Creole in the Archive

In this episode,  Erica Moiah James talks with Roshini Kempadoo, media artist, photographer, and scholar, whose book Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence, and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, has been critical to Erica's work in theorizing the Caribbean archive. Roshini discusses working in the archives at the University of the West Indies, and the particularity of archives in Trinidad and Guyana. They also discuss a common theoretical model in African diaspora scholarship, critical fabulation, which originally indicated the ethical demand for scholars working within archives marked by colonial violence and absence to use tools of fiction and imagination to return embodied existence to individuals, reduced to numbers. Yet this tool of critical fabulation has taken on a life of its own. Erica and Roshini discuss the complications of working in colonial archives and think about the possibilities of limits of presence and absence within these archives. 

Transcript

Erica Moiah James 
I am Erica Moiah James, an art historian, curator and associate professor at the 
University of Miami. I was previously the founding director and chief curator of 
the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas when it was founded in July of 2003. 
Over the next five episodes, I will discuss Portrait of a Young Woman and reflect 
on what it means to search for the name of a historical individual in the archive. 
What tools might I, as a contemporary art historian, use to uncover the possible 
history and life of the woman who remains unnamed? In this process, I'm using 
the traditional methods of art history to think about how art history as a 
discipline has historically and structurally made it both difficult to name 
unnamed figures of color within historical portraiture, and also has used 
representations of Blackness such as this as evidence for claims to deny the 
presence and vitality of Black life in the early modern world.

I do not know if I will ever find this particular woman in the archive, but in my 
search, I make a claim that this work is both necessary and that it begins to do 
reparative justice within a discipline that has all too frequently settled for 
assuming absence in the archive instead of doing the essential historical work to 
illuminate Black lives.

In this episode, I will talk with Roshini Kempadoo, media artist, photographer, 
and scholar whose work Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence, and the 
Location of the Caribbean Figure has been critical to my own work in theorizing 
the Caribbean archive. Roshini discusses working in the archives at the University 
of the West Indies and the particularity of archives in Trinidad and Guyana. We 
will also discuss a common theoretical model in African diaspora scholarship, 
namely critical fabulation, which originally indicated the ethical demand for 
scholars working within archives marked by colonial violence and absence to use 
tools of fiction and imagination to return embodied existence to individuals 
reduced to numbers. Yet, this tool of critical fabulation has taken on a life of its 
own, and Roshini and I discussed the complications of working in colonial 
archives, and we think about the possibilities of limits of presence and absence 
within these archives.

For African diasporic people, paper archives that might tell you where and from 
whom you descend enter the abyss of slavery and the Middle Passage in 1870, 
the year Henry Louis Gates marks as the temporal border of history and archive 
for Black people in America. This is because the 1870 census was the first to 
record the majority of African Americans as individuals and as citizens with two 
names, rather than as property. Before then, most Black people in the United 
States, if not the entire Americas, were listed as, “slave inhabitants,” according 
to their racial configuration, age, and gender, usually without names, or in rare 
cases, a single name. The Middle Passage and subsequent enslavement became 
a kind of abyss where Black people's generational ties to Africa were severed, 
and they emerged on the other side unnamed and recorded as property rather 
than as persons. In terms of archive, one can think of it as the place where Black 
people, as the artist Lavon Bell recently reminded me, “begin to lose their 
memories.” 

A careful study of Portrait of a Young Woman explores the potentialities of nontraditional archives and methodologies when transatlantic art histories imbricate with Black representation. In dialogue with Roshini Kempadoo’s Creole in the Archive: Imagery Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, my study draws on material culture as archive of tangible and immaterial histories. It also engages technical art history and good old-fashioned connoisseurship, with all of its limitations, to grapple with the possibilities of knowledge. At times, I 
speculate, and I should emphasize that at times I speculate more than I can 
prove. But I also resist fabulation, critical or otherwise, and follow where the 
research takes me.

