Colonial Inventions

Colonial Inventions:
Landscape, Power and Representation
in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad

By

Amar Wahab

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 Data

A 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 Landscape
in 19th-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 Kingsleys 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

For my mother
For my father
For my family

Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or English

park. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still without
popular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island in
the intestines of slaves.
V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, (1967, 147)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii
Introduction ............................................................................................... 1
Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape
The Tales of Mountains A Blind Rehearsal ........................................ 1
Theoretical Perspective: Positioning (Post)Colonial Discourse............. 5
Landscape in (Post)Colonial Discourse ............................................... 11
Postcolonial Un/Re-mappings of the Caribbean............................... 14
Managing Race and Gender: Orientalist and Africanist Discourse...... 21
Ways of Looking.................................................................................. 24
Travel Writing and Landscape Painting............................................... 25
Reading Strategies ............................................................................... 29
De/Re-Historicizing Nineteenth-century Trinidad........................ 31
Chapter Summaries.............................................................................. 36
Chapter One............................................................................................. 39
Rehearsing Caribbean Colonial Landscapes
Introduction.......................................................................................... 39
Inventing Invitation: Emptiness, Cannibalism and Savagery............... 41
Inventing Tropical Nature.................................................................... 45
Re-Centering the Caribbean: The Rise of Plantations.......................... 51
The Colonial Picturesque ..................................................................... 57
Tracking Colonial Ambivalence: Transculturation, Agency
and Reconsolidation............................................................................. 61
Chapter Two ............................................................................................ 69
Inventing Trinidad in the European Imagination:
From Colombus to Richard Bridgens
A Euro-Navigational Birth: Columbuss Discovery of Paradise...... 70
Re-tracing Paradise: The Search for El Dorado ................................... 73
Imagining A Ghostly Paradise.......................................................... 76
The Cedula and the Reinvention of a Cultivable Paradise................... 80

viii

Table of Contents

Trinidad's New Prosperity": Early Nineteenth-Century British

Representations .................................................................................... 82
Richard Bridgenss Sketches of West India Scenery (circa. 1825)....... 86
Conclusion ........................................................................................... 99
Chapter Three........................................................................................ 103
Views from the Underside? Michel Jean Cazabons NineteenthCentury Landscape Painting of Trinidad (1851-1880)
Introduction........................................................................................ 103
Biographical Note on Michel Jean Cazabon (1813-1888) ................. 105
Social Context: An Explosive Amalgam of Changes..................... 107
Michel Jean Cazabons Painterly Discourse ...................................... 113
A Review of MacLeans and Cudjoes Readings .............................. 114
A Reading Strategy: David Dabydeens Hogarths Blacks................ 116
Reading Cazabon ............................................................................... 121
The Post-emancipation Planters Picturesque: A Nostalgic Gesture? 121
A Governors landscape: The Harris Collection ................................ 124
Su/Pro/specting .................................................................................. 124
Cazabons Civilizing Townscapes: Port of Spain as Tropical City ... 134
The Threat.......................................................................................... 138
A Return to Labour: Picturesque Coolies....................................... 141
Cazabons Women ............................................................................. 145
The Uneasiness of Pleasure................................................................ 151
Conclusion ......................................................................................... 154
Chapter Four ......................................................................................... 159
Return to Order: Disciplinary Gestures in Charles Kingsleys
At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871)
Introduction........................................................................................ 159
Travel Writing and Natural History in the Nineteenth Century ......... 161
Obsessions of Race and Order in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
West Indian-English Discourse.......................................................... 164
Kingsleys Narrative Structure........................................................... 172
Paradise Anew: Idealizations of the Trinidadian Natural Landscape 175
Reinventing Tropicality as Wild Nature ..................................... 176
Reinventing Bounty: Prospecting the Picturesque ............................. 180
Cultivating Nostalgia ........................................................................ 185
Re-Writing the Other: Re-Naturalizing Colonized Subjects .............. 187
The Negro Character: The Retrograde of Paradise......................... 187
Coolie Scripts A Return to Order ................................................ 196
Intimate Strangers: Contradistinctive Ordering of Others ................. 206

Colonial Inventions

ix

Engendered Scripts ............................................................................ 209

Conclusion ......................................................................................... 212
Conclusion .............................................................................................. 217
Unfinished Cartographies
Contrapuntal Cartographies ............................................................... 220
Cataloging Colonial Space................................................................. 221
(Re)Scripting Colonized Subjects: Mapping Vis--vis ...................... 225
Cartographic Disjunctures.................................................................. 235
Coda................................................................................................... 237

Endnotes .................................................................................................. 239

Glossary................................................................................................... 261
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 267
Index........................................................................................................ 281

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1.1: Natives of the Caribees feasting on human flesh 42

