Colonial Inventions - Cambridge Scholars

Colonial Inventions

Colonial Inventions: Landscape, Power and Representation

in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad

By

Amar Wahab

Colonial Inventions: Landscape, Power and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad, by Amar Wahab

This book first published 2010

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2010 by Amar Wahab

An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as: Island of the Blest: (Re)naturalizing the Natural Landscape in 19th-Century Trinidad. In What is the Earthly Paradise?: Ecocritical Responses to the Caribbean, eds. E. Sommerville and C. Campbell. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. (2007)

and as: Re-Writing Colonized Subjects: Disciplinary Gestures in Charles Kingsley’s At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871). Revista Mexicana del Caribe, No. 16. (2005).

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-1922-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1922-0

For my mother For my father For my family

Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or English park. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still without popular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island in the intestines of slaves. —V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, (1967, 147)

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii Introduction ............................................................................................... 1 Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape

The Tales of Mountains – A Blind Rehearsal ........................................ 1 Theoretical Perspective: Positioning (Post)Colonial Discourse............. 5 Landscape in (Post)Colonial Discourse ............................................... 11 Postcolonial Un/Re-mappings of the “Caribbean”............................... 14 Managing Race and Gender: Orientalist and Africanist Discourse...... 21 Ways of Looking.................................................................................. 24 Travel Writing and Landscape Painting............................................... 25 Reading Strategies ............................................................................... 29 “De/Re-Historicizing” Nineteenth-century “Trinidad”........................ 31 Chapter Summaries.............................................................................. 36

Chapter One............................................................................................. 39 Rehearsing Caribbean Colonial Landscapes

Introduction..........................................................................................39 Inventing Invitation: Emptiness, Cannibalism and Savagery............... 41 Inventing Tropical Nature.................................................................... 45 Re-Centering the Caribbean: The Rise of Plantations.......................... 51 The Colonial Picturesque..................................................................... 57 Tracking Colonial Ambivalence: Transculturation, Agency and Reconsolidation............................................................................. 61

Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 69 Inventing “Trinidad” in the European Imagination: From Colombus to Richard Bridgens

A Euro-Navigational Birth: Columbus’s “Discovery” of Paradise...... 70 Re-tracing Paradise: The Search for El Dorado ................................... 73 Imagining “A Ghostly Paradise”.......................................................... 76 The Cedula and the Reinvention of a Cultivable Paradise................... 80

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“Trinidad's New Prosperity": Early Nineteenth-Century British Representations .................................................................................... 82 Richard Bridgens’s Sketches of West India Scenery (circa. 1825)....... 86 Conclusion ........................................................................................... 99

Chapter Three........................................................................................ 103 Views from the Underside? Michel Jean Cazabon’s Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting of “Trinidad” (1851-1880)

Introduction........................................................................................ 103 Biographical Note on Michel Jean Cazabon (1813-1888) ................. 105 Social Context: “An Explosive Amalgam of Changes”..................... 107 Michel Jean Cazabon’s Painterly Discourse ...................................... 113 A Review of MacLean’s and Cudjoe’s Readings .............................. 114 A Reading Strategy: David Dabydeen’s Hogarth’s Blacks................ 116 Reading Cazabon ............................................................................... 121 The Post-emancipation Planter’s Picturesque: A Nostalgic Gesture? 121 A Governor’s landscape: The Harris Collection ................................ 124 Su/Pro/specting .................................................................................. 124 Cazabon’s Civilizing Townscapes: Port of Spain as Tropical City ... 134 The Threat.......................................................................................... 138 A Return to Labour: Picturesque “Coolies”....................................... 141 Cazabon’s Women............................................................................. 145 The Uneasiness of Pleasure................................................................ 151 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 154

Chapter Four ......................................................................................... 159 Return to Order: Disciplinary Gestures in Charles Kingsley’s At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871)