This is interesting to me historically because in that same pivotal decade of the 
1990s, in the first few pages of the now transformative text, The Black Atlantic as 
Counterculture of Modernity, Paul Gilroy relates a story that has always intrigued 
me. He glosses Edmund Burke's discussion of the sublime, where he equates, 
“darkness with Blackness, linking them to the skin of a real-life Black woman.” 
Just seeing this Black woman produces what Gilroy describes as “a sublime 
feeling of terror” in a boy whose sight had been restored surgically. Unable to 
apparently distinguish black objects from Black people and black objects and 
people from darkness, when the boy encounters a Black woman on the street, 
he recoils in horror, thinking as he sees her that his blindness was returning. I 
find this story fascinating for many reasons, but mostly because of the ways it 
collapses signification across ontology and materiality into an association that 
makes darkness into evidence of blindness and unseen. It renders darkness and 
with it, Blackness as negative space, rather than as a kind of chiaroscuro, as seen 
in a Caravaggio painting, for example, where darkness as Blackness remains alive 
with the potential that someone or something can emerge from it.

To equate perceived darkness with racialized Blackness is quite a feat, but in a 
strange way, describes the ways in which representation of Blackness, 
specifically in works like this from the 18th and 19th centuries, have been read 
for a very long time as willful, dark, or blind spots in plain sight. Dismissed as 
type, non-person, sign, thing, the representation was gutted of humanity and 
seen not as possibly human, but as a tool. The represented Black body carried 
little independent meaning outside the epistemic frame of the painting, wholly 
intended for the white subject’s emergence or as evidence of artistic mastery.
Please join me today as I talk with Roshini Kempadoo about the archive and its 
possibilities for reimagining historical and contemporary Afrodiasporic histories 
across the Atlantic world. Recalling an experience of the West Indiana special 
collection at the University of the West Indies and Augusta and Trinidad, 
Kempadoo notes the ways in which formal institutional archives imbue 
legitimacy to the university's claim as, “the ultimate preserver of knowledge.” In 
her book on Caribbean archives, Roshini ponders on what Jacques Derrida 
describes as the “archival lithic drive,” or how through archival form one 
witnesses, “an impulse to remember and be reminded of an experience or a 
drive to produce and sustain archives, with which to recollect and preserve a 
memory externally.” 

Post-colonial archives and time, if not form, like the one housed at UWI Saint 
Augustine codify official history according to a colonial system of value and 
organization. It is a system built to preserve what was stored in the memory 
banks of the colonizer, rather than the colonized, even as it sought to address 
society's archival needs post-independence. At its foundation, the archive 
valorizes loss built into the colonial archival system. Now, let's turn to my 
discussion with Roshini about the work of historians and artists to address this 
erasure.

Thank you again for agreeing to do this short conversation with me about your 
book in relation to my project, because I was just really encouraged by your 
work. Even though I'm not talking about photography, I think some of the 
principles that you explore, especially in the beginning, in your introduction, that 
sort of really shaped your research, were really important to me and I was really 
drawn in when you recounted your experience going into the archives at UWI. It 
may seem like a simple thing, but I wanted you to talk about that—not only as an 
experience, but as a trigger to question. Because it's a personal sort of 
experience, right? You're in there, you're thinking of art, you know, going into 
the archive, et cetera. But it sort of says something or gets something going in 
you, and to me, it kind of mimics my experience or encounter with this pastel, 
with this painting, at the St. Louis Art Museum all these years ago now. And I 
wanted to know if you could possibly not only recount that event, but talk about 
what it triggered, as I mentioned, but also how it may have informed your idea 
to quote unquote “Creolize the archive.” 

Roshini Kempadoo 
Thank you for that question. 