Fig. 1.2: Frontispiece, Histoire Naturelle et Morale (1665) 42
Fig. 1.3: La Figure de Moulins a Sucre (1665) 54
Fig. 2.1: Title Plate, a wreath composed of sugar cane, plantain, &c 91
Fig. 2.2: Pitch Lake Palm 91
Fig. 2.3: Planting the Sugar Cane 93
Fig. 2.4: Boiling House 93
Fig. 2.5: Carting Sugar 93
Fig. 2.6: Bed Stocks 94
Fig. 2.7: Stocks for Hands and Feet 94
Fig. 2.8: Carting Canes to the Mill 95
Fig. 2.9: Field Negro 95
Fig. 2:10: Sunday Morning in Town 96
Fig. 2:11: Negro and Indian Character 98
Fig. 3.1: Residence at Orange Grove Estate, Trinidad 122
Fig. 3.2: Garden Estate Arouca 122
Fig. 3.3: View of Mount Tamana from Arima 125
Fig. 3.4: Village of Arima and Mount Tamana 125
Fig. 3.5: Thatched Huts on a Cocoa Estate 128
Fig. 3.6: Mountain Village 128
Fig. 3.7: Cedar Point, Mount Tamana 129
Fig. 3.8: Cedar Point, Mount Tamana, Trinidad 129
Fig. 3.9: Exterior of Shooting Lodge, Mount Tamana, Trinidad 131
Fig. 3.10: Interior of Shooting Lodge 131
Fig. 3.11: Pitch Lake, Trinidad 133
Fig. 3.12: The Governors Residence, St. Anns 134
Fig. 3.13: St. Anns 134
Fig. 3.14: View of Port of Spain from Laventille Hill 137
Fig. 3.15: View of Port of Spain from Cotton Hill 138
Fig. 3.16: View from Laventille Hill 138
Fig. 3.17: Dry River, Port of Spain 139
Fig. 3.18: Sunrise from Corbeaux Town 140
Fig. 3.19: Corbeaux Town, Port of Spain 140
Fig. 3.20: East Indian Group 142
Fig. 3.21: Creole Woman with a Parasol 146
Fig. 3.22: Negress in Gala Dress 146
Fig. 3.23: Old Negress, French, in Gala Dress 147

xii

List of Illustrations

Fig. 3.24: East Indian Woman 148

Fig. 3.25: Grand Trinidad Races, 5th January 1853. Maiden Stake 152
Fig. 3.26: Stuart Island 154
Fig. 3.27: Carenage from Five Islands 1 and 2 154
Fig. 3.28: View from Carenage 154
Fig. 4.1: The High Woods 177
Fig. 4.2: Ceiba 178
Fig. 4.3: Frontispiece: The Botanic Gardens, Port of Spain 185
Fig. 4.4: Banana 193
Fig. 4.5: Coolies A-Field 197
Fig. 4.6: Coolies Cooking 203
Fig. 4.7: A Coolie Family 203
Fig. 4.8: Coolie Sacrificing 206
Fig. 4.9: Coolie and Negro 208
Fig. 4.10: Waiting for the Races 208

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was birthed as a doctoral dissertation at the University of

Toronto in 2004, but morphed into a wider and more involved endeavour
in the past five years. My sincere thanks goes out to all those who were
involved, even tangentially, in the eventual publication of this work which
has taken me to various academic institutions located in numerous
countries. The journey has been at times tiresome, as efforts to bring the
project to fruition were always met by productive obstacles that detoured
me into different academic spaces, providing the opportunity to gain
exposure 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 commitment
to this kind of project through their encouraging and stimulating feedback,
but who also continued to pressure me to work on converting the
dissertation into a manuscript. Especially with Professor Trotz, who shared
the conviction that the need for this kind of work is urgent in Caribbean
Studies, I was also encouraged and benefited from presentation feedback
at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom where I completed my
postdoctoral studies. During this time, my supervision under Professor
David Dabydeen helped me to refine some of my ideas and the breadth of
analysis that I would come to regard as indispensable to postcolonial
studies. Most rewarding was my day to day research at the British Library,
the National Archives, and the National Art Library at the Victorian and
Albert Museum which continue to seduce me with their power to memory.
My findings in these archives have strengthened the books scholarly
focus and my commitment to bring some of these works back into the
public domain in an effort to contemplate their relevance to contemporary
conversations. In this regard I would also like to thank Carol Koulikourdi,
Amanda Millar, Soucin Yip-Sou and the anonymous reviewers of
Cambridge Scholars Publishing who provided valuable feedback in the
draft manuscript stages and remained committed to the vision of this
project.
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 Mimi
Sheller, Patricia Mohammed, Selwyn Cudjoe, Krista Thompson, who have
written on the relevance of postcolonial Caribbean studies. What I find

