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Archiving Caribbean Identity
Records, Community, and Memory
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Book Description
Archiving Caribbean Identity highlights the "Caribbeanization" of archives in the region, considering what those archives could include in the future and exploring the potential for new records in new formats.
Interpreting records in the broadest sense, the 15 chapters in this volume explore a wide variety of records that represent new archival interpretations. The book is split into two parts, with the first part focusing on record forms that are not generally considered "archival" in traditional Western practice. The second part explores more "traditional" archival collections and demonstrates how these collections are analysed and presented from the perspective of Caribbean peoples. As a whole, the volume suggests how colonial records can be repurposed to surface Caribbean narratives. Reflecting on the unique challenges faced by developing countries as they approach their archives, the volume considers how to identify and archive records in the forms and formats that reflect the postcolonial and decolonized Caribbean, how to build an archive of the people that documents contemporary society and reflects Caribbean memory, and how to repurpose the colonial archives so that they assist the Caribbean in reclaiming its history.
Archiving Caribbean Identity demonstrates how non-textual cultural traces function as archival records and how folk-centred perspectives disrupt conventional understandings of records. The book should thus be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of archives, memory, culture, history, sociology, and the colonial and postcolonial experience.
Table of Contents
Introduction
John A. Aarons, Jeannette A. Bastian, and Stanley H. Griffin
Part I. Tangible and Intangible Formats
Chapter 1. Soca and collective memory; Savannah Grass as an archive of Carnival
Kai Barratt
Chapter 2. Jamaican twitter as a repository for documenting memory and social resistance: Listening to the "articulate minority"
Norman Malcolm
Chapter 3. Singing Our Caribbean Identity: Programming the UWI, Mona Festival of the Nine Lessons with Carols
Shawn R. A. Wright
Chapter 4. Archives "cast in stone": Memorials as memory
Elsie E. Aarons
Chapter 5. Landscape as record: Archiving the Antigua Recreation Ground
Stephen Butters
Chapter 6. Concert Dance in Barbados as Archive: Dancing the national narratives
John Hunte
Chapter 7. Remembering an art exhibit: The Face of Jamaica, 1963-1964
Monique Barnett-Davidson
Chapter 8. Traditional and new record sources in geointerpretive methods for reconstructing biophysical history: Whither Withywood
Thera Edwards and Edward Robinson
Part II. Collections Through a Caribbean Lens
Chapter 9. Resistance in/and the Pre-Emancipation Archives
Tonia Sutherland, Linda Sturtz, and Paulette Kerr
Chapter 10. Postcolonial philately as memory and history: Stamping a new identity for Trinidad and Tobago
Desaray Pivott-Nolan
Chapter 11. Recasting Jamaican sculptor Ronald Moody (1900-1984): An archival homecoming
Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski
Chapter 12. St. Lucian memory and identity through the eyes of John Robert Lee
Antonia Charlemagne-Marshall
Chapter 13. Crop Over and Carnival in the archives of Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago
Allison O. Ramsay
Chapter 14. Ecclesiastical records as sources of social history: The Anglican Church of Trinidad and Tobago
Janelle Duke
Chapter 15. Erasure and retention in Jamaica’s official memory: The case of the disappearing telegrams
James Robertson
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Index
Editor(s)
Biography
John A. Aarons, now retired, was Executive Director of the National Library of Jamaica (1992–2002), Government Archivist of Jamaica (2002–2008), and University Archivist of the University of the West Indies (2009–2014).
Jeannette A. Bastian is Emerita Professor at Simmons University. She is currently an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Library and Information at the University of the West Indies.
Stanley H. Griffin is Deputy Dean, Undergraduate Matters (Humanities), and Lecturer in Archival and Information Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Education, Department of Library and Information Studies, at the University of the West Indies, Mona Jamaica.