Introduction........................................................................................ 159 Travel Writing and Natural History in the Nineteenth Century ......... 161 Obsessions of Race and Order in Mid-Nineteenth-Century West Indian-English Discourse.......................................................... 164 Kingsley’s Narrative Structure........................................................... 172 Paradise Anew: Idealizations of the Trinidadian Natural Landscape 175 Reinventing Tropicality as “Wild Nature” ..................................... 176 Reinventing Bounty: Prospecting the Picturesque ............................. 180 Cultivating Nostalgia ........................................................................ 185 Re-Writing the Other: Re-Naturalizing Colonized Subjects .............. 187 The “Negro Character”: The Retrograde of Paradise......................... 187 “Coolie” Scripts – A Return to Order ................................................ 196 Intimate Strangers: Contradistinctive Ordering of Others ................. 206

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Engendered Scripts ............................................................................ 209 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 212

Conclusion .............................................................................................. 217 Unfinished Cartographies

Contrapuntal Cartographies ............................................................... 220 Cataloging Colonial Space................................................................. 221 (Re)Scripting Colonized Subjects: Mapping Vis-à-vis...................... 225 Cartographic Disjunctures.................................................................. 235 Coda................................................................................................... 237

Endnotes .................................................................................................. 239 Glossary................................................................................................... 261 Bibliography............................................................................................ 267 Index........................................................................................................ 281

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1.1: Natives of the Caribees feasting on human flesh 42 Fig. 1.2: Frontispiece, Histoire Naturelle et Morale (1665) 42 Fig. 1.3: La Figure de Moulins a Sucre (1665) 54 Fig. 2.1: Title Plate, a wreath composed of sugar cane, plantain, &c 91 Fig. 2.2: Pitch Lake Palm 91 Fig. 2.3: Planting the Sugar Cane 93 Fig. 2.4: Boiling House 93 Fig. 2.5: Carting Sugar 93 Fig. 2.6: Bed Stocks 94 Fig. 2.7: Stocks for Hands and Feet 94 Fig. 2.8: Carting Canes to the Mill 95 Fig. 2.9: Field Negro 95 Fig. 2:10: Sunday Morning in Town 96 Fig. 2:11: Negro and Indian Character 98 Fig. 3.1: Residence at Orange Grove Estate, Trinidad 122 Fig. 3.2: Garden Estate Arouca 122 Fig. 3.3: View of Mount Tamana from Arima 125 Fig. 3.4: Village of Arima and Mount Tamana 125 Fig. 3.5: Thatched Huts on a Cocoa Estate 128 Fig. 3.6: Mountain Village 128 Fig. 3.7: Cedar Point, Mount Tamana 129 Fig. 3.8: Cedar Point, Mount Tamana, Trinidad 129 Fig. 3.9: Exterior of Shooting Lodge, Mount Tamana, Trinidad 131 Fig. 3.10: Interior of Shooting Lodge 131 Fig. 3.11: Pitch Lake, Trinidad 133 Fig. 3.12: The Governor’s Residence, St. Ann’s 134 Fig. 3.13: St. Ann’s 134 Fig. 3.14: View of Port of Spain from Laventille Hill 137 Fig. 3.15: View of Port of Spain from Cotton Hill 138 Fig. 3.16: View from Laventille Hill 138 Fig. 3.17: Dry River, Port of Spain 139 Fig. 3.18: Sunrise from Corbeaux Town 140 Fig. 3.19: Corbeaux Town, Port of Spain 140 Fig. 3.20: East Indian Group 142 Fig. 3.21: Creole Woman with a Parasol 146 Fig. 3.22: Negress in Gala Dress 146 Fig. 3.23: Old Negress, French, in Gala Dress 147

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Fig. 3.24: East Indian Woman 148 Fig. 3.25: Grand Trinidad Races, 5th January 1853. Maiden Stake 152 Fig. 3.26: Stuart Island 154 Fig. 3.27: Carenage from Five Islands 1 and 2 154 Fig. 3.28: View from Carenage 154 Fig. 4.1: The High Woods 177 Fig. 4.2: Ceiba 178 Fig. 4.3: Frontispiece: The Botanic Gardens, Port of Spain 185 Fig. 4.4: Banana 193 Fig. 4.5: Coolies A-Field 197 Fig. 4.6: Coolies Cooking 203 Fig. 4.7: A Coolie Family 203 Fig. 4.8: Coolie Sacrificing 206 Fig. 4.9: Coolie and Negro 208 Fig. 4.10: Waiting for the Races 208

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was birthed as a doctoral dissertation at the University of

Toronto in 2004, but morphed into a wider and more involved endeavour in the past five years. My sincere thanks goes out to all those who were involved, even tangentially, in the eventual publication of this work which has taken me to various academic institutions located in numerous countries. The journey has been at times tiresome, as efforts to bring the project to fruition were always met by productive obstacles that detoured me into different academic spaces, providing the opportunity to gain exposure and engage feedback from a number of scholarly minds.