xiv

Acknowledgements

most encouraging about their work, is that they comprise a group scholars
whose commitment to the Caribbean region and its academic importance
has provided for me, a platform from which to make or contest claims
about the region and at the same time engage in a deeply personal project
of self-knowledge. This is also perhaps what makes me feel humbly
indebted to all the scholars I have employed in this manuscript
conversation as I see it as reflective of the many modes through which
intellectual community is threaded across time, space and discipline. To
all my colleagues in the fields of postcolonial and Caribbean Studies I
would like to express my gratitude for the work you do and which
continues to inspire others in the fields.
I would particularly like to thank Mr. Geoffrey MacLean, without
whom all of the images in chapter three would not have been possible to
include. Geoffrey has been a continuous supporter of this sort of work and
it is to him that I feel that chapter three owes much of its inspiration and
direction. It is dedicated to him. My gratitude also goes out to the Harris
Trustees and Andrea Davies at Belmont House (UK) who also provided
permission to use the images in chapter three. In addition I would like to
thank the staff at The University of the West Indies Library (West Indiana
Division, St. Augustine) and The National Archives of Trinidad and
Tobago who bore patience with me as I meticulously searched their
archival collections. I cannot stress how much one`s access to these sorts
of archival institutions determines the scope and shape of one`s work, as it
did in my case. The use of the rare image set by Richard Bridgens in
chapter two is under kind permission from The Victorian and Albert
Museum, London, United Kingdom, and I would especially like to thank
Chrysanthe Constantouris for helping me to access copyright permission.
A support grant from the Faculty of Arts and Science, Nipissing
University, Canada was invaluable for the purchase of Bridgens images,
and I am deeply indebted to Dr. Craig Cooper for supporting my research
in this way. Thanks also to the York University Library, Canada which
provided me with access to the sketches used in chapter four. Added to
this list is Mr. Gerard Besson, of Paria Publishers, Trinidad and Tobago,
who was very generous in providing me with the first image of chapter
one and permission to use the image in this publication.
As with all academic labour, there is often a sphere of support that is
often hidden though it is crucial to, and probably the real product of
writing through community; this refer here to my circle of friends and
colleagues who have been invaluable to this publications life-support
system. I must express special gratitude to my friends and colleagues:
Beverly-Jean Daniel, Eve Haque, Michelle Rowley, Gabrielle Hezekiah,

Colonial Inventions

xv

the Coventry Crew, the Brub 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 and
without prejudice.
While much of this project was completed within the space of
academia, it is no doubt grounded in my own personal journey to see
myself reflected and refracted in my academic work. It is in trying to make
the linkages between these at times conflictual worlds, that I must thank
my family for helping me to bridge the distance, literal and imaginative,
and for giving me a starting point and a frame of reference that permeates
this publication. Especially my mother and late father, who worked from
extremely meagre beginnings in a tin shack, their dedication and
compassion towards each other and life in general, nourished me with an
approach to knowledge and self in the world that always makes me feel
like writing away my freedom, declaring myself to an ever-changing
horizon. To my sister, Shelly, my brothers Saeed and Siddiq, and my
grandmother, Violet, this work has benefited much for your emotional
support as well as the points of reference you provided in my life that
made the project evolve in the way it did. Thanks also to my Canadian
family, The Hoseins; without their support this project would not have
even begun, especially as I tried to make sense of my diasporic life
between 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 this
project, bearing with me at times of confused anguish and celebrating with
me at times of deliverance. As a sort of shadow research assistant, he sent
me countless references and relevant material during my postdoctoral
studies, at times making me feel that he was even more excited to see this
project to publication. His incomparable emotional support has been
tremendous and indispensable to the completion of this project.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the people of Trinidad and
Tobago. They constitute an exciting node of human possibility and energy
on the global circuit and I am most privileged to have emerged from such
a creative space, most so, through its critical impulses. It is my hope that
this publication will make a constructive contribution to the work ahead,
in collaboration with a collective of exciting and provoking agents who
never lose faith in that ever-changing horizon of self-knowledge.
Especially to all those lost and found in the diaspora, this effort
acknowledges the possibility and danger of return, only to find anew
something that awaits.

INTRODUCTION
TOWARD A (POST)COLONIAL
DISCOURSE ON LANDSCAPE

Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or English

park. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still without
popular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island in
the intestines of slaves.
V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, (1967, 147)
Naipaul shows us that the landscape was not pure, that it had not remained
untouched since Creation, and that it was not original, native, or virginal
at all. Rather, its purity was a fabrication, a myth. The landscape was
really the product of the snatching of people from Africa and their brutal
enslavement. The land bore witness to the oppression and degradation of
people. There was blood, violence and squalor in the Caribbean landscape;
Beneath the myth of paradise lurked the unspoken, wished-away reality
of 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 friend
and I decided to take a daylong car journey through the densely forested,
meagerly-populated Northern Range Mountains of Trinidad. We left the
town of St. Augustine baking in the intense tropical heat and gradually
climbed into the coolness of an overwhelmingly breath-taking tropical
rainforest in the Arima Hills. Along the way the forest canopy covered the
road forming a dark cool tunnel that invited a romantic escape of many
sorts. Both tired with doing interviews, detentions in the archives, and the
day to day challenges of our dissertation research, a trip into natures
paradise was a welcome stress reliever. In addition, she being AfroTrinidadian and me Indo-Trinidadian, we were in some way also trying to
escape the discomfiting gazes that always darted like a surveillance
camera whenever we were together in public. The Northern Range offered
an opportunity to temporarily escape those constantly questioning eyes.

