Colonial Inventions - Landscape, Power and Representation in 19th Trinidad

8/9/2019 Colonial Inventions - Landscape, Power and Representation in 19th Trinidad

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Colonial Inventions


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Colonial Inventions:

Landscape, Power and Representationin Nineteenth-Century Trinidad

By

Amar Wahab


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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 DataA 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 Landscapein 19 th-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


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For my motherFor my father

For my family


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Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or Englishpark. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still withoutpopular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island inthe intestines of slaves.—V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men , (1967, 147)


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... xi

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii

Introduction ............................................................................................... 1

Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on LandscapeThe Tales of Mountains – A Blind Rehearsal ........................................ 1Theoretical Perspective: Positioning (Post)Colonial Discourse............. 5Landscape in (Post)Colonial Discourse ............................................... 11Postcolonial Un/Re-mappings of the “Caribbean”............................... 14Managing Race and Gender: Orientalist and Africanist Discourse...... 21Ways of Looking.................................................................................. 24Travel Writing and Landscape Painting............................................... 25Reading Strategies ............................................................................... 29

“De/Re-Historicizing” Nineteenth-century “Trinidad”........................ 31Chapter Summaries .............................................................................. 36

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

Introduction.......................................................................................... 39Inventing Invitation: Emptiness, Cannibalism and Savagery............... 41Inventing Tropical Nature.................................................................... 45Re-Centering the Caribbean: The Rise of Plantations.......................... 51

The Colonial Picturesque..................................................................... 57Tracking Colonial Ambivalence: Transculturation, Agencyand Reconsolidation............................................................................. 61

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

A Euro-Navigational Birth: Columbus’s “Discovery” of Paradise ...... 70Re-tracing Paradise: The Search for El Dorado................................... 73

Imagining “A Ghostly Paradise”.......................................................... 76The Cedula and the Reinvention of a Cultivable Paradise ................... 80


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Table of Contentsviii

“Trinidad's New Prosperity": Early Nineteenth-Century BritishRepresentations.................................................................................... 82

Richard Bridgens’s Sketches of West India Scenery (circa. 1825)....... 86Conclusion ........................................................................................... 99

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

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

Chapter Four ......................................................................................... 159Return to Order: Disciplinary Gestures in Charles Kingsley’s

At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871)Introduction........................................................................................ 159Travel Writing and Natural History in the Nineteenth Century ......... 161Obsessions of Race and Order in Mid-Nineteenth-CenturyWest Indian-English Discourse.......................................................... 164Kingsley’s Narrative Structure........................................................... 172Paradise Anew: Idealizations of the Trinidadian Natural Landscape 175Reinventing Tropicality as “Wild Nature” ..................................... 176Reinventing Bounty: Prospecting the Picturesque ............................. 180Cultivating Nostalgia ........................................................................ 185Re-Writing the Other: Re-Naturalizing Colonized Subjects .............. 187The “Negro Character”: The Retrograde of Paradise......................... 187“Coolie” Scripts – A Return to Order ................................................ 196Intimate Strangers: Contradistinctive Ordering of Others ................. 206


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1.1: Natives of the Caribees feasting on human flesh 42Fig. 1.2: Frontispiece, Histoire Naturelle et Morale (1665) 42Fig. 1.3: La Figure de Moulins a Sucre (1665) 54

Fig. 2.1: Title Plate, a wreath composed of sugar cane, plantain, &c 91Fig. 2.2: Pitch Lake Palm 91Fig. 2.3: Planting the Sugar Cane 93Fig. 2.4: Boiling House 93Fig. 2.5: Carting Sugar 93Fig. 2.6: Bed Stocks 94Fig. 2.7: Stocks for Hands and Feet 94Fig. 2.8: Carting Canes to the Mill 95Fig. 2.9: Field Negro 95Fig. 2:10: Sunday Morning in Town 96Fig. 2:11: Negro and Indian Character 98