My deepest gratitude must be expressed to Professors Alissa Trotz, Patricia O`Riley, and Mimi Sheller who not only sustained my commitment to this kind of project through their encouraging and stimulating feedback, but who also continued to pressure me to work on converting the dissertation into a manuscript. Especially with Professor Trotz, who shared the conviction that the need for this kind of work is urgent in Caribbean Studies, I was also encouraged and benefited from presentation feedback at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom where I completed my postdoctoral studies. During this time, my supervision under Professor David Dabydeen helped me to refine some of my ideas and the breadth of analysis that I would come to regard as indispensable to postcolonial studies. Most rewarding was my day to day research at the British Library, the National Archives, and the National Art Library at the Victorian and Albert Museum which continue to seduce me with their power to memory. My findings in these archives have strengthened the book’s scholarly focus and my commitment to bring some of these works back into the public domain in an effort to contemplate their relevance to contemporary conversations. In this regard I would also like to thank Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar, Soucin Yip-Sou and the anonymous reviewers of Cambridge Scholars Publishing who provided valuable feedback in the draft manuscript stages and remained committed to the vision of this project.

I continue to be inspired by the work of scholars whose work have been crucial to the framing of this piece of writing, most notably Mimi Sheller, Patricia Mohammed, Selwyn Cudjoe, Krista Thompson, who have written on the relevance of postcolonial Caribbean studies. What I find

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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 publication’s life-support system. I must express special gratitude to my friends and colleagues: Beverly-Jean Daniel, Eve Haque, Michelle Rowley, Gabrielle Hezekiah,

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the Coventry Crew, the Bérubé 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

Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or English park. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still without popular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island in the intestines of slaves. —V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, (1967, 147) Naipaul shows us that the landscape was not pure, that it had not remained untouched since Creation, and that it was not original, “native,” or virginal at all. Rather, its purity was a fabrication, a myth. … The landscape was really the product of the snatching of people from Africa and their brutal enslavement. The land bore witness to the oppression and degradation of people. There was blood, violence and squalor in the Caribbean landscape; … Beneath the myth of paradise lurked the unspoken, wished-away reality of the plantation. —Ian Strachan, Paradise and Plantation, (2002, 158)

The Tales of Mountains – A Blind Rehearsal

In the dry season of 2002 while on research in Trinidad a close friend and I decided to take a daylong car journey through the densely forested, meagerly-populated Northern Range Mountains of Trinidad. We left the town of St. Augustine baking in the intense tropical heat and gradually climbed into the coolness of an overwhelmingly breath-taking tropical rainforest in the Arima Hills. Along the way the forest canopy covered the road forming a dark cool tunnel that invited a romantic escape of many sorts. Both tired with doing interviews, detentions in the archives, and the day to day challenges of our dissertation research, a trip into nature’s paradise was a welcome stress reliever. In addition, she being Afro-Trinidadian and me Indo-Trinidadian, we were in some way also trying to escape the discomfiting gazes that always darted like a surveillance camera whenever we were together in public. The Northern Range offered an opportunity to temporarily escape those constantly questioning eyes.

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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 private-sector 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 can’t take on!” Her frustration charged a strong reaction in me, because I didn’t 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 Trinidad’s landscape had emerged and how different groups, especially Africans and Indians were differentially