Introduction

Here and there along the roadside miniature waterfalls protruded, the
delicious scent of majestic teak plantations mixed with the fresh forest air,
and the quaint little villages like Morne La Croix, Blanchisseuse and
Brasso Seco seemed so quiet as if all had been abandoned. After stopping
at the Asa Wright Nature Centre and enjoying the natural pool (formed
by a rerouted waterfall), we then continued our car journey into some of
the most beautiful, relatively untouched areas of the Northern Range.
From the sounds of gushing water currents of unseen rivers hundreds of
meters down misty, densely forested precipices to the overwhelmingly
serene vistas of the sun-bathed blue Caribbean Sea along the mountainous
edges this trip was definitely our escape into paradise. Though the
journey was interrupted with signs of government-supported privatesector 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 Road
remarking 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 in
their bathing suits, sitting and eating in their car on the roadside and
playing Indian music rather loudly. My friend grew very upset by the
scene, exclaiming this is what I cant take on! Her frustration charged a
strong reaction in me, because I didnt see anything abnormal about what
the group was doing after all it was to me an expected and common sight
as the road drew nearer to the beaches on the coast. Moreover it was
something that even I did with my family on several occasions. Shocked
and confused, I asked my friend what was wrong and told her I felt these
people were enjoying themselves. She replied, yes, but why do they have
to do it like that? My instant response of silence connected with strong
feelings of being erased or edited out of a paradise which itself had already
been assembled from contradictory fragments of the mountain: quaint
villages in the middle of nowhere, quarried hillsides, re-routed waterfalls
all had their place in this set-up, but not the Indians in the roadside car. My
angst about this moment connected to a feeling of conditional belonging,
as the comment, whether intended or not, seemed to enliven a coded
rehearsal of racialized registers within the prison house of this landscape.
Though we both seemed to watch the landscape with different eyes, the
incident raised the question about how we i.e. Afro-Trinidadians and
Indo-Trinidadians came to inhabit the landscape and imagine ourselves
and each other, partly through colonial scripts. My angst fed a desire to
understand how such visions of Trinidads landscape had emerged and
how different groups, especially Africans and Indians were differentially

Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape

positioned on this landscape in interconnected yet distinct ways. How was

this idea of tropical paradise historically constructed and naturalized as a
metaphor for the differential placements of colonized subjects in relation
to the Trinidadian landscape as a form of colonial knowledge and power?
How did this metaphor circulate in ways that served to include/exclude
particular ways of experiencing Caribbean reality and of informing
multiple identities? It seemed that lay oral history discourses on AfricanIndian relations had always begun at the point of arrival of Indians in the
mid-nineteenth century, without considering how the previous early
nineteenth-century history of African presence had in fact shaped the
African in Trinidadian society and produced the conditions that would
eventually shape what the Indian was to become in Trinidad. Viranjini
Munasinghes Callaloo or Tossed Salad? (2001) has taken this approach
in historicizing East Indians and the cultural politics of identity in
Trinidad whereby she claims that a certain idiom for ideologically
situating the East Indians position in relation to the larger society was
already in place before East Indians set foot in Trinidad (2001, 43). Yet
rather than taking this approach merely to talk about the foretelling of
East Indian ethnicity as Munasinghe, this book is a kind of re-telling that
acknowledges the saliency of related and entangled histories. Though the
varied works of Caribbean fiction writers have approached this project
from multiple angles, they have all underlined the historical constructedness
of the ways Africans and Indians have been imagined and have imagined
themselves separately and in relation to each other on the Trinidadian
landscape.
The work of 2001 Nobel laureate, Trinidadian-born literary artist, Sir
V.S. Naipaul attends to this project by imaginatively re-encountering
Trinidads history to suggest even more complicated and disturbing
nuances about how Caribbean people talk about and imagine themselves
(Strachan 2002, 150). Though constantly under critique, Naipaul is most
noted for his brutal scrutiny and demythologizing of the Caribbean
region as an idealized paradise. Ian Strachans Paradise and Plantation
(2002, 158) makes the point that Naipaul wished to attack the idea, the
romantic conception, of the Caribbean landscape. Naipauls assertion in
the opening epigraph that the Caribbean landscape as paradise is an
invention i.e. a social construction, is one that aligns with the primary
claims of postcolonial studies. The writers criticism not only strives to
expose the fraudulence of this invention of a fixed landscape, but to
register the idea that the colonial landscape has a double side that is
oppressive, humiliating and blinding - rendering the paradisiacal landscape
as unreal. Naipauls pronouncement provokes a need to historicize this

