tending to our own plots
I am attending to three generations of cultural workers and theorists: those who witnessed the early stirrings of anti-colonial agitation (Claudia Jones); those who were born during the period of decolonization (Dionne Brand, June Givanni, Banyan filmmakers); and those video artists who have been active from the 1980s/1990s to the contemporary moment. I am interested in how their artistic strategies are also gestures toward a kind of sovereignty that has often been elided by both the masculinist imperial, and nationalist projects.
The project thinks expansively about narrative plot, turning to Sylvia Wynter (1971) who showed how Caribbean history and literature could be understood in the social and spatial arrangements between two interlocking and paradoxical terrains: the enslaver’s plantation, and the enslaved’s provision grounds. Through the prism of moving image production, I am asking, what is the relationship between the plot and time? Does a sustained engagement with film and video bend time towards liberatory means? Where and how do our artistic provision grounds exist alongside the culture industry’s plantation? What are the sites of engagement that are created by women, and how does the work coming out of these sites respond to but also transcend that which is being supported by nationalist cultural infrastructures? How is this work envisioning liberation, at once as a “becoming” and a state of “being”? (Hall, 1989).
Caribbean filmmakers are stewards of time, collaging temporality as they suture tragedy and possibility again and again. In doing so, plotting becomes a way of adorning, nourishing, tiefin’, traveling, jumping and bending time, and remaking centers of knowledge and power.
Theirs is an endeavor in futuring, and my aim is to weave time alongside them through image, word and sound.