Fig. 3.1: Residence at Orange Grove Estate, Trinidad 122Fig. 3.2: Garden Estate Arouca 122Fig. 3.3: View of Mount Tamana from Arima 125Fig. 3.4: Village of Arima and Mount Tamana 125Fig. 3.5: Thatched Huts on a Cocoa Estate 128Fig. 3.6: Mountain Village 128Fig. 3.7: Cedar Point, Mount Tamana 129Fig. 3.8: Cedar Point, Mount Tamana, Trinidad 129Fig. 3.9: Exterior of Shooting Lodge, Mount Tamana, Trinidad 131Fig. 3.10: Interior of Shooting Lodge 131Fig. 3.11: Pitch Lake, Trinidad 133Fig. 3.12: The Governor’s Residence, St. Ann’s 134Fig. 3.13: St. Ann’s 134Fig. 3.14: View of Port of Spain from Laventille Hill 137Fig. 3.15: View of Port of Spain from Cotton Hill 138Fig. 3.16: View from Laventille Hill 138Fig. 3.17: Dry River, Port of Spain 139Fig. 3.18: Sunrise from Corbeaux Town 140Fig. 3.19: Corbeaux Town, Port of Spain 140Fig. 3.20: East Indian Group 142Fig. 3.21: Creole Woman with a Parasol 146Fig. 3.22: Negress in Gala Dress 146Fig. 3.23: Old Negress, French, in Gala Dress 147


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List of Illustrationsxii

Fig. 3.24: East Indian Woman 148Fig. 3.25: Grand Trinidad Races, 5 th January 1853. Maiden Stake 152Fig. 3.26: Stuart Island 154Fig. 3.27: Carenage from Five Islands 1 and 2 154Fig. 3.28: View from Carenage 154

Fig. 4.1: The High Woods 177Fig. 4.2: Ceiba 178Fig. 4.3: Frontispiece: The Botanic Gardens, Port of Spain 185Fig. 4.4: Banana 193Fig. 4.5: Coolies A-Field 197Fig. 4.6: Coolies Cooking 203Fig. 4.7: A Coolie Family 203Fig. 4.8: Coolie Sacrificing 206Fig. 4.9: Coolie and Negro 208Fig. 4.10: Waiting for the Races 208


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was birthed as a doctoral dissertation at the University ofToronto in 2004, but morphed into a wider and more involved endeavourin the past five years. My sincere thanks goes out to all those who wereinvolved, even tangentially, in the eventual publication of this work whichhas taken me to various academic institutions located in numerous

countries. The journey has been at times tiresome, as efforts to bring theproject to fruition were always met by productive obstacles that detouredme into different academic spaces, providing the opportunity to gainexposure 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 commitmentto this kind of project through their encouraging and stimulating feedback,but who also continued to pressure me to work on converting thedissertation into a manuscript. Especially with Professor Trotz, who shared

the conviction that the need for this kind of work is urgent in CaribbeanStudies, I was also encouraged and benefited from presentation feedbackat the University of Warwick, United Kingdom where I completed mypostdoctoral studies. During this time, my supervision under ProfessorDavid Dabydeen helped me to refine some of my ideas and the breadth ofanalysis that I would come to regard as indispensable to postcolonialstudies. Most rewarding was my day to day research at the British Library,the National Archives, and the National Art Library at the Victorian andAlbert Museum which continue to seduce me with their power to memory.

My findings in these archives have strengthened the book’s scholarlyfocus and my commitment to bring some of these works back into thepublic domain in an effort to contemplate their relevance to contemporaryconversations. In this regard I would also like to thank Carol Koulikourdi,Amanda Millar, Soucin Yip-Sou and the anonymous reviewers ofCambridge Scholars Publishing who provided valuable feedback in thedraft manuscript stages and remained committed to the vision of thisproject.

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 MimiSheller, Patricia Mohammed, Selwyn Cudjoe, Krista Thompson, who havewritten on the relevance of postcolonial Caribbean studies. What I find


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Acknowledgementsxiv

most encouraging about their work, is that they comprise a group scholarswhose commitment to the Caribbean region and its academic importance

has provided for me, a platform from which to make or contest claimsabout the region and at the same time engage in a deeply personal projectof self-knowledge. This is also perhaps what makes me feel humblyindebted to all the scholars I have employed in this manuscriptconversation as I see it as reflective of the many modes through whichintellectual community is threaded across time, space and discipline. Toall my colleagues in the fields of postcolonial and Caribbean Studies Iwould like to express my gratitude for the work you do and whichcontinues to inspire others in the fields.

