Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and Location of the Caribbean Figure (2016)

This monograph is a culmination of 10 years research of visual material associated with Caribbean countries Trinidad and Guyana. The author’s starting point is based on analysing visual material associated with the period 1850s to 1960s deemed particularly relevant to photography being established and developed as a primary technology for visualising the then British colonies.
A new concept for framing Caribbean visual archives was the ambition of the book. The author does this through exploring the relationship between the historical material and contemporary artworks by Caribbean visual artists. Kempadoo argues that it is through the analysis of colonial visual material ‘read’ in close proximity or as contiguous to contemporary artworks and visual documentation that we are able to reframe the colonial past to develop knowledge of the Caribbean figure as decolonial.

The author was the first to develop a creole practice and concept for Caribbean visual material of historical and contemporary works. She traces the concept of creolisation as a hybrid discourse that is unique to the Caribbean’s brutal history involving slavery and indentureship, the primacy of colonial plantation economies and contemporary postcolonial migration.
Kempadoo was invited to present papers and artist talks to several international conferences and symposia that contributed to the development of the book and the dissemination of the research including: keynote speaker to Sensing the Caribbean: Art, Culture, History, and the Sensory Turn (2017), University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA and Sonic Scenes Symposium, MIT, Boston (2018).