Yes, I guess my concern and my issue with the archives and going into UWI was I 
really thought about, and it brought home to me the level of vigilance and 
surveillance that was associated with a body of material that actually is about my 
ancestors, right? So, I was constantly being surveilled in a kind of a soft way, and I 
remember distinctly that being the case in going to UWI. So, you go into this 
amazing kind of brutalist building that's one of the few air-conditioned buildings 
on campus. That's almost this kind of absolutely safeguarding. And so, for me it 
triggered thinking about Derrida's work, thinking about the archive and the 
monolithic kind of structures of modernism, if you like, that actually, so many big 
libraries and institutions are.

And then of course, you're being checked over. The people are looking at your 
bags and stuff before you go in and going back out again. And I think I'm 
reminded of that kind of level of, and for me what it triggered was: why have we 
in the Caribbean got archives that are actually housed and structured in this 
way? Because the one thing about my project is about going to Trinidad and 
looking at the archives there. So, it was not concerned with being able to find out 
everything about visual archives of Trinidad, which you could easily do in a 
colonial archive here in the UK of course. And so, traveling there and writing 
about that experience was really important for me to kind of think about, in a 
kind of more embodied response, how you encounter the archive and how you 
might think about that.

So, the three elements, if you like, that I was thinking about for the book were 
obviously the informal and formal archives, the formal ones being something like 
the University of the West Indies and this West Indiana collection; thinking about 
embodied research, thinking about the kind of the research journal as an active 
kind of response to encountering archives; and thinking about the work of 
contemporary Caribbean artists as a kind of a counterbalance to the historical 
material.

Erica Moiah James
That's fantastic. And of course, I use that as permission to do everything and 
anything, because I felt really inspired by that in multiple ways. And one of them 
was, of course, to look outside of that archive, to not sort of rest on the authority 
of that archive or use it. Go in but not let that be the final story or even the 
primary way that I enter the work. And for me, your work gave me permission to 
look at non-paper archives in relation to the Caribbean. And as I mentioned, I'm 
working with fashion, cloth, and dress, but I find that in my wider art historical 
practice, I'm also looking at gesture, movement, sound, storytelling, language, 
music, but language formation more broadly because that's kind of generative in 
the Caribbean and trying to find ways to really let that lead historically. And to 
sort of think of those kinds of non-paper archives as giving them equal weight in 
conversation with those paper archives that we really protect in the Caribbean. 
It's actually quite hard to get into many of these archives. You really have to have 
permission of the highest of the high oftentimes to get in, go in, and your 
physical experience with that brutalist building, I just found that really a 
metaphor for so many things. Let's put it that way. 

Roshini Kempadoo 
Yes, and then the kind of mausoleum of Eric Williams, this other space as well.
But I mean, I guess for me, the book was written in 2016, and since then, there's 
been an enormous amount of really interesting writings around how we think 
about the archives. And I guess one of the things that I would probably push and 
start thinking about, and we have been doing this in discussions over here 
around creating an interference project, is to think a little bit about, you know, 
how else do you bring about a critical engagement with the material, right? So 
that it's not only looking at the object itself, but also thinking about the 
contextualization of it the way in which we might think about as you as I have 
kind of conceptualized a contiguous archive, how it sits alongside other things 
and other matters, and in a way, an almost an affective touch to the material, 
which I think is quite important. And so, that for me becomes quite embedded in 
the idea of what I thought about and conceptualized as Creolization, having 
explored its genealogy through the writings of people in the Caribbean, writers 
and critics of the Caribbean, to think through in relation to the archives.

Erica Moiah James
I remember I was in London last November, I think, and I went to see Women in 
Revolt and I was reminded once again that you're a fantastic artist, and I know 
your work ended the show. I'm like, oh my goodness, Roshini, that's great! But, 
I'm really curious about what you just said in relation to your work as an artist 
using these archives in your practice, but also my interest in, and you touch on 
this as well, this idea of fabulation that has become quite interesting and it's 
something I'm really thinking about and wanting to in a sense, engage and push 
against—not in a negative way, but just in terms of its relationship with the 
archive. I think a lot of people, a lot of scholars or young scholars, believe that it's 
a repudiation of the archive. And in the sense oftentimes, at least in the US, I've 
seen it used as an excuse not to go into the archive. And I'm wondering, you 
know, I think of fabulation as a very important aspect of archiving, especially in 
relation, and research, in relation to the Caribbean, but in conversation with the 
archive. And if it's just about fabulation, then you're an artist, not a researcher.
Tell me I'm wrong!

