Anita Waters in her book Planning the Past: Heritage Tourism and Post-Colonial Politics at Port Royal, (2006), lays out what for her is the enduring problem that has plagued Caribbean historiography. This problem is characterized by a kind of historical amnesia, a “loss of collective memory” as Glissant has said (1989). Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) has identified this absence of memory as, in actuality, a silencing of memory. That is, the history of the islands is not merely written by elites; they create an historiography founded upon their own prejudices, privileging not only documents and archives, personages and events that they have ultimately created but that these are the only kinds of “history” that are considered legitimate.
As a response, but working necessarily within this structure of power, stands the following general rejoinder: The laying claim and repossessing of history on the part of the marginalized. This is not, as in some spaces, a divide of classes or levels of education alone, but always one of color. Walcott has called the response to colonial history the “literature of revenge” which, he says, “yellows into polemic”
(1998: 37) Both Walcott and William A. Green (1977) seem to find only a grim dichotomy available for writers of Caribbean history. On the one hand, the re-morseful or arrogant imperial histories, on the other, a rather shallow history of resistance that sees all people of the Caribbean who are not white as African and
whose actions stand as object lessons in opposition. I would argue that, given the course of Caribbean independence movements and identity politics from the late-1950s through the 1970s, the latter form of historiography has won out. Green adheres to neither of these two poles; nor do I. Indeed, there may be many histori-ans in the region who do not, but the legacy of this polarization in the writing of history has become the power structure from which a Foucauldian “truth-effect”
has emerged. This “truth-effect” emerges as the rather broad stereotype of the colonial world, the plantation house, et cetera. It derives, of course, from the plan-tation’s very real role in the enslavement and oppression of generations of Afri-cans, not to mention the indenture of poor whites, Asians and South Asians. How-ever, the role of sugar and the plantation economy in the post-emancipation period and the cultural changes that can be traced through the society of the emancipated could provide a different kind of heritage.
Anthropologist Peter J. Wilson once wrote that Caribbean people have only the land and themselves with which to identify and that “until such time as a Car-ibbean culture is recognized with pride by the people themselves, much of the burden of their identity must be placed on land” (Wilson 1973: 224–225). This is enormously problematic in Barbados, although it may be somewhat true for other Caribbean spaces. As quite a few historians have noted, land in Barbados has never been readily available to free people without means. For free black and colored as well as poor white, gaining access to land was extremely difficult. Furthermore, the visible landscape of Barbados is a constant reflection and reminder of this state of affairs. Sugar-cane is no longer the economic engine it once was, but the land is absolutely dominated by it. Its presence is a continual reminder of the past. The cane fields themselves are heritage. Given that sugar-cane is still standing and that land is both difficult to get and expensive, it is no wonder that building a con-sistent identity, as Wilson has said, based on land, is more difficult than, say in Jamaica or Trinidad. A heritage industry based around monuments to those who did own the land, presented largely in a vacuum of not only the social consequenc-es at the time, but also of subsequent developments in the history of the island is not going to resonate with the general public. Only public support can really sus-tain a heritage industry.
To reiterate: The legacy of Colonialism and the kind of historiography that was useful in the postcolonial moment has established a certain orthodoxy about slav-ery and the plantation that makes an industry based on heritage vslav-ery difficult.
There can be little flexibility in the narrative that continues to see sugar and slavery in only one light. Richard Hart, a strong example of the post-colonial historian of resistance, says quite clearly in his introduction to Slaves Who Abolished Slavery:
Blacks in Rebellion (2002) that his impulses were political, growing out of the work-ers’ movement in the 1930s. Yet the role of the workers in sustaining the sugar industry is a subject of far less public attention, even if there have been excellent histories of it. Similarly, investigations into how others saw the plantation house in the 20th century, how it was used, who else besides whites may have owned them,
may lead to public exhibitions about the other side of the great house; not simply rooted in the era of slavery but well beyond it. As Joanne Melish (2006) has said in her study of problems in representing slavery in the United States: “Acknowledg-ing the past presents the problem of reconcil“Acknowledg-ing dissonant but fully developed interpretations.” Though this seems quite clear to historians and anthropologists working with the most “difficult” histories, in the case of Barbados and other parts of the Caribbean, it is compounded by the sense of urgency that comes from need-ing to expand and diversify the tourism economy. Why? It is because any heritage industry must be built on a notion of heritage that resonates with significant num-bers in the society. The separation between those who control the reins of gov-ernment and those who might control or stand to benefit from the industry of heritage is wide at critical points in Barbados, perhaps too wide at this time.
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