episode 4:
creole in the archive
“At its foundation, the archive valorizes loss built into the colonial archival system."
In this episode
Erica Moiah James talks with Roshini Kempadoo, media artist, photographer, and scholar, whose book Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence, and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, has been critical to Erica's work in theorizing the Caribbean archive. Roshini discusses working in the archives at the University of the West Indies, and the particularity of archives in Trinidad and Guyana. They also discuss a common theoretical model in African diaspora scholarship, critical fabulation, which originally indicated the ethical demand for scholars working within archives marked by colonial violence and absence to use tools of fiction and imagination to return embodied existence to individuals, reduced to numbers. Yet this tool of critical fabulation has taken on a life of its own. Erica and Roshini discuss the complications of working in colonial archives and think about the possibilities of limits of presence and absence within these archives.
TRANSCRIPT
Roshini Kempadoo's research, multimedia and photographic projects combine factual and fictional re-imaginings of contemporary experiences, histories and memories. Roshini has been active in documenting Caribbean communities, events, rights issues, and individuals in the UK and the Caribbean. She was instrumental in setting up Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers in the late 1980s, and worked as a documentary photographer for Format Picture Agency (1983–2003). She has recently completed the Spring 2019 International Artist-in-Residence @ Artpace, San Antonio, US creating the artwork Like Gold Dust. She is Reader with CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media), at Westminster School of Arts, University of Westminster. She is represented by Autograph ABP, London.
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