National Archives Authority of Saint Lucia is unique. The National Archives is a community-oriented institution which seeks to enable every Saint Lucian to make use of its holdings, to see himself or herself as part of the on-going history of the country and to de-mystify the word archive.
(Thomas, 2018, p. 361)
The Saint Lucian archive illustrates the possibilities for infusing living records within its g iven traditional infrastructure to preserve the documentary heritage of its peoples. Recognizing and including the various knowledge systems and expressions of the Caribbean citizenry require both institution and community to work in tandem. Failing this, the colonial principle of divide and rule will persist in record forms.
Therefore, archiving Caribbean identity and memory goes beyond acknowledgement of “new” sources of knowledge and decolonizing conventional thought and practices. To archive Caribbean memory a reframing of archival infrastructures and mandates is required. Rather than the archive being the standalone “house of memory,” the Caribbean archive should be part of this living cultural ecosystem that receives and releases life-giving knowledge energies to the identities and memory of all its constituents. Rose, in describing Aboriginal communities’ perspectives on the relationship to their landscapes,
which she called country and life, essentially captures the purpose of this text. She writes,
Life is meaningful, and much human activity – art, music, dance, philosophy, religion, ritual and daily activity – is about celebrating and promoting life. Country is the key, the matrix, the essential hear t of life. It follows that much Aboriginal art, music, dance, philosophy, religion, ritual and daily activity has country as its focus or basis. Not only is life valued, but the systemic quality of life is valued too. Within this holistic system of knowledge, each living thing is a participant in living systems. Celebration of life is a celebration of the interconnections of life in a particular place which also includes the humans who celebrate.
(Rose, 1996, p. 11)
The Caribbean archive is in the life of its people and needs to be appreciated as such.
Constructing a Caribbean Archival Aesthetic
The 15 chapters in this book, drawn from almost 30 presentations at the symposium, address the questions and challenges of documenting Caribbean memory through a wide variety of formats – textual, material, tangible, and intangible – as well as a wide variety of perspectives on what might be considered as an archive. Since the authors come from a spectrum of academic disciplines and cultural practices in the English-speaking Caribbean, perceptions of what an archive could be are highly dependent on the authors’ own intellectual spheres and areas of knowledge. Thus, for example, a cultural heritage theorist sees meaning and social documentation through popular music, while a choir director fnds a nation and its history through evolving liturgy. A geographer claims the landscape as a constantly documenting change agent, while an archivist explores the landscape as a multilayered record and a dance director traces conficting postcolonial attitudes through the development of national dance companies.
Importantly, four of the chapters are by recent graduates of the newly established University of the West Indies archival studies programme in its Department of Library and Information Studies. As these authors discuss the archival value of postage stamps, the landscape of the Antiguan Recreational Ground, the value of ecclesiastical records, and the ways in which the collection of a private individual refects the memory of a nation, it seems clear that innovative thinking by a new generation of Caribbean archivists is paving the way for new archival perspectives.
Dividing the 15 chapters into two parts, “Tangible and Intangible Formats” and “Collections Through a Caribbean Lens,” enabled an exploration of archival records that excludes no formats and parallels the textual/traditional
along with the non-textual and non-traditional, thereby presenting Caribbean records as “diverse, dynamic and delicate” while addressing the complex cultural, evidential, and informational values of a wide spectrum of expressions and materials.
In the twenty-frst century, defnitions of records, fuelled, at least partially by digital afordances, social justice imperatives, and community exigencies, are moving beyond the traditional “textual” and “fxed,” focusing on contextual and inherent values rather than external formats. British archivist Geofrey Yeo defnes a record as a “persistent representation,” explaining that
[i]t is a persistent representation because it has the capacity to remain available after the ending of the activity or event that it represents. . . . . Records may not last forever, but they outlive the immediate circumstances in which they were created.
(Yeo, 2020, p. x)
Australian records manager Chris Colwell writes, “Site-specifc culturaldiscursive, material-economic and socio-political arrangements . . . actively shape records. . . . Records are products of social practices” (Colwell, 2020, p. ix). These contemporary defnitions, combined with the defnition of Caribbean records presented earlier in this Introduction, ofer ample space for the intangible and tangible formats considered in these chapters, giving longneeded consideration to the many and varied ways that communities express themselves, their histories, and their identities.
As these “new” characterizations of records open the archives to alternate forms and expressions, they also suggest new approaches for existing colonial and postcolonial collections, approaches that place these collections within contexts that both open up the voices of the marginalized and support the trajectories of the newly independent nation states. Thus, a collection of postage stamps also tells a popular history of a nation, a sculptor’s papers reveal a national artist, and colonial records bring to light both the presences and absences of Black women in Caribbean historiography.