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positioned on this landscape in interconnected yet distinct ways. How was this idea of tropical paradise historically constructed and naturalized as a metaphor for the differential placements of colonized subjects in relation to the Trinidadian landscape as a form of colonial knowledge and power? How did this metaphor circulate in ways that served to include/exclude particular ways of experiencing Caribbean reality and of informing multiple identities? It seemed that lay oral history discourses on African-Indian relations had always begun at the point of arrival of Indians in the mid-nineteenth century, without considering how the previous early nineteenth-century history of African presence had in fact shaped the African in Trinidadian society and produced the conditions that would eventually shape what the Indian was to become in Trinidad. Viranjini Munasinghe’s Callaloo or Tossed Salad? (2001) has taken this approach in historicizing “East Indians and the cultural politics of identity in Trinidad” whereby she claims that “a certain idiom for ideologically situating the East Indians’ position in relation to the larger society was already in place before East Indians set foot in Trinidad” (2001, 43). Yet rather than taking this approach merely to talk about the “foretelling of East Indian ethnicity” as Munasinghe, this book is a kind of re-telling that acknowledges the saliency of related and entangled histories. Though the varied works of Caribbean fiction writers have approached this project from multiple angles, they have all underlined the historical constructedness of the ways Africans and Indians have been imagined and have imagined themselves separately and in relation to each other on the Trinidadian landscape.

The work of 2001 Nobel laureate, Trinidadian-born literary artist, Sir V.S. Naipaul attends to this project by imaginatively re-encountering Trinidad’s history to suggest even more complicated and disturbing nuances about how “Caribbean people talk about and imagine themselves” (Strachan 2002, 150). Though constantly under critique, Naipaul is most noted for his brutal scrutiny and “demythologizing” of the Caribbean region as an “idealized” paradise. Ian Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation (2002, 158) makes the point that Naipaul “wished to attack the idea, the romantic conception, of the Caribbean landscape.” Naipaul’s assertion in the opening epigraph that the Caribbean landscape as paradise is an invention i.e. a social construction, is one that aligns with the primary claims of postcolonial studies. The writer’s criticism not only strives to expose the fraudulence of this invention of a fixed landscape, but to register the idea that the colonial landscape has a double side that is oppressive, humiliating and blinding - rendering the paradisiacal landscape as “unreal.” Naipaul’s pronouncement provokes a need to historicize this

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claim, while simultaneously finding ways to question the authority with which this statement can be made as a totalizing Caribbean reality. The idea that Caribbean landscapes are “manufactured” and inescapably annexed to the region’s exploitative colonial history is therefore the central assumption of this book. An engagement with the Caribbean landscape in a postcolonial setting is therefore contingent on the precedents set in the colonial period.

Any research that attempts to highlight the Caribbean landscape as an invented site/sight is by default interdisciplinary and must attend to the primacy of historical construction. The aim of this tbook is to understand the multiple and contradictory ways in which nineteenth-century colonial discourse sought to represent and shape i.e. invent the Trinidadian landscape as an imaginary and material site. Moreover I am concerned with how representations of the landscape might serve as sites for an analysis of colonial power and authority. By representation I mean the “process and products that give signs their particular meaning” (Sardar and Van Loon 1999, 13). I address this concern by reading travel writings and images produced by British travelers as well as those of a local Trinidadian artist.

I specifically foreground the 1825 (circa) sketches of British travelling artist Richard Bridgens to highlight the early construction of the landscape and the positioning of the African (slave) in relation to early British rule in Trinidad amidst the rise of a plantation society. I then focus on the paintings and lithographs (1851 – 1880) of local Creole Trinidadian artist, Michel Jean Cazabon to understand his spatial re-invention of Trinidad and the re-scripting of colonized subjects (blacks, coloureds and East Indians) in a period of immense ideological upheaval caused by the abolition of slavery (1834). Finally, I focus on the travelogue (1871) of British novelist Charles Kingsley to understand how the re-imaging of the Trinidadian landscape and colonized subjects was intimately tied to the re-stabilization of British order. I have brought these three works together to re-tell a tale about Africans and Indians in the colonial space of the nineteenth century that acknowledges the implied presences of each other by mapping1 back and forth between particular recurring yet shifting themes and temporal moments. I attempt to read the representations of these travel writings and paintings using (post)colonial discourse analysis as my main theoretical and methodological framework. However since these paintings, lithographs and travel writings are also viewed as cultural practices through which relations of power are produced and managed in particular social and political contexts, there is considerable overlap between colonial discourse and the broader field of cultural studies. I will


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now attempt to discuss some of the main tenets and limitations of (post)colonial discourse, followed by an attempt to situate the concept of landscape within this framework.

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 Sheller’s 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?” Spurr’s question leads to my first task of defining the concept of discourse as a structure of knowledge and power.

