The Battle over the Caribbean Imagination

As someone born in the Caribbean but who lives in Canada, I relish opportunities to read and listen to Caribbean perspectives on global events.  For that reason, whenever I travel to the region, I try to read local newspapers and make an effort to engage with local radio and television programing. 

A few years ago, in 2017 to be exact, I was in Tobago for the annual conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians.  Much to my dismay, there were no local television channels available at the hotel which hosted the conference.  Most of the stations, if not all, were from the United States.  It was a moment of absolute frustration once I realized that I would  actually be standing on Caribbean soil for the next week but would be unable to access television content that reflected Caribbean perspectives. 

This concern over greater access to Caribbean content on Caribbean soil is nothing new.  I was recently reminded of this when I saw the documentary And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon, which was produced in 1992.  Directed by the prolific filmmakers Christopher Laird and the late Anthony Hall (both from Trinidad & Tobago), the film was an attempt to raise awareness about the impact of foreign television on the region.  It suggested that an overexposure to narratives produced outside the region was contributing to a distorted worldview among people of the Caribbean. 

Keep in mind that when this film was produced in 1992, most people in the Caribbean only had access to one or two television channels.  With few exceptions (such as Cuba), the television stations were locally owned but ran with a majority of foreign content.  Today, of course, the situation is quite different.  Telecommunications companies now offer cable packages with over two hundred channels – the vast majority of which are foreign owned.   On the website of one popular telecommunications company in the English-speaking Caribbean, it informs readers that customers can access ‘premium content’ such as the American stations HBO and Fox.  In the French Caribbean the problem is similar.  Although there are efforts to produce local content in places such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, the majority of the content comes from France and elsewhere.

The situation is even further complicated by all the content available on the internet …

Banyan:  The Counter-Archive

Of course many Caribbean artists, cultural architects, and intellectuals have long been participating in a David and Goliath battle over the Caribbean imagination and challenging those hegemonic narratives that are ubiquitous throughout the region. In fact, it was precisely because of these efforts that I was able to watch And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon.  This documentary is part of a digital collection called the Banyan Archive which is now available on a streaming platform by Alexander Street – a ProQuest Company. 

In my opinion, the Banyan Archive should really be thought of as a counter-archive.  It is a response by Caribbean people to collect, organize, and make available cultural products that reflect Caribbean perspectives and showcase Caribbean voices.  According to the website description, the Banyan collection contains more than ‘1,100 hours of music, dance, interviews and cultural programing’ that were produced by Banyan Productions in Trinidad & Tobago.  Founded in 1974, it was the first local television producer that provided programing ‘for, about, and by the Caribbean people.’ The Banyan mission was to provide ‘Caribbean people with the means to tell their stories to one another without influence from the outside world.’

Fortunately, building counter-archives has always been considered an essential element in the arsenal used to fight colonialism and imperialism.  For that reason, there is a very long history of  Caribbean people who not only challenged the imposition of Eurocentric hegemonic narratives but who also strove to counter them.  Artists, intellectuals, and politicians have all left traces of the various ways in which Caribbean people understood their reality.  In so doing, they were creating counter-archives for, about, and by the Caribbean people – to borrow from the Banyan mission statement. 

As a historian of, and from, the Caribbean, it comes as no small irony that I have spent most of my professional life relying on documents housed in a variety of archives and libraries in the United States, the United Kingdom and France.  For reasons that will be obvious to most historians, the majority of the primary source documents accessible to me were produced by agents serving the projects of colonialism and imperialism.  In contrast, the voices of the colonized were rarely present and even when this was the case, they were heavily mediated, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot would argue in Silencing the Past, through the systems of power imbedded in historical production.