In discussing activists and thinkers like Fanon, Césaire and Memmi, the focus of our course has primarily been upon colonized intellectuals. Our understanding of their particular cultural contexts has consequently been informed through their relations and positions vis-à-vis these resources. I intend to move away from colonized intellectuals as a primary reference to the lives and experiences of the colonized masses and their reliance upon culture and religion as a means to resist their physical and psychic domination.
The aim of this project will thereby be to study how the very sites of colonial domination, for instance cultural/social institutions, also become the means of resistance. In employing religion and tradition as tools of defiance, the enslaved deny the accusations of calcification and stagnancy and instead reveal these institutions to be dynamic and adaptive in nature.
The aforementioned analysis will be traced through the study of Obeah practices. Obeah, as a religious practice had its roots in West African religions and was a synthesis of one’s natural, supernatural and social realms. Practitioners derived legitimacy through their access to and contact with spirits and an intricate knowledge of herbs and medicines that could cure or poison its recipients. Its reliance upon spirituality and nature as means of authority to heal, protect, and often condemn people redeemed a sense of authority in the enslaved populations and thus challenged the domination of the colonizers over them. Moreover, men and women of authority also had a pivotal role in organizing rebellions and garnering support through the proclamation of invincibility as a result of taking the oath.
In discussing direct physical combat, such as the Tacky Rebellion of 1760 fought under the command of an Obeah woman, Queen Nanny, as well as everyday resistances enabled through Obeah beliefs, like reproductive control and social capital for Obeah-women otherwise denied under patriarchal arrangements, I will highlight the adaptive nature of enslaved communities to negotiate power relations with their salve-masters. This stance will further be supported through the ability of enslaved communities to manipulate legislations that criminalize their religious practices.
Finally, my project is intended to take the shape of photomontages accompanied by a write-up. Photomontage was first employed as a tool of expressing political dissent under Dadaism (1915) and later Surrealism. Since I aim to highlight the resistances posed by enslaved groups to their domination, I believe montages to be a relevant art form that may complement the nature of my project.
Decoloniality and Decolonization 