Creole in the Archive

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.