I would particularly like to thank Mr. Geoffrey MacLean, withoutwhom all of the images in chapter three would not have been possible toinclude. Geoffrey has been a continuous supporter of this sort of work andit is to him that I feel that chapter three owes much of its inspiration anddirection. It is dedicated to him. My gratitude also goes out to the HarrisTrustees and Andrea Davies at Belmont House (UK) who also providedpermission to use the images in chapter three. In addition I would like tothank the staff at The University of the West Indies Library (West IndianaDivision, St. Augustine) and The National Archives of Trinidad andTobago who bore patience with me as I meticulously searched theirarchival collections. I cannot stress how much one`s access to these sortsof archival institutions determines the scope and shape of one`s work, as itdid in my case. The use of the rare image set by Richard Bridgens inchapter two is under kind permission from The Victorian and AlbertMuseum, London, United Kingdom, and I would especially like to thankChrysanthe Constantouris for helping me to access copyright permission.A support grant from the Faculty of Arts and Science, NipissingUniversity, Canada was invaluable for the purchase of Bridgens’ images,and I am deeply indebted to Dr. Craig Cooper for supporting my researchin this way. Thanks also to the York University Library, Canada whichprovided me with access to the sketches used in chapter four. Added tothis list is Mr. Gerard Besson, of Paria Publishers, Trinidad and Tobago,who was very generous in providing me with the first image of chapterone and permission to use the image in this publication.

As with all academic labour, there is often a sphere of support that isoften hidden though it is crucial to, and probably the real product ofwriting through community; this refer here to my circle of friends andcolleagues who have been invaluable to this publication’s life-supportsystem. I must express special gratitude to my friends and colleagues:Beverly-Jean Daniel, Eve Haque, Michelle Rowley, Gabrielle Hezekiah,


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Colonial Inventions xv

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 andwithout prejudice.While much of this project was completed within the space of

academia, it is no doubt grounded in my own personal journey to seemyself reflected and refracted in my academic work. It is in trying to makethe linkages between these at times conflictual worlds, that I must thankmy family for helping me to bridge the distance, literal and imaginative,and for giving me a starting point and a frame of reference that permeatesthis publication. Especially my mother and late father, who worked fromextremely meagre beginnings in a tin shack, their dedication andcompassion towards each other and life in general, nourished me with anapproach to knowledge and self in the world that always makes me feellike writing away my freedom, declaring myself to an ever-changinghorizon. To my sister, Shelly, my brothers Saeed and Siddiq, and mygrandmother, Violet, this work has benefited much for your emotionalsupport as well as the points of reference you provided in my life thatmade the project evolve in the way it did. Thanks also to my Canadianfamily, The Hoseins; without their support this project would not haveeven begun, especially as I tried to make sense of my diasporic lifebetween 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 thisproject, bearing with me at times of confused anguish and celebrating withme at times of deliverance. As a sort of shadow research assistant, he sentme countless references and relevant material during my postdoctoralstudies, at times making me feel that he was even more excited to see thisproject to publication. His incomparable emotional support has beentremendous and indispensable to the completion of this project.

Last but not least, I would like to thank the people of Trinidad andTobago. They constitute an exciting node of human possibility and energyon the global circuit and I am most privileged to have emerged from sucha creative space, most so, through its critical impulses. It is my hope thatthis publication will make a constructive contribution to the work ahead,in collaboration with a collective of exciting and provoking agents whonever lose faith in that ever-changing horizon of self-knowledge.Especially to all those lost and found in the diaspora, this effortacknowledges the possibility and danger of return, only to find anewsomething that awaits.


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INTRODUCTION

TOWARD A (POST )COLONIALDISCOURSE ON LANDSCAPE

Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or Englishpark. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still withoutpopular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island inthe intestines of slaves.—V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men , (1967, 147)

Naipaul shows us that the landscape was not pure, that it had not remaineduntouched since Creation, and that it was not original, “native,” or virginalat all. Rather, its purity was a fabrication, a myth. … The landscape wasreally the product of the snatching of people from Africa and their brutalenslavement. The land bore witness to the oppression and degradation ofpeople. There was blood, violence and squalor in the Caribbean landscape;… Beneath the myth of paradise lurked the unspoken, wished-away realityof 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 friendand I decided to take a daylong car journey through the densely forested,

meagerly-populated Northern Range Mountains of Trinidad. We left thetown of St. Augustine baking in the intense tropical heat and graduallyclimbed into the coolness of an overwhelmingly breath-taking tropicalrainforest in the Arima Hills. Along the way the forest canopy covered theroad forming a dark cool tunnel that invited a romantic escape of manysorts. Both tired with doing interviews, detentions in the archives, and theday to day challenges of our dissertation research, a trip into nature’sparadise 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 surveillancecamera whenever we were together in public. The Northern Range offeredan opportunity to temporarily escape those constantly questioning eyes.