Introduction

claim, while simultaneously finding ways to question the authority with

which this statement can be made as a totalizing Caribbean reality. The
idea that Caribbean landscapes are manufactured and inescapably
annexed to the regions exploitative colonial history is therefore the central
assumption of this book. An engagement with the Caribbean landscape in
a postcolonial setting is therefore contingent on the precedents set in the
colonial period.
Any research that attempts to highlight the Caribbean landscape as an
invented site/sight is by default interdisciplinary and must attend to the
primacy of historical construction. The aim of this tbook is to understand
the multiple and contradictory ways in which nineteenth-century colonial
discourse sought to represent and shape i.e. invent the Trinidadian
landscape as an imaginary and material site. Moreover I am concerned
with how representations of the landscape might serve as sites for an
analysis of colonial power and authority. By representation I mean the
process and products that give signs their particular meaning (Sardar and
Van Loon 1999, 13). I address this concern by reading travel writings and
images produced by British travelers as well as those of a local
Trinidadian artist.
I specifically foreground the 1825 (circa) sketches of British travelling
artist Richard Bridgens to highlight the early construction of the landscape
and the positioning of the African (slave) in relation to early British rule in
Trinidad amidst the rise of a plantation society. I then focus on the
paintings and lithographs (1851 1880) of local Creole Trinidadian artist,
Michel Jean Cazabon to understand his spatial re-invention of Trinidad
and the re-scripting of colonized subjects (blacks, coloureds and East
Indians) in a period of immense ideological upheaval caused by the
abolition of slavery (1834). Finally, I focus on the travelogue (1871) of
British novelist Charles Kingsley to understand how the re-imaging of the
Trinidadian landscape and colonized subjects was intimately tied to the restabilization of British order. I have brought these three works together to
re-tell a tale about Africans and Indians in the colonial space of the
nineteenth century that acknowledges the implied presences of each other
by mapping 1 back and forth between particular recurring yet shifting
themes and temporal moments. I attempt to read the representations of
these travel writings and paintings using (post)colonial discourse analysis
as my main theoretical and methodological framework. However since
these paintings, lithographs and travel writings are also viewed as cultural
practices through which relations of power are produced and managed in
particular social and political contexts, there is considerable overlap
between colonial discourse and the broader field of cultural studies. I will

Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape

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 although
the Caribbean lies in an indisputable narrative position at the origin of the
plot 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 Shellers concern
by contemplating how Trinidad became discursively produced as a
landscape in the nineteenth-century British imagination. The concern is
related to a wider methodological question posed by David Spurr (1993, 2)
who asks How does the Western writer construct a coherent representation
out of the strange and (to the writer) often incomprehensible realities
confronted in the non-Western world? Spurrs question leads to my first
task of defining the concept of discourse as a structure of knowledge and
power.
Michel Foucaults understanding of discourse in The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1972) foregrounds the unification of selected statements about
a particular reality united by a set of rules i.e. the structuring of
knowledge, that functions as a form of power. Discursive production
shapes and is in turn shaped by the positioning of human subjects, to the
extent that the constitutive ideas and practices are considered to be
coherent and inevitable (Barnes and Duncan 1992). Attention is paid to the
constructedness of categories of the social imagination based on particular
criteria 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 not
solely about representation but about the social and historical conditions
within which specific ways of seeing and representing difference
construct colonial institutions of control. The work of the proceeding
chapters therefore is not only to understand the representational strategies
through which the landscape and subjects are produced, but also how these
strategies obey certain rules (Foucault 1972, 138) which exert a
naturalizing power over this production. Moreover, it is important to
attend to Foucaults (1980) assertion that discursive production is also an
unstable/disunited process that makes visible other powers that challenge,
transform, negotiate and subvert the prime constructing forces of truth-

Introduction

making i.e. resistance. Colonialism is one such apparatus of discursive

power.
Loomba (1998) defines colonialism2 as the conquest and domination of
one group of people by another, but stresses that it was not a monolithic
process; rather it comprised complex and heterogeneous ideas and
practices. Additonally, Spurr claims that colonization is a form of selfinscription onto the lives of a people who are conceived of as an extension
of the landscape (1993, 7). Both Loombas and Spurrs points resonate
with postcolonial scholar Edward Saids (1993)-that colonialism in terms
of material accumulation and acquisition3 is underwritten by:
[I]deological formations that include notions that certain territories and
people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge
affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century
imperial culture is plentiful with words and concepts like inferior: or
subject races, subordinate peoples, dependency, expansion, and
authority. (9)

When applied to the historical process of European colonization in the

Caribbean, the term colonial discourse is loaded with various lexicons
that are enabling of, generated by and evident of colonialism. The various
texts of colonial discourse, 4 each produced in and through specific
historical situations, share similarities in that they contain particular
gestures of colonization, yet they cannot be totally contained by the term,
colonial discourse (Spurr 1993, 2).
Edward Saids Orientalism (1979), drawing on Foucaults notion of
knowledge as power, inaugurated a new approach to the critique of
colonial power what has now been coined colonial discourse. 5
According to Hulme (1986, 2) colonial discourse is a unified ensemble of
linguistically-based practices, deployed in the management of colonial
relationships.
He elaborates that:
Underlying the idea of colonial discourse is the presumption that during
the colonial period large parts of the non-European world were produced
for Europe through a discourse that imbricated sets of questions and
assumptions, methods of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and
imagery, normally separated out into discrete areas of military strategy,
political order, social reform, imaginative literature, personal memoir and
so on. (1986, 2; emphasis added)

Young claims that one of the more disturbing aspects of Orientalism was
Saids claim that the texts of Orientalist discourse can create not only

Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape

knowledge but also the very reality that they appear to describe (1995,
160). For Said therefore, written colonial discourse concerns the Eurocentric invention of reality through an epistemic violence and a
colonizing will to power the material (Spurr 1993, 3). In this book I rely
on Peter Hulmes (1993, 200) notion of invention - that colonial
discourse has the power to call its categories into being.6 Often, the sites
where colonial discourse is produced are in travel writing, exploration
narratives, memoirs, colonial administration documents, etc., i.e. written
texts that centralize European interpretation, representation and
domination 7 and reify colonial authority. This authority is produced
through the discursive production of essentialized identities through the
naming, marking, and ordering of difference (Spurr 1993, 4). Saids
emphasis on the European representation of supposedly non-Western
cultures and its designation of a cultural Other has enabled a re-order of
the study of colonialism (Loomba 1998, 43) at the same time it has
provoked much deliberation and tension about simplistic positivist binaries.
Loomba claims that Orientalism examined key literary and cultural
texts, consolidated certain ways of seeing and thinking which in turn
contributed to the functioning of colonial power (1998, 43).8 Writing in
the context of the Caribbean Elizabeth Bohls 9 (1994) expands on this
claim 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 on
that most visible and seemingly natural of signs, the color of skin
aesthetic discourse collaborates with colonial power, exploiting the visible
to obscure or naturalize the relationships between the island scene and
the violence that scene both reveals and conceals. (372)10

In fact Saids main thesis in Orientalism is that Western representations of

other peoples and places revealed more about the West than they did about
other spaces (Thompson 2002, 18). Colonial discourse therefore concerns
the dialectic marking between European Self and non-European Other that
structured colonial ways of seeing and thinking about or representing
difference that were integral to the production of colonial authority.
Moreover, this approach depends on an examination of the social and
historical conditions within which specific representations are generated
(Loomba 1998, 97).
Scholars like H. Bhabha, L. Ahmed and D. Porter have criticized
Orientalism and colonial discourse for its binaristic logic, its tendency to
homogenize colonial encounter, its privileging of the more ideological and
discursive aspects of colonial knowledge production at the expense of

Introduction

material realities, and its insufficient attention to self-representation and

agency of colonized peoples. 11 Driver and Yeoh (2000, 3) claim that a
major limitation of Saids analysis is its tendency to project a
homogeneous and coherent European system of knowledge, which may
reproduce the very thing that critics wish to bring into question. In other
words, by privileging Western literature and travel writing, which I do to a
considerable degree in this study, the focus becomes locked on how these
writings construct the cultural Other, without attention to reciprocating
acts of counter construction by colonial subjects. 12 Critics of colonial
discourse 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 Saids argument is countered on the
basis that colonial discourse bears a constant uncertainty, leading to an
inherent confusion of identity, difference and authority. In fact, Saids
corrective Culture and Imperialism (1994) revealed that colonial discourse
was not a one-sided process as thought. For Leela Ghandi (1998, 25)
Culture and Imperialism gives a much more optimistic vision of the
possibilities of reconciliation and an end to domination and confrontation
between West and non-West. She relates this move in part as an attempt
by Said to abandon Foucaults totalizing and deterministic conception of
power (ibid.).
Homi Bhabha has posed one of the foremost challenges to Saids
colonial discourse, applying psychoanalysis to demonstrate that colonial
discourse also operated according to ambivalent (continual fluctuation
between wanting one thing and its opposite) protocols of fantasy and
desire (Young 1995, 161). For Bhabha colonial authority and power are
subject to indeterminate crisis that allow subaltern voices to be recovered,
thereby exposing the incoherence of colonial discourse. Bhabhas
emphasis on hybridity i.e. the co-existence of autocolonization of the
native who meets the requirements of colonist address and the evasions
and sly civility through which the native refuses to satisfy the demand of
the colonizers narrative (Parry 1995, 41), is aimed at exposing the
uncertainties and ambivalences of the colonist text (ibid.). The subaltern
is therefore able to operate through these ambivalences to resist the
totalizing power of colonial construction.
For postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak 13 the principal concern is
whether marginalized or subordinate groups (i.e. the subaltern) can speak
for themselves or whether they are forever locked into systems of
representation by others (Ghandi 1998, 28). Spivak (1988) is weary of the
agency of subaltern subjects that is all too easily recovered given the brutal
nature of colonial power, even though she stresses the need to mine

Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape

colonial discourse for its native counter-knowledges. Yet Spivaks

critique is useful in understanding the processes of ventriloquism whereby
colonial discourses appropriate the subalterns voice to consolidate
Europes self-positioning as civilized in relation to a barbaric Other.
Another useful point is Spivaks insistence on the impossibility of
recovering an originary subaltern consciousness independent of the
intervening history of colonialism (Ghandi 1998, 31). Young (1995)
considers Said, Bhabha and Spivak as constituting the Holy Trinity of
colonial-discourse analysis, suggesting that their different positions on the
production of colonial power constitute the seminal terrain of a discursive
field. Yet if we are to consider the critique of colonial discourse that both
colonizer and colonized participated and negotiated relations of colonial
power, then the notion of colonial invention must also be accompanied by
its 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 produced
by imperial eyes for European audiences. She applied a dialectic and
historicized approach to the study of travel writing based on a concept
she terms the contact zone. By this she implies:
[T]he space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples
geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other
and 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 of