What do you think about that relationship between archive and fabulation as an 
artist, but also as a writer, a researcher, and a scholar? 

Roshini Kempadoo 
I mean, I think absolutely, you've got to the crux of the issue, right? That there is 
something about the kind of historical, factual accuracy of history that actually, 
the authoritative voice, the factual kind of truth regime that we actually 
understand history to have and this kind of fabulation that is beginning to creep 
in as a critical engagement with it. Which is I think is quite an interesting one, 
and we're at a very difficult moment, particularly around more digital stuff of 
kind of fake truths, et cetera. So, we're in that kind of digital moment, which is 
also quite difficult. I would say that there is every way in which memory work or 
artistic work that actually recalls in a more poetic way and includes this is, a kind 
of a more extreme form of fabulation that I think as long as it's actually identified 
as that and it's recognized as that, then I think that that's not a problem. 

So, for me, there is something every way in which a value could be accrued to 
having material poetic fabulation around a historical material or historical object. 
And in fact, if I think about your piece that you’re looking at, which is the Portrait 
of a Young Woman. You know, there is an incredible way in which that 
imaginative stroke, if you like, brush stroke, is embedded into that piece. And I 
quote Marcus Wood, who talks a little bit about the imagination and the idea of 
that being absolutely at the heart of a historical narrative and a historical 
narration. So, for me, there is every way in which that needs to be brought into 
question at times. But that's not necessarily going to be the—I don't use it or nor 
would I encourage it as a way of not going to the archives, as a way of not 
understanding the kind of information, the meta narrative that goes with that 
object. Right? Because that is an important one to work from and to disrupt in a 
way, and to bring a critical encounter to it. So, I would say that these things can 
sit alongside each other. I think they have different ways in which they can be 
contextualized and problematized in both equal measure on both sides of the 
thing.

So, I hear what you say, and my book, to me, was about a kind of a historical 
uncovering. But on the other hand, I equally concluded at the end of it. I thought 
about it, I was thinking, I don't really want to know these archives too much. I 
have them thrown in my face all the time. I understand the slave ledgers, and I 
can see how the slave is constituted as a kind of a commodity in the slave 
records. But actually, if we know that they're there, why wouldn't we spend time 
with looking at a more, an evocation of a liberated slave, for example.
Right? So, there is, for me, one of the journeys that I took was thinking, well, 
what kinds of material are we still looking at? Right? Do we still need to be 
looking at these records in that way? Do we need to move from them quite 
quickly in order to kind of think about other narratives such as freedom, 
resistance movements, and I think you'll find, in my book I wrote about the union 
formations and resistance in that way. And can we think about also, the 
limitations of a, kind of a canon of endorsing that factual material more 
problematically and in more complex ways. So that's a very long answer.

 
Erica Moiah James
No, no, no, no, because I think you speak to methodologies, right? That are really 
important I think, in this moment, you know, in this contemporary moment. And 
I find myself, as an art historian and a fallen artist working in this contemporary 
moment and looking back at the 18th century, that there are some things I have 
to grapple with, you know? I mean, in terms of my current eye, concerns that I 
have that may not have been a concern of the period. You know, and I think 
you're speaking to some of that sort of non-linear experience of the researcher in 
a generative way, I mean, methodologically you're in a sense pointing to different 
ways of dealing with archives, but also, in our contemporary moment with the 
need to sort of at times fabulate, I guess. But is this all, you know, we're in this 
moment of 144 characters, you need your soundbite. If you had to describe what 
you understood as creolizing the archive when you wrote the book in 2016 
versus how you see that process methodologically for research today, how would 
you sort of summarize that approach, that work?