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Introduction2

Here and there along the roadside miniature waterfalls protruded, thedelicious scent of majestic teak plantations mixed with the fresh forest air,

and the quaint little villages like Morne La Croix, Blanchisseuse andBrasso Seco seemed so quiet as if all had been abandoned. After stoppingat the Asa Wright Nature Centre and enjoying the “natural” pool (formedby a rerouted waterfall), we then continued our car journey into some ofthe most beautiful, relatively untouched areas of the Northern Range.From the sounds of gushing water currents of unseen rivers hundreds ofmeters down misty, densely forested precipices to the overwhelminglyserene vistas of the sun-bathed blue Caribbean Sea along the mountainousedges – 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 Roadremarking 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 intheir bathing suits, sitting and eating in their car on the roadside andplaying Indian music rather loudly. My friend grew very upset by thescene, exclaiming “this is what I can’t take on!” Her frustration charged astrong reaction in me, because I didn’t see anything abnormal about whatthe group was doing – after all it was to me an expected and common sightas the road drew nearer to the beaches on the coast. Moreover it wassomething that even I did with my family on several occasions. Shockedand confused, I asked my friend what was wrong and told her I felt thesepeople were enjoying themselves. She replied, “yes, but why do they haveto do it like that ?” My instant response of silence connected with strongfeelings of being erased or edited out of a paradise which itself had alreadybeen assembled from contradictory fragments of the mountain: quaintvillages in the middle of nowhere, quarried hillsides, re-routed waterfallsall had their place in this set-up, but not the Indians in the roadside car. Myangst about this moment connected to a feeling of conditional belonging,as the comment, whether intended or not, seemed to enliven a codedrehearsal of racialized registers within the prison house of this landscape.

Though we both seemed to watch the landscape with different eyes, theincident raised the question about how “we” i.e. Afro-Trinidadians andIndo-Trinidadians came to inhabit the landscape and imagine ourselvesand each other, partly through colonial scripts. My angst fed a desire tounderstand how such visions of Trinidad’s landscape had emerged andhow different groups, especially Africans and Indians were differentially


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Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape 3

positioned on this landscape in interconnected yet distinct ways. How wasthis idea of tropical paradise historically constructed and naturalized as a

metaphor for the differential placements of colonized subjects in relationto the Trinidadian landscape as a form of colonial knowledge and power?How did this metaphor circulate in ways that served to include/excludeparticular ways of experiencing Caribbean reality and of informingmultiple identities? It seemed that lay oral history discourses on African-Indian relations had always begun at the point of arrival of Indians in themid-nineteenth century, without considering how the previous earlynineteenth-century history of African presence had in fact shaped theAfrican in Trinidadian society and produced the conditions that wouldeventually shape what the Indian was to become in Trinidad. ViranjiniMunasinghe’s Callaloo or Tossed Salad? (2001) has taken this approachin historicizing “East Indians and the cultural politics of identity inTrinidad” whereby she claims that “a certain idiom for ideologicallysituating the East Indians’ position in relation to the larger society wasalready in place before East Indians set foot in Trinidad” (2001, 43). Yetrather than taking this approach merely to talk about the “foretelling ofEast Indian ethnicity” as Munasinghe, this book is a kind of re-telling thatacknowledges the saliency of related and entangled histories. Though thevaried works of Caribbean fiction writers have approached this projectfrom multiple angles, they have all underlined the historical constructednessof the ways Africans and Indians have been imagined and have imaginedthemselves separately and in relation to each other on the Trinidadianlandscape.

The work of 2001 Nobel laureate, Trinidadian-born literary artist, SirV.S. Naipaul attends to this project by imaginatively re-encounteringTrinidad’s history to suggest even more complicated and disturbingnuances about how “Caribbean people talk about and imagine themselves”(Strachan 2002, 150). Though constantly under critique, Naipaul is mostnoted for his brutal scrutiny and “demythologizing” of the Caribbeanregion as an “idealized” paradise. Ian Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation (2002, 158) makes the point that Naipaul “wished to attack the idea, theromantic conception, of the Caribbean landscape.” Naipaul’s assertion inthe opening epigraph that the Caribbean landscape as paradise is aninvention i.e. a social construction, is one that aligns with the primaryclaims of postcolonial studies. The writer’s criticism not only strives toexpose the fraudulence of this invention of a fixed landscape, but toregister the idea that the colonial landscape has a double side that isoppressive, humiliating and blinding - rendering the paradisiacal landscapeas “unreal.” Naipaul’s pronouncement provokes a need to historicize this