transculturation 14 whereby subordinated peoples selected and reinvented
the materials that were transmitted to them by metropolitan culture
(ibid.). Not only is Pratts work an effort to expand the boundaries of
Saids colonial discourse, but it suggests that the power exerted by various
modes of colonial positioning could also be undermined by moments of
contradiction within the periphery. As a result subjects are constituted in
and by their relations to each other, though situated in highly asymmetrical
relations of power (Pratt 1992, 7). Transculturation as a two-way process
of discursive production therefore allows us to think about how the
impulse to make comprehensible (i.e. order) colonial landscapes was also
re-constitutive of Europeans evolving sense of themselves. Pratts notion
of colonial discourse as an asymmetrically shared field of relations
therefore complicates Hulmes notion of invention. Her idea of a contact
zone suggests that invention is not a homogeneous, static or one-way
process, but a dynamic struggle whereby Euro-centric categories of
knowledge and power are almost always being re-made in relation to

10

Introduction

disturbances and anxieties around the very breakdown of a European will

to power. Yet Loomba (1998) claims that it was this very blurring of
binary logic that stimulated colonial regimes to reinforce cultural and
racial 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 at
an ideological level also implies the search for alternative discourses of
the colonial era (Spurr 1993, 6). According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and
Tiffin (1995, 17) postcolonial discourse is inherently a discourse of
oppositionality. The term does not imply an absolute break with colonial
discourse, but is rather made contingent and unstable by it. While on the
one hand postcolonial discourse attempts to privilege the voices of the
colonized, on the other, it is criticized for its foreclosure of avenues for
recovery of selfhood, other than that conditioned by colonial discourse.
Loomba (1998) stands with other critics such as Anne McClintock 15 in
stating that if anything, postcolonial thought implies a proclivity to focus
on the reinscription of unequal relations of colonial rule in contemporary
formally decolonized societies. According to Loomba (1998, xiv), scholars
such as Ella Shohat and Terry Eagleton critique postcolonial studies for its
convergence with postmodernism, 16 and its seeming evacuation of
political terms such as imperialism and economic exploitation.
Though criticized by numerous scholars such as Benita Parry and Aijaz
Ahmad for its privileging of idealism and textualism at the expense of
materialist historical inquiry, Young (1995) states that colonial discourse
analysis remains useful since:
[I]t provides a significant framework by emphasizing that all
perspectives on colonialism share and have to deal with a common
discursive 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 in

terms of its inability to challenge its own assumptions, yet he emphasizes
that it is a site from which Third World theorists constitute an object for
analysis and resistance (1995, 165). Similarly, Sheller (2003, 5) claims
that in so far as the Caribbean was both denaturalized and renaturalized
as natural paradise there cannot be any distinction between real or
imagined. Having outlined some of the general issues in the broad field
of postcolonial criticism I will now focus specifically on the concept of

Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape

11

landscape which, for the purposes of this book, must be understood as an

iconic site of power within postcolonial discourse.

Landscape in (Post)Colonial Discourse

Although there are multiple debates concerning the meaning of the
term landscape I am interested in those that relate to it as a site of social
and historical construction.17 If landscape is indeed a cultural image that
structures 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 a
cultural production that can be read or interpreted while it is
simultaneously reconstituted through reading what Roland Barthes18 has
termed an open-ended process of signification (Duncan and Duncan
1992, 27). Such a post-structuralist approach implies that (the reading of)
landscape representation is also a process of continuous inter-textual
production ultimately undecipherable and unstable. The limitation of the
text here is that it both freezes and privileges itself as the site through
which reality can be deconstructed. Smith (1992) troubles this metaphor of
landscape as text since he asserts that its multiple discursive productions
bar various publics from performing certain kinds of readings, implying a
kind of analytical elitism. As a result landscape remains what W.J.T
Mitchell has described as an enigma a prison house that locks
understanding away from the world a process of ideological
mystification (1986, 2).
Reading landscape from a postcolonial perspective however, allows
me to read the textual representations of Trinidads landscape in
conjunction with the historical production of colonial power in the
Caribbean context -what Turner (1979) has referred to as the politics of
landscape. In this vein Mitchell (1994) regards landscape as an
instrument of cultural power with a double role:
[I]t naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial
world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that
representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or
less 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 with
Naipauls epigraph above on Trinidad, that the landscape is
manufactured in ways that simultaneously naturalize the asymmetrical

