Work for Final Critique

Research Statement

I intend for my work to open up a dialogue around the structures of power that exist on the island of Bermuda and that exist in other former colony islands. I am examining aspects of the island’s colonial history both on land and on the water, and drawing attention to specific narratives that have been altered and adapted to justify a continued colonial legacy. I am interested in the historic gaining of territories and how the European competition for power through possession to bolster their own country’s empires, shaped the past, impacts the present and lingers over the future of these islands and their independence.

My positionality as a British citizen who emigrated to the island of Bermuda seven years ago for employment, is pivotal in how I approach this body of work. I am first and foremost, seen as an "outsider" but my white privilege has made securing a teaching position on the island possible. I currently teach in a private high school that follows a British curriculum and teaches British history.

After relocating I quickly noticed the disparity of privilege and inequality across the island, owing to its colonization, and I found it troubling to ‘go on’ as normal in my daily life, existing in an ex-patriate world, where I could choose to not notice the injustices of these observations. My research practice aims to critique the relationship between colonialism and tourism and how the latter has returned domination to the colonizer, promoting histories of the British Empire through its tourism marketing.

Key Readings

I cannot simply choose the history of this place in which I now live or change how I arrived here but I am able to choose how to respond. The writing of Donna Haraway in Introduction: A kinship of feminist figuration has helped me to consider that there is already an existing structure of relations in this community yet I am able to attempt to make evident the historical markers through reconfiguration and repositioning of place in my work.

Haraway writes "I want to know how to inhabit histories and stories rather than deny them. I want to know how critically to live both inherited and novel kinships, in a spirit neither of condemnation nor celebration. I want to know how to help build ongoing stories rather than histories that end."[1]

[1] Haraway, D, Introduction: A kinship of feminist figurations, The Haraway Reader, 2003 p.6

A Glossary of Haunting by Eve Tuck and C Ree have highlighted some of the complexities of my own positionality to include aspects of both an outsider and the colonizer. Tuck writes "Yes I am telling you a story, but you may be reading another one"[2] and I draw attention to this statement as I seek to find a sense of belonging and community on the island through acknowledging my relationship to these histories and trying to refuse to replicate these structures in my own work and life.

[2] Tuck. E & Ree. C, A Glossary of Haunting, Holman Jones. S, Adams. T E, Ellis. C, Handbook of Ethnography, 2013 p. 640

A key quotation by Judith Butler in When Gesture Becomes Event offers the gesture as a performative device, something which has become a connective thread throughout my practice.

"I want to suggest that gesture, as a citational act, traverses the domain of language and performance, and that this dual sense of the performative proves important not only for understanding the dynamic of gender performativity, but for understanding how gesture, conceived as both citation and event, might also be understood as a critical practice that seeks to bring to a halt forms of violence accepted as quotidian."[3]

The concept of the gesture in these terms can be viewed as a shift and a way of my thinking or approaching this work, in the way that a gestural drawing is offering a ‘trace’ or a suggestion rather than a permanent mark onto a page.

[3] Butler, J, When Gesture Becomes Event, Inter Views in Performance Philosophy, 2017, p.178

Further Reading

Benitez Rojo, A The Repeating Island: the Caribbean and the postmodern perspective, Duke University Press (1996)

Carson, R, The Birth of an Island from The Sea Around Us, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York (1951)

Glissant, E, The Cry of the World from Treatise on the Whole-World, The Glissant Translation Project, Liverpool University Press (2020)

Kincaid, J, A Small Place, New York, N.Y: Penguin (1988)

Palmer, C, Tourism & Colonialism: The Experience of the Bahamas. Annals of Tourism Research, 21(4): 792-812 (1994)

Stratford, E, Baldacchino, G, McMahon, E, Farbotko, C, Harwood, A, Envisioning the Archipelago, Island Studies Journal, Vol 6, No. 2, Institute of Isnad Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada (2011)

Tropical is Political: Caribbean Art under the Visitor Economy Regime, Sept 21^st (2022)

https://www.as-coa.org/articles/americas-society-tropical-political-caribbean-art-under-visitor-economy-regime