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Introduction4

claim, while simultaneously finding ways to question the authority withwhich this statement can be made as a totalizing Caribbean reality. The

idea that Caribbean landscapes are “manufactured” and inescapablyannexed to the region’s exploitative colonial history is therefore the centralassumption of this book. An engagement with the Caribbean landscape ina postcolonial setting is therefore contingent on the precedents set in thecolonial period.

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

I specifically foreground the 1825 (circa) sketches of British travellingartist Richard Bridgens to highlight the early construction of the landscapeand the positioning of the African (slave) in relation to early British rule inTrinidad amidst the rise of a plantation society. I then focus on thepaintings and lithographs (1851 – 1880) of local Creole Trinidadian artist,Michel Jean Cazabon to understand his spatial re-invention of Trinidadand the re-scripting of colonized subjects (blacks, coloureds and EastIndians) in a period of immense ideological upheaval caused by theabolition of slavery (1834). Finally, I focus on the travelogue (1871) ofBritish novelist Charles Kingsley to understand how the re-imaging of theTrinidadian landscape and colonized subjects was intimately tied to the re-stabilization of British order. I have brought these three works together tore-tell a tale about Africans and Indians in the colonial space of thenineteenth century that acknowledges the implied presences of each otherby mapping 1 back and forth between particular recurring yet shiftingthemes and temporal moments. I attempt to read the representations ofthese travel writings and paintings using (post)colonial discourse analysisas my main theoretical and methodological framework. However sincethese paintings, lithographs and travel writings are also viewed as culturalpractices through which relations of power are produced and managed inparticular social and political contexts, there is considerable overlapbetween 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 althoughthe Caribbean lies in an “indisputable narrative position at the origin of theplot 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 concernby contemplating how Trinidad became discursively produced as alandscape in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The concern isrelated to a wider methodological question posed by David Spurr (1993, 2)who asks “How does the Western writer construct a coherent representationout of the strange and (to the writer) often incomprehensible realitiesconfronted in the non-Western world?” Spurr’s question leads to my firsttask of defining the concept of discourse as a structure of knowledge andpower.

Michel Foucault’s understanding of discourse in The Archaeology ofKnowledge (1972) foregrounds the unification of selected statements abouta particular reality united by a set of rules i.e. the structuring ofknowledge, that functions as a form of power. Discursive productionshapes and is in turn shaped by the positioning of human subjects, to theextent that the constitutive ideas and practices are considered to becoherent and inevitable (Barnes and Duncan 1992). Attention is paid to theconstructedness of categories of the social imagination based on particularcriteria 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 notsolely about representation but about the social and historical conditionswithin which “specific ways of seeing and representing differenceconstruct colonial institutions of control.” The work of the proceedingchapters therefore is not only to understand the representational strategiesthrough which the landscape and subjects are produced, but also how thesestrategies “obey certain rules” (Foucault 1972, 138) which exert anaturalizing power over this production. Moreover, it is important toattend to Foucault’s (1980) assertion that discursive production is also anunstable/disunited process that makes visible other powers that challenge,transform, negotiate and subvert the prime constructing forces of truth-


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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 acolonizing will to power the material (Spurr 1993, 3). In this book I relyon Peter Hulme’s (1993, 200) notion of “invention” - that “colonialdiscourse has the power to call its categories into being.” 6 Often, the siteswhere colonial discourse is produced are in travel writing, explorationnarratives, memoirs, colonial administration documents, etc., i.e. written texts that centralize European interpretation, representation anddomination 7 and reify colonial authority. This authority is producedthrough the discursive production of essentialized identities through thenaming, marking, and ordering of difference (Spurr 1993, 4). Said’semphasis on the European representation of supposedly non-Westerncultures and its designation of a cultural Other has enabled a “re-order ofthe study of colonialism” (Loomba 1998, 43) at the same time it hasprovoked much deliberation and tension about simplistic positivist binaries.

