All societies carry the burden of their historical past. The task entrusted on those who live in the present is to draw on the experiences, legacies and lessons if you like, to inform the present and as far as possible guide a vision for the future.

If colonisation has been responsible for shaping the colonized mind, then what must we learn from this past and how must we ensure that the present and the future are not overshadowed with its debilitating legacies.

Scripting ideas of a Caribbean sensibility through the academy, historians have erected solid cornerstones, as have archaeologists and socio-linguists, social scientists, literary scholars and writers, of both fiction and non-fiction.

All of these disciplines as they developed, have had in part, to create schools of thought and theoretical frameworks which were applicable to our specificity. Each has also contributed another lens through which we may view the region, some having to re-invent a voice. Kenneth Ramchand observed that “Caribbean Literature” had to find that grammar to speak to the people in the region.

In this research undertaking the task has been to locate the visual grammars of the images which have defined the region over the last 500 years. The theoretical assumption of the research is that writing is rapidly losing its social and ideological hegemony. As it gradually gives way to audio-visual media such as television and computers, our communication styles will increasingly come to match the sensory capacities and prejudices of these new technologies. By being proactive and anticipating these effects we can intervene in this process through the very same technology on which it draws.

Since 1996, digital photographs and slides have systematically been made from archival material in libraries, museums in almost all of the Caribbean territories and from repositories in United Kingdom, Spain, and The Netherlands.

An illustrated manuscript Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation, is now in press as the original research project which was conceived as a book. However, the research project lent itself naturally to electronic publishing, particularly in the form of a film documentary and is being translated into film. Video footage has now been added to data collection.

The expected outcome is the production of a six-part documentary series entitled A DIFFERENT IMAGINATION that are accessible to and which may be used by Caribbean lecturers and teachers at tertiary and secondary levels schools for the teaching of Gender and Development Studies, Cultural Studies, Visual Arts Programmes, Social Sciences, Humanities and Mass Communications. The product can also be marketed internationally for Caribbean Studies courses abroad and is geared for general public viewing both on television and in venues such as community centres and lecture halls.

One of the critiques of the exercise of reinventing the past narratives is that of the subjective intervention of the creator of such material. Of course this is true, but it is no less true of any historian who draws on a range of data and emerges with a selective reading of a period, or of a sociologist who abstracts a component of reality and scrutinises it under the sociological microscope. The same rules apply in the production of documentary film. It is one voice among many, drawing on similar methodologies of research and data gathering and grouping these to produce a coherent narrative.

There are no definitive answers produced. Each scholar, poet, painter, writer or documentary filmmaker is involved in work that reveals different prescriptions regarding Caribbean economy and social identity. The task of the academy is ongoing in this regard.

In essence the strengths of such an approach might be in raising new questions of the data we uncover so that we redefine the context and concept of development as it applies to our territories in the Region.

For example, the original peoples of the Caribbean have been logged into our histories through mariner’s reports and official documents, not through their original voices or even their language. We are left with relics to decipher the story of the first peoples who inhabited the spaces before the Europeans and all of us came.

Archaeological reconstructions of residential sites, burial grounds and artefacts of course reveal one picture, but what other sources are there available to help us imagine the Caribbean as a place which existed before colonization. If so how important is this in our reconfiguration of identity? Who then has rightful claim to land and territory? Is it those who predated us and “owned the land” a claim now made by the aboriginal populations of Australia and the native Americans of the north?

In Australia for example, the aboriginal culture of the past is already providing a defining cultural identity to this nation (albeit a contested one) an appreciation which began to take hold first through the popular appreciation of aboriginal art. This has now extended into many other spheres including environmental preservation.

The following images that we have gleaned from various sites provide us with other clues to how original peoples may have lived and worked in this region’s history. Is the representation of the Rupunini Indians a Neoclassical pastoral representation from the artistic imagination or a sketch of hunter-gatherer society drawn from life?

The Sevilla slab, one of many unearthed in Jamaica in Nueva Sevilla in the early twentieth century is of great significance as already signaling a ‘creole’ product since it is thought to have been the joint work of Arawaks working with a Spanish Craftsman. It is argued that these slabs represent one of the earliest found assimilations of “mimetic aesthetic of Renaissance Spain and the dynamic aesthetic of the Arawak religio-symbolic system of carving of zemis.”

In similar vein, the religious and gender belief systems of African populations brought to the Caribbean were denied its internal integrity, the yardstick of measurement being the monotheism of Christianity.

In the above illustration, James Phillipo, a Christian missionary to Jamaica in the early nineteenth century describes the African burial rights as heathen, just as the practices of Hinduism were once defined as pagan. How do we revisit these symbolic constructions of the past and rewrite a script that is more respectful of varied belief systems and thus respectful of difference?

One of the processes by which this can be done is by visually deconstructing the past and un-learning the symbolic order once inscribed. We must question who judged these belief systems as heathen and whose values are still residual in the contemporary understanding or aesthetic appreciation of these practices.

The presentation at the recent UWI Research Day forum was the first film in a documentary series entitled A Different Imagination. In addition, the presentation highlighted alternative use of images collected in this project which are being placed on a searchable Internet gender imagebase entitled Cultural Crossings, a project carried out in collaboration with Professor Edna Bay of Emory University, Atlanta, from her research in West Africa. Juxtaposing gender images of the Caribbean alongside those of West Africa for use by students and researchers in the region the project allows us to cross classify our visual data against those from the societies where forced migration from African originated, again posing different comparisons and questions for students and researchers alike to take us from the past into a present and future configuration of how we learn to see each other and ourselves.