Roshini Kempadoo 
Yeah, no, it's a good point. I mean, I guess for me it's kind of taking at its heart 
the idea of a Creole language that has a kind of a communication process to it. 
But on the other hand, has made up language in it, has an opacity to it, has a 
kind of a flexibility in its grammatical makeup, and I'm thinking of Kamau 
Brathwaite’s work that actually is about embedding, to me, the process of 
creolization. So, if I think about architecturally, looking at, you know, being in 
Trinidad or in Guyana, you know, it's the idea of something in process that I think 
is really important and the relational space to things.

So, I think for me conceptually and methodologically, I would think as you are 
quite rightly doing it as well, is to look at the material of what's to be creolized, 
right? What material would we take up and what material would contribute to 
what we would call a creolized visual archive, right? And for me, you know, of 
course I kind of looked at some of the things that were in the formal archive, but 
equally so, I felt that I needed to accrue value and give value to a family album, 
to a high street portrait of glass plates, for example, that de La Costa had. So, for 
me, there's something about the choice because one of the things certainly living 
in England for us is this enormous, vast tomb of historical colonial material. And I 
would say that we have to park some of it, right? So, I think the idea of 
methodologically selecting different sets of material, for me, is quite important to 
thinking about that point of creolizing. And then I guess for me, the other thing 
that I found reflecting on my book and my writing was to think about the kinds of 
writing about the object.

So, for me, immediately after I published that using semantic, semiotic kind of 
visual analysis, I was very struck by Tina Campt, introducing me to listening to 
images, right? Or affective kind of resonances of doing that. And I also thought 
about, you know, Christina Sharpe's work or Saidiya Hartman’s work where 
there's this fabulative kind of fabulation that's going on as well. And so, for me, 
I'm thinking about the different styles of writing and the different registers that 
could happen, and I really love your contributions on social media that actually 
are, you know, they're kind of personal, they're informative, they kind of make us 
laugh, and those to me are just as attractive and just as valid in terms of relating 
a historical kind of sense of anti-racist, mis historical sensibility that I think I'm 
trying to get to. So, for me, styles of writing. And I'm having this battle with 
somebody at the moment. I'm producing a chapter, and I've put in a poetic kind 
of reflection, if you like, and observation taken from my own artwork, and the 
editors don't really want to see it or they want to see it differentiated in the text, 
in the academic text. So, there is something for me that about a really 
problematizing the academic text in a way that actually allows us to pause, to 
introduce a different way of thinking and analyzing a piece of work.

And I'm thinking about Lola Flash's work when she was looking at an image that 
she gave us the factual information about the image, and then she moved away 
from it and reflected on that image. So, for me there's that kind of styles of 
writing and pushing a type of analysis that could really introduce us to a more 
poetic form, but doesn't really leave the historical factual accuracy, right? It can 
actually run it parallel, for example. It can run it through somehow. I don't know. 
I mean, we need to think more imaginatively about how we do that, right? 

Erica Moiah James
Yeah, I completely agree. In terms of humanities writing and art, historical 
writing, I think, when I proposed having co-writers of chapters for my holder 
project, you know, I received pushback on that. I think we really do need to be 
more open to forms of writing, forms of delivery, forms of engagement, you 
know? That are outside of the sort of typical ways of doing things to sort of open 
up the image. I think that in some ways the object or the image, they are doing 
different work.

Roshini Kempadoo 
I agree. 

Erica Moiah James 
And I think we need to attend to that. It needs different methodologies, different 
ways of engaging it I think to, in a sense, put it in this moment we're in, you 
know, to make it contemporary—the reflection, even if the object itself is 
historically grounded.