Loomba claims that Orientalism “examined key literary and culturaltexts, consolidated certain ways of seeing and thinking which in turncontributed to the functioning of colonial power” (1998, 43). 8 Writing inthe context of the Caribbean Elizabeth Bohls 9 (1994) expands on thisclaim 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 onthat most visible and seemingly natural of signs, the color of skin …aesthetic discourse collaborates with colonial power, exploiting the visibleto obscure or naturalize the relationships between the island “scene” andthe 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 aboutother spaces (Thompson 2002, 18). Colonial discourse therefore concernsthe dialectic marking between European Self and non-European Other thatstructured colonial “ways of seeing and thinking” about or representingdifference that were integral to the production of colonial authority.Moreover, this approach depends on an examination of the “social andhistorical conditions within which specific representations are generated”(Loomba 1998, 97).

Scholars like H. Bhabha, L. Ahmed and D. Porter have criticizedOrientalism and colonial discourse for its binaristic logic, its tendency tohomogenize colonial encounter, its privileging of the more ideological anddiscursive aspects of colonial knowledge production at the expense of


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Introduction8

material realities, and its insufficient attention to self-representation andagency of colonized peoples. 11 Driver and Yeoh (2000, 3) claim that a

major limitation of Said’s analysis is its tendency to project ahomogeneous and coherent European system of knowledge, “which mayreproduce the very thing that critics wish to bring into question.” In otherwords, by privileging Western literature and travel writing, which I do to aconsiderable degree in this study, the focus becomes locked on how thesewritings “construct” the cultural Other, without attention to reciprocatingacts of counter construction by colonial subjects. 12 Critics of colonialdiscourse 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 thebasis that “colonial discourse bears a constant uncertainty, leading to aninherent confusion of identity, difference and authority.” In fact, Said’scorrective Culture and Imperialism (1994) revealed that colonial discoursewas not a one-sided process as thought. For Leela Ghandi (1998, 25)Culture and Imperialism gives a “much more optimistic vision of thepossibilities of reconciliation and an end to domination and confrontationbetween West and non-West.” She relates this move in part as an attemptby Said to “abandon Foucault’s totalizing and deterministic conception ofpower” (ibid.).

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

For postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak 13 the principal concern iswhether marginalized or subordinate groups (i.e. the subaltern) can speakfor themselves or whether they are forever locked into systems ofrepresentation by others (Ghandi 1998, 28). Spivak (1988) is weary of theagency of subaltern subjects that is all too easily recovered given the brutalnature of colonial power, even though she stresses the need to mine


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colonial discourse for its “native” counter-knowledges. Yet Spivak’scritique is useful in understanding the processes of ventriloquism whereby

colonial discourses appropriate the subaltern’s voice to consolidateEurope’s self-positioning as “civilized” in relation to a “barbaric” Other.Another useful point is Spivak’s insistence on “the impossibility ofrecovering an originary subaltern consciousness independent of theintervening history of colonialism” (Ghandi 1998, 31). Young (1995)considers Said, Bhabha and Spivak as constituting the “Holy Trinity” ofcolonial-discourse analysis, suggesting that their different positions on theproduction of colonial power constitute the seminal terrain of a discursivefield. Yet if we are to consider the critique of colonial discourse that bothcolonizer and colonized participated and negotiated relations of colonialpower, then the notion of colonial invention must also be accompanied byits 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 producedby imperial eyes for European audiences. She applied a “dialectic andhistoricized approach” to the study of travel writing based on a conceptshe terms the “contact zone.” By this she implies:

[T]he space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoplesgeographically and historically separated come into contact with each otherand 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 oftransculturation 14 whereby subordinated peoples selected and reinventedthe materials that were “transmitted to them by metropolitan culture”(ibid.). Not only is Pratt’s work an effort to expand the boundaries ofSaid’s colonial discourse, but it suggests that the power exerted by various

modes of colonial positioning could also be undermined by moments ofcontradiction within the periphery. As a result subjects are “constituted inand by their relations to each other, though situated in highly asymmetricalrelations of power” (Pratt 1992, 7). Transculturation as a two-way processof discursive production therefore allows us to think about how theimpulse to make comprehensible (i.e. order) colonial landscapes was alsore-constitutive of Europeans’ evolving sense of themselves. Pratt’s notionof colonial discourse as an asymmetrically shared field of relationstherefore complicates Hulme’s notion of invention. Her idea of a “contact

zone” suggests that “invention” is not a homogeneous, static or one-wayprocess, but a dynamic struggle whereby Euro-centric categories ofknowledge and power are almost always being re-made in relation to