Michel Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s (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-

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making i.e. resistance. Colonialism is one such apparatus of discursive power.

Loomba (1998) defines colonialism2 as the conquest and domination of one group of people by another, but stresses that it was not a monolithic process; rather it comprised complex and heterogeneous ideas and practices. Additonally, Spurr claims that “colonization is a form of self-inscription onto the lives of a people who are conceived of as an extension of the landscape” (1993, 7). Both Loomba’s and Spurr’s points resonate with postcolonial scholar Edward Said’s (1993)-that colonialism in terms of material accumulation and acquisition3 is underwritten by:

[I]deological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperial culture is plentiful with words and concepts like “inferior: or “subject races,” “subordinate peoples,” “dependency,” “expansion,” and “authority. (9)

When applied to the historical process of European colonization in the Caribbean, the term “colonial discourse” is loaded with various lexicons that are enabling of, generated by and evident of colonialism. The various texts of colonial discourse,4 each produced in and through specific historical situations, share similarities in that they contain particular gestures of colonization, yet they cannot be totally contained by the term, “colonial discourse” (Spurr 1993, 2).

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), drawing on Foucault’s notion of knowledge as power, inaugurated a new approach to the critique of colonial power – what has now been coined “colonial discourse.”5 According to Hulme (1986, 2) colonial discourse is a “unified ensemble of linguistically-based practices, deployed in the management of colonial relationships.” He elaborates that:

Underlying the idea of colonial discourse … is the presumption that during the colonial period large parts of the non-European world were produced for Europe through a discourse that imbricated sets of questions and assumptions, methods of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery, normally separated out into discrete areas of military strategy, political order, social reform, imaginative literature, personal memoir and so on. (1986, 2; emphasis added)

Young claims that one of the more disturbing aspects of Orientalism was Said’s claim that the texts of Orientalist discourse “can create not only


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knowledge but also the very reality that they appear to describe” (1995, 160). For Said therefore, written colonial discourse concerns the Euro-centric 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 Hulme’s (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 domination7 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). Said’s 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

In fact Said’s main thesis in Orientalism is that Western representations of other peoples and places revealed more about the West than they did about other spaces (Thompson 2002, 18). Colonial discourse therefore concerns the dialectic marking between European Self and non-European Other that structured colonial “ways of seeing and thinking” about or representing difference that were integral to the production of colonial authority. Moreover, this approach depends on an examination of the “social and historical conditions within which specific representations are generated” (Loomba 1998, 97).

Scholars like H. Bhabha, L. Ahmed and D. Porter have criticized Orientalism and colonial discourse for its binaristic logic, its tendency to homogenize colonial encounter, its privileging of the more ideological and discursive aspects of colonial knowledge production at the expense of

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material realities, and its insufficient attention to self-representation and agency of colonized peoples.11 Driver and Yeoh (2000, 3) claim that a major limitation of Said’s analysis is its tendency to project a homogeneous and coherent European system of knowledge, “which may reproduce the very thing that critics wish to bring into question.” In other words, by privileging Western literature and travel writing, which I do to a considerable degree in this study, the focus becomes locked on how these writings “construct” the cultural Other, without attention to reciprocating acts of counter construction by colonial subjects.12 Critics of colonial discourse call for a more complicated historical inquiry that recognizes the “labour of representation” in terms of unequal exchange. Spurr (1993, 7) claims that the totalizing aspect of Said’s argument is countered on the basis that “colonial discourse bears a constant uncertainty, leading to an inherent confusion of identity, difference and authority.” In fact, Said’s corrective Culture and Imperialism (1994) revealed that colonial discourse was not a one-sided process as thought. For Leela Ghandi (1998, 25) Culture and Imperialism gives a “much more optimistic vision of the possibilities of reconciliation and an end to domination and confrontation between West and non-West.” She relates this move in part as an attempt by Said to “abandon Foucault’s totalizing and deterministic conception of power” (ibid.).

