Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, by Roshini Kempadoo

摘要

Designed as an investigation into the interrelationships between “historicalimagery and poetic narratives of memory” (p. 2), specifically within the contextof Trinidad in the eastern Caribbean, this is a widely ranging and thoughtfulbook by a visual artist of Caribbean background based in the United Kingdom.Such interrelationships are complex and Roshini Kempadoo is fully immersedin the task of conveying their critical character, with attention to discourse theory and Foucauldian approaches to the study of images, locating such concernsin the Caribbean by way of the terms “presence,” “creole,” and “the Caribbeanfigure.” “Presence” seems to be an object of desire for Kempadoo, as an engagedscholar who strives to make visible those Caribbean subjectivities that have suffered invisibility, misrecognition, and trauma, being silenced and erased fromhistorical memory. She aims at raising their status to one of newfound historical“presence,” calling forgotten Caribbean subjects to remembrance. Hers is thus amoral striving as much as a political project of foregrounding and highlightingmore plural—and in that sense “creole” and more multivocal and inclusive—ideas about the past.