In interpreting records and documentation broadly, the chapters therefore cover a wide range of cultural issues from church liturgy to memorials, to folk literature, to social media, and to even cricket. The perspectives demonstrate the multiple and diverse eforts by Caribbean peoples to redefne and “Caribbeanize” their society in all its aspects. It is notable that while the chapters provide a wide range of perspectives, the chapters are also united by commonalities. The shadowy presence of colonial history links the chapters through the common desire of the authors to both renounce colonialism and replace it with a new way – as true of records and archives as for other aspects of Caribbean life. And this search for a new way forward is coupled both with pride in regional progress and a deep sense of identity with these island nations and the wider Caribbean of which they are an integral part.
The Chapters
Part I Tangible and Intangible Formats
The Caribbean is renowned for its music, whether traditional folk songs – born out of the experiences of slavery and oppression – reggae, soca, or calypso. Two chapters in this part deal with the archival qualities of various genres of music within a Caribbean context. In “Soca and Collective Memory: Savannah Grass as an Archive of Carnival,” Kai Barratt, considers a popular 2019 Carnival song as a case study for examining soca (a musical genre invented in Trinidad defned as “calypso with soul”) as a repository for the collective memories of place, people, and emotions, which characterize carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. Barrett analyses “Savannah Grass” as an archive of the carnival experience, a perspective that is reinforced not only by social media but also by the musicians themselves in a YouTube video that includes historical images of past Carnival celebrations in the Port of Spain Savannah.
Performance as an embodied archive is also demonstrated in “Singing Our Caribbean Identity: Programming the UWI, Mona Festival of the Nine Lessons With Carols,” by Shawn R.A. Wright who, through a variety of “records” that include programme notes and music scores in addition to choir performances, demonstrates how this annual Christmas Service has been “Caribbeanized” over the years as selections have moved from traditional British carols to those of a more Caribbean nature and favour. Through this evolution, a new Christmas music tradition developed as part of the creation of a regional identity. Similarly, dance, also an embodied performance, can also be a celebration and a tool of liberation. As an archive it is a repository of history as well as an expression of cultural memory. In “Concert Dance in Barbados as Archive: Dancing the National Narratives,” John Hunte traces the continued contestation between Afro-centric and Euro-centric ideologies and methodologies in a space that privileges the latter in post-independence Barbados and as expressed through dance.
In this frst quarter of the twenty-frst century, Twitter has emerged as a preferred form of social media. The archival qualities of Twitter are examined by Norman Malcolm in “Jamaican Twitter as a Repository for Documenting Memory and Social Resistance: Listening to the ‘Articulate Minority’,” who not only discusses its particular relevance to Jamaican society but sees Jamaican Twitter as a means of documenting those events, activities, personalities, and views often neither represented in traditional media nor archived in traditional records. Using examples to discuss this popular format and its counter-memory, Malcolm assesses Twitter as a new type of repository for Jamaica’s national memory.
At the opposite end of the documenting scale, stone is one of the oldest methods of recording information but, in a world governed by text, not traditionally considered archival. In “Archives ‘Cast in Stone’: Memorials as Memory,” Elsie E. Aarons explores stone memorials as a recording format.
As she writes, “information of value can often be found ‘etched in stone’ on murals, gravestones, statues, monuments, plaques, etc.,” noting that both the documenting and memory value of memorials have been heightened by current controversies.
As suggested earlier in this Introduction, cultural memory can be preserved not only in events and activities but in broader forms such as in landscapes. In “Landscape as Record: Archiving the Antigua Recreation Ground,” Stephen Butters considers the ways in which this landscape, renowned as a cricket ground and venue for cultural events, also functions as a repository for multilevel records, from colonialism to independence, and thus has become a signifcant memory archive for the nation. Landscape as an archive is examined from a diferent perspective by Thera Edwards and Edward Robinson. In “Traditional and New Record Sources in Geointerpretive Methods for Reconstructing Biophysical History: Whither Withywood,” they investigate the reconstruction of a historical site in an area known as Wither Wood or Withywood in the parish of Clarendon on the south coast of Jamaica. Utilizing a range of geographical and recording tools – aerial and underwater photography, satellite imagery, terrestrial laser scanning, sonar, and global positioning system (GPS) – they demonstrate that the ever-changing landscape also yields a historical record. In the fnal chapter in this part, Monique Barnett-Davidson, in “Remembering an Art Exhibit: The Face of Jamaica, 1963–1964,” explores a retrospective exhibition presented via an online platform in 2012 of a Jamaican art exhibition called the Face of Jamaica, which toured cities in West Germany and England between 1963 and 1964. Never before shown in Jamaica, this recovered and reconstructed exhibit, and its supporting documentation, has itself become an archive and a cultural record.