One of my last questions, I want to talk about the Caribbean image, particularly 
of the female image, the representation of women in particular historically, but 
also in this moment we're in. I spend too much of my time looking at the ways in 
which this portrait shows up, you know, the different sort of scenarios and places 
and conversations she's showing up to sort of illustrate, you know? And it's really 
interesting. I mean, she's completely out of context in most cases, which bothers 
me as an art historian. But I'm curious about desire and the image and, you 
know, contemporary desire, and our need or wanting to sort of connect with 
images of Black and Brown people that are historically based or made along—I 
don't know what's the right language—but I'm wondering about your own work 
with the image as an artist and you tend to use, you know, archival work, archival 
images, but how do you sort of think of time; movement across history; how the 
modern intersects the contemporary; and this is a wrench, and what do we do 
with, you mentioned AI earlier, what do we do with this sort of contemporary 
desire I sense in the work of an artist like Rodell Warner. You've seen his recent 
work? 

Roshini Kempadoo 
Yes. Yes, I have. 

Erica Moiah James
And lots of people really love these images that he's created and they have a sort 
of historical feel the way he sepia tones them, the way he, you know, there's 
something really interesting happening and these are all Caribbean based 
imagery. And I'm curious—that’s a very muddled question—but I'm curious 
about time, modernity, we always talk about non-linear time in the Caribbean, 
and I'm curious about the ways in which the image of a Caribbean person sort of, 
you know, moves through time in our contemporary moment, and also, this sort 
of contemporary desire for those older images that we see, ironically, in the 
response of AI generated images that look historical now. I mean, I don't know 
what's going on but set me straight as they say! Make it make sense to me! 

Roshini Kempadoo 
I'm not sure I get, I mean, I guess one of the things that's happened in my 
situation and in conversation with people like Ingrid Pollard, and Rodell's work, is 
the move away from the archive, right? So, the move away from the use of 
historical material, because in a way you can see my work has emptied it out. So, 
the visual language of the archive has been, it begins to be removed and at the 
moment, they're showing stuff from the eighties, which still has it in there.
But actually, my latest works are really interested in looking at the woman 
environmental activist and how do we actually evoke her, right? And to me, that's 
about a kind of a more dynamic kind of suggestion of a figure who may be doing 
something and including a kind of a more fabulous approach to it.

So, I'm at the moment researching and looking at this descriptive software that 
can describe who she might be and what she might be doing. And just to see 
how far I get with it. It's a very interesting journey, but it's actually one that I 
guess I've moved much more into this idea of what if and what are the 
possibilities? So, thinking about a more futuristic space of where we might be 
and how we might get out of the situation we're in. And for me, history and the 
past is not doing that at the moment in a way that's useful for us to imagine our 
ways out of this crisis we're in—or multiple crises we are in.

So, I guess my idea of really thinking through in a more imaginative space for the 
future in a positive, in a more equitable way, where there might be issues of 
racial justice happening, is what I'm grappling with and what I'm trying to kind of 
present in my work. And that's because I think all of us need to think about how 
we actually survive and how we actually think about a different future. 

Erica Moiah James 
Oh, that's encouraging, Roshini. It really is! Exactly.

Roshini Kempadoo 
Do you know what I mean?

Erica Moiah James 
Yeah, I think that's the artist in you because I keep wondering, you know, isn't 
there another model other than capitalism? I mean, why can't we imagine our 
way out of the situation we're in. We sort of see this in so many aspects of our 
lives right now, but we just seem to just be going along. That power of the 
imagination—I want to read Ruha Benjamin's book on imagination now because I 
think we need to come back to that because somehow, and I see it in our history 
as a, I mean on a very, you know, on a disciplinary level, on a professional level, 
but I also see it in our larger life. This sort of reluctance to sort of imagine 
differently, you know, we want to stick to these forms, we want to, you know, 
uphold these ways of doing things that are just not working and are not 
addressing our lives today, you know, and what we're facing today and in a 
productive way. And I don't know, maybe I'm still naive, but I think a lot of that 
sort of imagination needs to be reflected in scholarship and in the academy itself. 
I mean, if we are not doing it, oh my goodness, where is it going to come from? 