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Introduction10

disturbances and anxieties around the very breakdown of a European willto power. Yet Loomba (1998) claims that it was this very blurring of

binary logic that stimulated colonial regimes to reinforce “cultural andracial 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 atan ideological level also implies the search for “alternative discourses ofthe colonial era” (Spurr 1993, 6). According to Ashcroft, Griffiths andTiffin (1995, 17) postcolonial discourse is inherently a discourse ofoppositionality. The term does not imply an absolute break with colonialdiscourse, but is rather made contingent and unstable by it. While on theone hand postcolonial discourse attempts to privilege the voices of thecolonized, on the other, it is criticized for its foreclosure of avenues forrecovery of selfhood, other than that conditioned by colonial discourse.Loomba (1998) stands with other critics such as Anne McClintock 15 instating that if anything, postcolonial thought implies a proclivity to focuson the reinscription of “unequal relations of colonial rule” in contemporaryformally decolonized societies. According to Loomba (1998, xiv), scholarssuch as Ella Shohat and Terry Eagleton critique postcolonial studies for itsconvergence with postmodernism, 16 and its seeming evacuation ofpolitical terms such as “imperialism” and “economic exploitation.”

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

[I]t provides a significant framework … by emphasizing that allperspectives on colonialism share and have to deal with a commondiscursive 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 interms of its inability to challenge its own assumptions, yet he emphasizesthat it is a site from which Third World theorists constitute an “object foranalysis and resistance” (1995, 165). Similarly, Sheller (2003, 5) claimsthat “in so far as the Caribbean was both denaturalized and renaturalizedas natural paradise there cannot be any distinction between real or

imagined.” Having outlined some of the general issues in the broad fieldof 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 aniconic site of power within postcolonial discourse.

Landscape in (Post)Colonial Discourse

Although there are multiple debates concerning the meaning of theterm “landscape” I am interested in those that relate to it as a site of socialand historical construction. 17 If landscape is indeed a “cultural image thatstructures 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 acultural production that can be read or interpreted while it issimultaneously reconstituted through reading – what Roland Barthes 18 hastermed “an open-ended process of signification” (Duncan and Duncan1992, 27). Such a post-structuralist approach implies that (the reading of)landscape representation is also a process of continuous inter-textualproduction – ultimately undecipherable and unstable. The limitation of thetext here is that it both freezes and privileges itself as the site throughwhich reality can be deconstructed. Smith (1992) troubles this metaphor of“landscape as text” since he asserts that its multiple discursive productionsbar various publics from performing certain kinds of readings, implying akind of analytical elitism. As a result landscape remains what W.J.TMitchell has described as an “enigma … a prison house that locksunderstanding away from the world …a process of ideologicalmystification” (1986, 2).

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

[I]t naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificialworld as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes thatrepresentation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more orless 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 withNaipaul’s epigraph above on Trinidad, that the landscape is“manufactured” in ways that simultaneously naturalize the asymmetrical


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Introduction12

positioning of colonizer and colonized. The primary ingredient of thisinvention 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 seenall at one glance, from a fixed point of view.” Similarly, Nancy Stepan(2001, 25) regards landscape as “a manner of perceiving spaces in terms ofa scene situated at a distance from the observer … a Western way oforganizing the visual field.” The deployment of landscape as anepistemological category in postcolonial discourse therefore attends to theways in which it has been used as a tool of social control to impose visualorder over non-European peoples, spaces and places. As a particular way of seeing and ordering relations it is also important to consider the “waylandscape circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visualappropriation, 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 alsoquestioned the unidirectional totalizing power of landscape as a gazeprojected from the British metropole to the colony. According to Martins(2000) imperial landscape tropes such as the picturesque and the romanticwere of considerable currency to nineteenth-century European travelersand colonizers as modes of representing tropical landscapes. Yet, shewarns against an unproblematic application of what she terms, “totalisingconstructions like the imperial eye” to the reading of these tropes ofrepresentation, advocating instead, for the “complexities of exchange andrelationships in particular contexts in the colonial period” (2000, 21).Although critics of postcolonial discourse may argue that this approachobscures attention to the material effects of domination, Martins(following Pratt) echoes a demand for understanding the ways the coloniallandscape also had profound constitutive effects on imperial eyes. Martinsalludes to the paradoxical coupling between “order and mastery” and“uncertainty and disorientation” that both work to foreground ambivalencein colonial landscapes and therefore to undermine the totalizing power ofcolonial discourse. In this book I am therefore deploying the termlandscape to contemplate a dynamic economy of gestures at inter-positioning between colonizer and colonized that does not always preservethe dialectical power relations between both subjects in the same way inany given moment.