Homi Bhabha has posed one of the foremost challenges to Said’s colonial discourse, applying psychoanalysis to demonstrate that colonial discourse also operated according to “ambivalent (continual fluctuation between wanting one thing and its opposite) protocols of fantasy and desire” (Young 1995, 161). For Bhabha colonial authority and power are subject to indeterminate crisis that allow subaltern voices to be recovered, thereby exposing the incoherence of colonial discourse. Bhabha’s emphasis on hybridity i.e. the co-existence of “autocolonization of the native who meets the requirements of colonist address and the evasions and ‘sly civility’ through which the native refuses to satisfy the demand of the colonizer’s narrative” (Parry 1995, 41), is aimed at exposing the “uncertainties and ambivalences of the colonist text” (ibid.). The subaltern is therefore able to operate through these ambivalences to resist the totalizing power of colonial construction.

For postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak13 the principal concern is whether marginalized or subordinate groups (i.e. the subaltern) can speak for themselves or whether they are forever locked into systems of representation by others (Ghandi 1998, 28). Spivak (1988) is weary of the agency of subaltern subjects that is all too easily recovered given the brutal nature of colonial power, even though she stresses the need to mine


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colonial discourse for its “native” counter-knowledges. Yet Spivak’s critique is useful in understanding the processes of ventriloquism whereby colonial discourses appropriate the subaltern’s voice to consolidate Europe’s self-positioning as “civilized” in relation to a “barbaric” Other. Another useful point is Spivak’s insistence on “the impossibility of recovering an originary subaltern consciousness independent of the intervening history of colonialism” (Ghandi 1998, 31). Young (1995) considers Said, Bhabha and Spivak as constituting the “Holy Trinity” of colonial-discourse analysis, suggesting that their different positions on the production of colonial power constitute the seminal terrain of a discursive field. Yet if we are to consider the critique of colonial discourse that both colonizer and colonized participated and negotiated relations of colonial power, then the notion of colonial invention must also be accompanied by its contradictions (i.e. ambivalence) and subsequent waves of reinvention.

Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) examined the ways in which the non-European world was produced by imperial eyes for European audiences. She applied a “dialectic and historicized approach” to the study of travel writing based on a concept she terms the “contact zone.” By this she implies:

[T]he space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. (1992, 6)

Pratt claims that this zone is characterized by the phenomenon of transculturation14 whereby subordinated peoples selected and reinvented the materials that were “transmitted to them by metropolitan culture” (ibid.). Not only is Pratt’s work an effort to expand the boundaries of Said’s colonial discourse, but it suggests that the power exerted by various modes of colonial positioning could also be undermined by moments of contradiction within the periphery. As a result subjects are “constituted in and by their relations to each other, though situated in highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 1992, 7). Transculturation as a two-way process of discursive production therefore allows us to think about how the impulse to make comprehensible (i.e. order) colonial landscapes was also re-constitutive of Europeans’ evolving sense of themselves. Pratt’s notion of colonial discourse as an asymmetrically shared field of relations therefore complicates Hulme’s notion of invention. Her idea of a “contact zone” suggests that “invention” is not a homogeneous, static or one-way process, but a dynamic struggle whereby Euro-centric categories of knowledge and power are almost always being re-made in relation to

Introduction

10

disturbances and anxieties around the very breakdown of a European will to power. Yet Loomba (1998) claims that it was this very blurring of binary logic that stimulated colonial regimes to reinforce “cultural and racial segregation” i.e. reconstitute colonialism in more powerful ways.

The criticisms of Bhabha, Pratt, and Spivak et. al. which transgress the boundaries set by Orientalism constitute part of postcolonial discourse, which is not limited by its interpretation as political independence, but at an ideological level also implies the search for “alternative discourses of the colonial era” (Spurr 1993, 6). According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1995, 17) postcolonial discourse is inherently a discourse of oppositionality. The term does not imply an absolute break with colonial discourse, but is rather made contingent and unstable by it. While on the one hand postcolonial discourse attempts to privilege the voices of the colonized, on the other, it is criticized for its foreclosure of avenues for recovery of selfhood, other than that conditioned by colonial discourse. Loomba (1998) stands with other critics such as Anne McClintock15 in stating that if anything, postcolonial thought implies a proclivity to focus on the reinscription of “unequal relations of colonial rule” in contemporary formally decolonized societies. According to Loomba (1998, xiv), scholars such as Ella Shohat and Terry Eagleton critique postcolonial studies for its convergence with postmodernism,16 and its seeming evacuation of political terms such as “imperialism” and “economic exploitation.”