Part II. Collections Through a Caribbean Lens
The chapters in this part interrogate existing collections from a Caribbean viewpoint, drawing on collections both in the region and elsewhere. The lead chapter, “Resistance in/and the Pre-Emancipation Archives,” by Tonia Sutherland, Linda Sturtz, and Paulette Kerr examines resistance by enslaved Black women as documented in pre-emancipation era archives. Exploring the lives of three women, Nanny of the Maroons, Mary Reid from Jamaica, and La Mulâtresse Solitude, from Guadalupe through the scant evidence in legal histories, private and administrative correspondence, and oral testimony in order to uncover their resistance (counter) narratives exemplifes the frustration and the challenge of recovering the marginalized through colonial records.
Private personal collections have long been regarded as having important and often unique archival values. The two chapters in this section dealing with collections of individuals have particular signifcance in formulating a better understanding of the career of a prominent artist and the cultural life of the island nation of St. Lucia. Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, in “Recasting Jamaican
Sculptor Ronald Moody (1900–1984): An Archival Homecoming,” contextualizes sculptor and philosopher Ronald Clive Moody as an international networked fgure and artistic practitioner chiefy through the examination of his artworks, exhibition history, and personal papers. Particularly intriguing are the ways in which an interrogation of his archival papers in the Tate Gallery helped in documenting his works and coming to a fuller understanding of his career and his relationship to his native Jamaica. Similarly, the archival collections of Caribbean writers and artists also provide windows into the Caribbean experience. A good example of this is Antonia Charlemagne-Marshall’s chapter, “St. Lucian Memory and Identity Through the Eyes of John Robert Lee.” These “eyes” are not only his own creative works but materials he accumulated in his various capacities as librarian, information ofcer, cultural ofcer, and member of the Nobel Laureate Week Organizing Committee. This collection has an added value in that it has remained in St. Lucia, and just as a people can be “of”a place, archives can also be of a place. In this case, the place is the author’s homeland, St. Lucia, which gives the collection an added signifcance as it can be accessed by researchers in the “context of its creation.”
Although often overlooked as documentation, postage stamps created for ofcial purposes contain a wealth of historical, social, and cultural information. In “Postcolonial Philately as Memory and History: Stamping a New Identity for Trinidad and Tobago,” Desaray Pivot-Nolan traces the creation and transformation of postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago and the formation of its national identity through an examination of the great variety of postage stamps issued over this period. When systematically examined, these stamps, currently in the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, present a story of a nation’s history and development captured in a unique format. Also utilizing archival collections in Trinidad, Allison O. Ramsay, in “Crop Over and Carnival in the Archives of Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago,” examines materials in newspaper repositories and on social media relating to these festivals. Crop Over and Carnival are two of the best-known festivals in the region, cultural expressions that originated during the period of African enslavement and tell stories of race, class, colour, and gendered identities.
In addition to traditional records, Ramsay explores the documentation and archiving opportunities of social media and websites, demonstrating that interaction with archival material in the digital world as well as the textual can also unlock public memory.
Church records are often unrecognized and underutilized sources of archival information in the Caribbean for, within a denomination, these materials tend to be dispersed among various churches without an organized archival system or structure. In “Ecclesiastical Records as Sources of Social History: The Anglican Church of Trinidad and Tobago,” Janelle Duke discusses their social and religious values as sources of history, collective memory, and the national identity of Trinidad and Tobago. In the fnal chapter, “Erasure and Retention in Jamaica’s Ofcial Memory: The Case of the Disappearing Telegrams,” James
Robertson asks the question – what factors contribute to shaping the collections of ofcial records in a postcolonial society such as Jamaica? With specifc reference to the Jamaica Archives, he notes the gaps created not only by the destruction of records caused by neglect or naturally occurring events such as hurricanes, but also by deliberate actions of ofcers in removing records prior to their transfer to archival custody.
As examples he uses telegrams and later savingrams of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries relating to the haphazard treatment of these records to contemporary concerns with electronic records. As a historian, he discusses the implications in trying to interpret records in which signifcant materials have been removed.
Conclusion
Archiving Caribbean identity is a complex matter given the history of the region with centuries of colonialism, oppression, slavery, and indentureship in which the lives of the vast majority of the population were not documented and valued only for their labour. The situation has not been helped by onesided views in surviving records in ofcial archival repositories in the region that only refect the thought processes and actions of the elite and governing classes. After all, the creation of records was essential to colonial control. Combatting these “silences” in the archives requires a holistic vision of what a record is and could be, a recognition of the many ways in which societies express themselves as well as an appreciation of the ways in which traditional records can be reinterpreted to enhance the memory of the region. The chapters in this volume present a few of the possibilities, honouring those of the past and present, while imagining repositories of the future.
Notes
1 See “Mission”: The Dancehall Archive and Research Initiative. Retrieved November 11, 2021, from www.dancehallarchive.org/mission/
2 See “About Us,” Caribbean Yard Campus. Retrieved November 11, 2021, from www. caribbeanyardcampus.org/about-us/
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