I do not mean to imply that as an epistemological category landscape isa 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 theCaribbean there were always landscapes or indigenous histories of

ordering relationships with the surroundings.19

The point is however, thatEuropean colonialism was a violent interruption of an indigenousknowledge system and process of change. The sorts of exploitative,extractive and dominant relationships that Europeans imposed on thesealready existing landscapes however became instantiated as the only wayof seeing, while obliterating and marginalizing others as aberrant visions.It is also important to recognize that landscapes (i.e. relations) and thepower with which they were (re)invented, would have undergonesignificant transformations within the asymmetrical structures anddynamic conditions of colonial encounter.

This brings me to another related but crucial point for consideringlandscape in a postcolonial perspective – landscape as history. If the abovediscussion makes a case for considering landscape as a way of Europeanself-relationing, between the West and its other then I further that theserelations are also the substance of History. 20 Any critique of colonialismmust be seen therefore as a way of re-reading the landscape for contestedhistories (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999, 33). John Barrell (1980) has also referredto the histories that are hidden in representations of landscape as “the darkside of the landscape.” Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant inCaribbean Discourse has proffered this much in his term “language of thelandscape” which he has identified as a “shaping force” in the Caribbean(Dash 1989). Glissant, like Naipaul, stresses that in the Caribbean it is notenough to reference landscape as a descriptor, but that: “Our (Caribbean)landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on theunderside. It is all history” (Dash 1989, 11).

Glissant’s “underside” therefore shares with Tuhiwai-Smith that thereare multiple and contested histories of the landscape that might be at oncesubverted by and subversive of the totalizing forces of History. MichaelDash, in his introduction to Caribbean Discourse (1989, xi) claims thatGlissant proposes the release from “fixed, univocal meanings of the past,toward a close scrutiny of the obscurities, the vicissitudes, the fissures thatabound in Caribbean history from slavery to the present.” The implicationis that while critics may argue that a postcolonial reading of theTrinidadian landscape might replicate some of the same problematics forwhich Said has been criticized, it might also provide opportunities for therecovery of different histories that unsettle the binaristic and dialecticcharacter of colonial discourse. My heavy reliance on historical context forreading colonial representations in each chapter is therefore simultaneously


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Introduction14

an effort to turn the written texts and visual images back on these contextsto question the givenness of the landscape’s history – to provoke its History.

The question that seems to be underwriting this discussion oflandscape in postcolonial discourse is how have different colonial subjectscome to be constructed and positioned vis-à-vis each other as naturalconstituents of the landscape in the history of colonial nineteenth-centuryTrinidad? This is linked to Selwyn Cudjoe’s (2003) concern about “whopossesses the truth of colonial reality?” Mitchell (1994, 29) remarks it isnot just the answer, but the question itself that generates a “hopelesslyevasive, generalized and equivocal analysis.” For Mitchell the quarrel isalready convinced that the “landscape is the medium through whichcolonial evils are veiled and naturalized,” yet remains ambivalent about“whether this knowledge gives us any power” (1994, 30). If we are toconsider Pratt’s and Martin’s direction about landscape as contact zonedefined through processes of asymmetrical exchange and inter-framing ofcolonizer and colonized, then the question of possession I raise above mustbe debated within the contestations and struggles of representation. As ameans 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 studythese considerations must be further inflected by a relatively recentregionalist scholarly impulse in Caribbean postcolonial studies to which Inow turn.

Postcolonial Un/Re-mappings of the “Caribbean”

This study is situated in relation to a more regionalist installment inCaribbean postcolonial studies that is concerned with elucidating the waysin which the Caribbean was discursively shaped by and productive of itsencounter with Europe. This recent scholarship seeks to un-mapCaribbean-specific and related colonial discourse as part of a continuallyre-defining decolonization project that reveals the constructedness of theCaribbean, 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 parton the discursive production of the Caribbean in colonial discourse haveeach in their own way highlighted processes of naturalization,denaturalization and renaturalization of the Caribbean landscape andcolonized peoples.

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Colonial Inventions - Landscape, Power and Representation in 19th Trinidad

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