White Skin, Black Kin: a Postcolonial Exposé of (white) Female Creole Identity

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“In the Caribbean we are all performers … we all try to act out the roles that our skin reads out to us” (Benítez-Rojo 236). As Antonio Benítez-Rojo observes in The Repeating Island (1992), because of the colonial plantation system’s resettlement and reculturization of racially diverse populations through institutionalized transatlantic slavery, the postcolonial Caribbean is a site of multi-layered discourses where white guilt / contrition and black retribution plague racial identity’s conceptualization.

My artistic practice specifically examines my identity as a white Creole woman. By tracing how gender relations in the Caribbean have been constructed and experienced by women through colonialism and patriarchy, I aim to negotiate an (alter)native cultural space for the former “female colonizing subject” (the white Creole woman) within a discourse which I propose as a “(white) postcolonial Creole feminism”. The contradictions implicit in this split subject position; that is, the materially privileged / domestically empowered colonizing subject with the marginalized / patriarchally oppressed female subject, are central to my project.

I am reclaiming the historical / colonial use of the cultural term, “Creole”¹, to more succinctly define (white) identity in the contemporary Caribbean. By doing this, I aim to complexify this identity as being unique from, though related to, (white) Western identity, through its intertwined historical bond with black identity. By proposing creolisation as a theoretical concept, I explore the hybrid identity of Caribbean whites and show that a shared geopolitical and cultural history can shape identity beyond the confines of the assumed racial / racist determinants in established Western theory.

Recognizing that white female colonial subjectivity has not been articulated within the site of black and third world feminisms or postcolonial studies where previously silenced black and racially “othered” voices speak about themselves and their histories, my project aims to give the white female Creole a voice in these discourses. By using this (white) postcolonial Creole feminist methodological practice to analyse eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material culture in the Barbados Museum and Historical Society’s collection (formal portraits, abolitionist caricatures, and texts), I construct a (slippery) theoretical space for the white Creole woman. Stereotypical portrayals of the lazy and cruel “plantation mistress” found in slave narratives and European travelogues documenting Creole life are critiqued by probing their “in-between” spaces. European historical assertions of the white female Creole as culturally inferior Other are also examined and marriage / slavery parallels (as outlined in Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s essay
, “Bodily Bonds” (1993)) are claimed as pivotal to understanding the shared relationships of Caribbean women.

My project also proposes the colonial sugar plantation in the English-speaking Caribbean as a metaphorical amphitheater in which the female Creole body was formally articulated and “staged”. In particular, I look at representations / portraits of Creole bodies (the actors), tools of torture (the stage props), and the plantation Great House and its furnishings (the stage setting), to facilitate a discussion of plantation life as a visual spectacle of power and race. The eighteenth-century cross-racial topsy-turvy doll is also examined as a powerful visual trope in that it binds together the Self and Other in one gendered body. Playing on hiding and revealing, this doll articulates the interracial dynamics / cultural hybridity that results from the close proximity of racial difference.

My visual practice negotiates a legitimate space for my own Creole voice. It offers a unique perspective for examining postcolonial racial identity and representation from the point of view of a white artist. While many contemporary artists address identity issues, racial identity usually only appears specifically in works by racially marginalized artists. Comparatively, white artists have failed to examine their racial identities as a site of privilege and their ownership of colonialism. Though grounded in the Caribbean’s historical / cultural specificity, my project points to the wider issue of white Western postcolonial guilt and aims to subvert the notion that colonialism’s effects are solely an issue of the Other.

1 I am using the term “Creole” to refer to someone born in the West Indies, without distinction of race. This term originated in the seventeenth century to differentiate whites born in the newly settled colonies from those of European birth. Despite their similar British ancestry, such a distinction was found necessary to assert their cultural difference owing to the creolisation of the native-born whites.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Joscelyn Gardner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.