Though criticized by numerous scholars such as Benita Parry and Aijaz Ahmad for its privileging of idealism and textualism at the expense of materialist historical inquiry, Young (1995) states that colonial discourse analysis remains useful since:

[I]t provides a significant framework … by emphasizing that all perspectives on colonialism share and have to deal with a common discursive medium which was also that of colonialism itself: the language used to enact, enforce, describe or analyse colonialism is not transparent, innocent, ahistorical or simply instrumental. (163)

Young flags the problematic stagnation of colonial discourse analysis in terms of its inability to challenge its own assumptions, yet he emphasizes that it is a site from which Third World theorists constitute an “object for analysis and resistance” (1995, 165). Similarly, Sheller (2003, 5) claims that “in so far as the Caribbean was both denaturalized and renaturalized as natural paradise there cannot be any distinction between real or imagined.” Having outlined some of the general issues in the broad field of postcolonial criticism I will now focus specifically on the concept of


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landscape which, for the purposes of this book, must be understood as an iconic site of power within postcolonial discourse.

Landscape in (Post)Colonial Discourse

Although there are multiple debates concerning the meaning of the term “landscape” I am interested in those that relate to it as a site of social and historical construction.17 If landscape is indeed a “cultural image that structures or symbolizes surroundings” according to Daniels and Cosgrove (1994, 1), then it is constituted through a myriad of representations (written, verbal, visual) which are not merely mimetic, but “constituent of its meanings.” Barnes and Duncan (1992, 5-6) agree that landscape is a cultural production that can be read or interpreted while it is simultaneously reconstituted through reading – what Roland Barthes18 has termed “an open-ended process of signification” (Duncan and Duncan 1992, 27). Such a post-structuralist approach implies that (the reading of) landscape representation is also a process of continuous inter-textual production – ultimately undecipherable and unstable. The limitation of the text here is that it both freezes and privileges itself as the site through which reality can be deconstructed. Smith (1992) troubles this metaphor of “landscape as text” since he asserts that its multiple discursive productions bar various publics from performing certain kinds of readings, implying a kind of analytical elitism. As a result landscape remains what W.J.T Mitchell has described as an “enigma … a prison house that locks understanding away from the world …a process of ideological mystification” (1986, 2).

Reading landscape from a postcolonial perspective however, allows me to read the textual representations of Trinidad’s landscape in conjunction with the historical production of colonial power in the Caribbean context -what Turner (1979) has referred to as the “politics of landscape.” In this vein Mitchell (1994) regards landscape as an instrument of cultural power with a double role:

[I]t naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness of sight and site. (2)

For Mitchell (1994, 5) landscape is therefore a “particular historical formation associated with European imperialism” that resonates with Naipaul’s epigraph above on Trinidad, that the landscape is “manufactured” in ways that simultaneously naturalize the asymmetrical

Introduction

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positioning of colonizer and colonized. The primary ingredient of this invention is the panoptical gaze that claims to be stable and all-emcompassing rather than situated and contingent. John Barrell (1972, 1) historicizes the “idea of landscape” as based on that “which could be seen all at one glance, from a fixed point of view.” Similarly, Nancy Stepan (2001, 25) regards landscape as “a manner of perceiving spaces in terms of a scene situated at a distance from the observer … a Western way of organizing the visual field.” The deployment of landscape as an epistemological category in postcolonial discourse therefore attends to the ways in which it has been used as a tool of social control to impose visual order over non-European peoples, spaces and places. As a particular way of seeing and ordering relations it is also important to consider the “way landscape circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of identity” (Mitchell 1994, 2). Mitchell therefore calls on scholars to understand the power of landscape not simply as a representation or trace of power relations, but also the “specificity of effects … at a particular historical juncture” (1994, 3).