12

Introduction

positioning of colonizer and colonized. The primary ingredient of this

invention is the panoptical gaze that claims to be stable and allemcompassing rather than situated and contingent. John Barrell (1972, 1)
historicizes the idea of landscape as based on that which could be seen
all at one glance, from a fixed point of view. Similarly, Nancy Stepan
(2001, 25) regards landscape as a manner of perceiving spaces in terms of
a scene situated at a distance from the observer a Western way of
organizing the visual field. The deployment of landscape as an
epistemological category in postcolonial discourse therefore attends to the
ways in which it has been used as a tool of social control to impose visual
order over non-European peoples, spaces and places. As a particular way
of seeing and ordering relations it is also important to consider the way
landscape circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual
appropriation, 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 also
questioned the unidirectional totalizing power of landscape as a gaze
projected from the British metropole to the colony. According to Martins
(2000) imperial landscape tropes such as the picturesque and the romantic
were of considerable currency to nineteenth-century European travelers
and colonizers as modes of representing tropical landscapes. Yet, she
warns against an unproblematic application of what she terms, totalising
constructions like the imperial eye to the reading of these tropes of
representation, advocating instead, for the complexities of exchange and
relationships in particular contexts in the colonial period (2000, 21).
Although critics of postcolonial discourse may argue that this approach
obscures attention to the material effects of domination, Martins
(following Pratt) echoes a demand for understanding the ways the colonial
landscape also had profound constitutive effects on imperial eyes. Martins
alludes to the paradoxical coupling between order and mastery and
uncertainty and disorientation that both work to foreground ambivalence
in colonial landscapes and therefore to undermine the totalizing power of
colonial discourse. In this book I am therefore deploying the term
landscape to contemplate a dynamic economy of gestures at interpositioning between colonizer and colonized that does not always preserve
the dialectical power relations between both subjects in the same way in
any given moment.
I do not mean to imply that as an epistemological category landscape is
a European invention per se. In fact Peter Hulme makes the point in

Toward a (Post)Colonial Discourse on Landscape

13

Colonial Encounters (1986) that prior to European contact in the

Caribbean there were always landscapes or indigenous histories of
ordering relationships with the surroundings.19 The point is however, that
European colonialism was a violent interruption of an indigenous
knowledge system and process of change. The sorts of exploitative,
extractive and dominant relationships that Europeans imposed on these
already existing landscapes however became instantiated as the only way
of seeing, while obliterating and marginalizing others as aberrant visions.
It is also important to recognize that landscapes (i.e. relations) and the
power with which they were (re)invented, would have undergone
significant transformations within the asymmetrical structures and
dynamic conditions of colonial encounter.
This brings me to another related but crucial point for considering
landscape in a postcolonial perspective landscape as history. If the above
discussion makes a case for considering landscape as a way of European
self-relationing, between the West and its other then I further that these
relations are also the substance of History.20 Any critique of colonialism
must be seen therefore as a way of re-reading the landscape for contested
histories (Tuhiwai-Smith 1999, 33). John Barrell (1980) has also referred
to the histories that are hidden in representations of landscape as the dark
side of the landscape. Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant in
Caribbean Discourse has proffered this much in his term language of the
landscape which he has identified as a shaping force in the Caribbean
(Dash 1989). Glissant, like Naipaul, stresses that in the Caribbean it is not
enough to reference landscape as a descriptor, but that: Our (Caribbean)
landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the
underside. It is all history (Dash 1989, 11).
Glissants underside therefore shares with Tuhiwai-Smith that there
are multiple and contested histories of the landscape that might be at once
subverted by and subversive of the totalizing forces of History. Michael
Dash, in his introduction to Caribbean Discourse (1989, xi) claims that
Glissant proposes the release from fixed, univocal meanings of the past,
toward a close scrutiny of the obscurities, the vicissitudes, the fissures that
abound in Caribbean history from slavery to the present. The implication
is that while critics may argue that a postcolonial reading of the
Trinidadian landscape might replicate some of the same problematics for
which Said has been criticized, it might also provide opportunities for the
recovery of different histories that unsettle the binaristic and dialectic
character of colonial discourse. My heavy reliance on historical context for
reading colonial representations in each chapter is therefore simultaneously

14

Introduction

an effort to turn the written texts and visual images back on these contexts
to question the givenness of the landscapes history to provoke its History.
The question that seems to be underwriting this discussion of
landscape in postcolonial discourse is how have different colonial subjects
come to be constructed and positioned vis--vis each other as natural
constituents of the landscape in the history of colonial nineteenth-century
Trinidad? This is linked to Selwyn Cudjoes (2003) concern about who
possesses the truth of colonial reality? Mitchell (1994, 29) remarks it is
not just the answer, but the question itself that generates a hopelessly
evasive, generalized and equivocal analysis. For Mitchell the quarrel is
already convinced that the landscape is the medium through which
colonial evils are veiled and naturalized, yet remains ambivalent about
whether this knowledge gives us any power (1994, 30). If we are to
consider Pratts and Martins direction about landscape as contact zone
defined through processes of asymmetrical exchange and inter-framing of
colonizer and colonized, then the question of possession I raise above must
be debated within the contestations and struggles of representation. As a
means 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 study
these considerations must be further inflected by a relatively recent
regionalist scholarly impulse in Caribbean postcolonial studies to which I
now turn.

Postcolonial Un/Re-mappings of the Caribbean

This study is situated in relation to a more regionalist installment in
Caribbean postcolonial studies that is concerned with elucidating the ways
in which the Caribbean was discursively shaped by and productive of its
encounter with Europe. This recent scholarship seeks to un-map
Caribbean-specific and related colonial discourse as part of a continually
re-defining decolonization project that reveals the constructedness of the
Caribbean, 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 part
on the discursive production of the Caribbean in colonial discourse have
each in their own way highlighted processes of naturalization,
denaturalization and renaturalization of the Caribbean landscape and
colonized peoples.