Roshini Kempadoo
Where is it going to come from? 

Erica Moiah James
Exactly.

Roshini Kempadoo 
And I think that that's why I, you know, I was really struck by Christina Sharpe's, 
10 Manifesters for a Beautiful World. You know, this idea of thinking, trying to 
think through some of these problematics. So, at the moment, I'm just trying to 
imagine the woman figure and a Caribbean figure as somebody who can think 
those things through, right?

Erica Moiah James 
Wow!

Roshini Kempadoo
And somebody who is, you know, and to me there is something that's already 
there in literature that sort of does that. And I don't understand why we can't do 
that through the visual register in a way. And we have now the possibility of the 
tools as you know, so many digital artists like Rodell or Ebony Patterson, Sharon
Alonzo, for example, or you know, Nadia Huggins, where they're thinking through 
what we, how we might be presenting ourselves. As more dynamic forms that 
have a strength to combat and take up imaginative space in the future. So, I 
guess that's for me is where I'm, and it has been spurred on by this real interest 
in institutions at the moment in the UK, and elsewhere, of really relooking at 
historical timeframes. So, the 1980s is being looked at again, you know?

Erica Moiah James 
Yay!

Roshini Kempadoo
And these are all really great for 50 or 60 something year olds who have work 
and exhibit it. But in a way, we cannot really rely on that work that was done in 
the eighties as being fit for purpose for where we are now, right? So, I guess it's 
trying to put the visual arts work and imagery into a 2024 scenario and thinking 
that through. And I don't necessarily have the solution at all, but I think it's about 
starting from that point. It's quite important. 

Erica Moiah James
Yeah, but I think we can end in the spirit of Kamau Brathwaite, who you 
mentioned, because you don't have to have the answers. He would say, just keep 
trying, just keep going at it, just keep imagining, and one day, you'll get to where 
you need to be. 

Roshini Kempadoo 
Absolutely.

Erica Moiah James
Following Roshini Kempadoo’s call, I want to see Portrait of a Young Woman
using the material archive of the sitter’s dress, jewelry, and specifically, her 
cotton head tie, to mark her as a Black Caribbean Creole woman. I want to walk 
with and push against Kempadoo’s claim that “the Caribbean figure in art is not a 
representation of a physical person or the essence of some authentic subject. It 
is much more than that. It is evoked from the history of the Caribbean as a space 
of migration. The figure is an imagined being rather than representative of an 
individual or group.” Beyond the imagined or immaterial built being, I want to 
attend to the life of a work of art beyond authorial intent while arguing that the 
representation of a physical person from the Caribbean, in this case, the 18th 
century, is indeed much more than that. Thank you for joining me. 

Caro Fowler 
Thank you for listening to In the Foreground Conversations on Art and Writing. 
For more information and links to the resources referenced in this episode, 
please visit clarkart.edu/rap/podcast. The Clark's Research and Academic 
Program would like to thank Erica Moiah James for her collaborative role in 
crafting this special iteration of the podcast.

In the foreground was co-created and produced by Caroline Fowler and Caitlin 
Woolsey, with editing by Caitlin Woolsey and Chase Bradshaw,4 sound mixing by 
CJ Dero, an additional support from Shawnette Smalls and Noelle Derksen. Our 
intro music is by lightchaser on the music experts used in this. Special season are 
by Tomas Aquino and Maria Isabel Trinidad from the Smithsonian Folkways 
compilation music from the Dominican Republic Volume two, the Island of 
Espanola, released by Folkways Records in 1976 with more details about the 
songs featured available on our podcast webpage.

The Clark Art Institute sits on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people. 
We acknowledge the tremendous hardship of their forcible removal from its 
homelands by the colonial settlers, a federally recognized nation. They now 
reside in Wisconsin and are known as the Stockbridge-Munsee community. As we 
learn, speak, and gather at the Clark, we pay honor to their ancestors past and 
present, and to future generations by committing to build a more inclusive and 
equitable space for all.