Somewhat differently, M.L. Pratt and other writers have also questioned the unidirectional totalizing power of landscape as a gaze projected from the British metropole to the colony. According to Martins (2000) imperial landscape tropes such as the picturesque and the romantic were of considerable currency to nineteenth-century European travelers and colonizers as modes of representing tropical landscapes. Yet, she warns against an unproblematic application of what she terms, “totalising constructions like the imperial eye” to the reading of these tropes of representation, advocating instead, for the “complexities of exchange and relationships in particular contexts in the colonial period” (2000, 21). Although critics of postcolonial discourse may argue that this approach obscures attention to the material effects of domination, Martins (following Pratt) echoes a demand for understanding the ways the colonial landscape also had profound constitutive effects on imperial eyes. Martins alludes to the paradoxical coupling between “order and mastery” and “uncertainty and disorientation” that both work to foreground ambivalence in colonial landscapes and therefore to undermine the totalizing power of colonial discourse. In this book I am therefore deploying the term landscape to contemplate a dynamic economy of gestures at inter-positioning between colonizer and colonized that does not always preserve the dialectical power relations between both subjects in the same way in any given moment.

I do not mean to imply that as an epistemological category landscape is a European invention per se. In fact Peter Hulme makes the point in


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Colonial Encounters (1986) that prior to European contact in the Caribbean there were always landscapes or indigenous histories of ordering relationships with the surroundings.19 The point is however, that European colonialism was a violent interruption of an indigenous knowledge system and process of change. The sorts of exploitative, extractive and dominant relationships that Europeans imposed on these already existing landscapes however became instantiated as the only way of seeing, while obliterating and marginalizing others as aberrant visions. It is also important to recognize that landscapes (i.e. relations) and the power with which they were (re)invented, would have undergone significant transformations within the asymmetrical structures and dynamic conditions of colonial encounter.

This brings me to another related but crucial point for considering landscape in a postcolonial perspective – landscape as history. If the above discussion makes a case for considering landscape as a way of European self-relationing, between the West and its other then I further that these relations are also the substance of History.20 Any critique of colonialism must be seen therefore as a way of re-reading the landscape for contested histories (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999, 33). John Barrell (1980) has also referred to the histories that are hidden in representations of landscape as “the dark side of the landscape.” Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant in Caribbean Discourse has proffered this much in his term “language of the landscape” which he has identified as a “shaping force” in the Caribbean (Dash 1989). Glissant, like Naipaul, stresses that in the Caribbean it is not enough to reference landscape as a descriptor, but that: “Our (Caribbean) landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history” (Dash 1989, 11).

Glissant’s “underside” therefore shares with Tuhiwai-Smith that there are multiple and contested histories of the landscape that might be at once subverted by and subversive of the totalizing forces of History. Michael Dash, in his introduction to Caribbean Discourse (1989, xi) claims that Glissant proposes the release from “fixed, univocal meanings of the past, toward a close scrutiny of the obscurities, the vicissitudes, the fissures that abound in Caribbean history from slavery to the present.” The implication is that while critics may argue that a postcolonial reading of the Trinidadian landscape might replicate some of the same problematics for which Said has been criticized, it might also provide opportunities for the recovery of different histories that unsettle the binaristic and dialectic character of colonial discourse. My heavy reliance on historical context for reading colonial representations in each chapter is therefore simultaneously

Introduction

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an effort to turn the written texts and visual images back on these contexts to question the givenness of the landscape’s 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-à-vis each other as natural constituents of the landscape in the history of colonial nineteenth-century Trinidad? This is linked to Selwyn Cudjoe’s (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 Pratt’s and Martin’s 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.

Postcolonial Un/Re-mappings of the “Caribbean”

This study is situated in relation to a more regionalist installment in Caribbean postcolonial studies that is concerned with elucidating the ways in which the Caribbean was discursively shaped by and productive of its encounter with Europe. This recent scholarship seeks to un-map Caribbean-specific and related colonial discourse as part of a continually re-defining decolonization project that reveals the constructedness of the Caribbean, though not always in a Saidian, unidirectional way. Contemporary scholars such as Mimi Sheller (2003), Selwyn Cudjoe (2003), Ian Strachan (2002), Krista Thompson (2002), Beth Fowkes-Tobin (1999a,b) and Mary Louise Pratt (1992) who work specifically or in part on the discursive production of the Caribbean in colonial discourse have each in their own way highlighted processes of naturalization, denaturalization and renaturalization of the Caribbean landscape and colonized peoples.

Documents

Colonial Inventions - Cambridge Scholars