Facing the Nation: Art History and Art Criticism in the Jamaican Context

In the opening comments for the 2000 Annual National Exhibition, Michael Cooke, then director of museums for the Institute of Jamaica, outlined his understanding of the role played by the arts on the island:

The work which is exhibited here today attempts in various ways to create a knowledge of this thing we define as nation. . . . We believe that it is of importance because it is part of the creation of an aesthetic of the nation—not merely what we see, but how we see, how personal, highly idiosyncratic visions are created within public fora and sourced in the communitas of shared experience.¹

Such nationalist assertions, traditionally associated with modernity, have regained currency in recent history as societies define themselves in relation to political, technological, and cultural globalization. As Cooke's statement suggests, in Jamaica the desire for more relevant systems to evaluate art practice has intensified, becoming central to the controversy surrounding the island's art institution. Presently, those who support an art historical narrative initiated in the 1980s and those who are detractors of this narrative, contest the country's cultural space, each offering their version of the tenor of Jamaican artistic practice. These antipodal positions are, however, problematized by transculturalization, a corollary of migratory peoples like Jamaicans, which frustrates attempts at making definitive statements about or assigning proper names to cultural activity. As a result the dialectic in Jamaica remains unresolved, and the descriptors of artistic practice at work on the island continue to be unsatisfying. However, by recognizing the hybridity of cultures formed by conditions both internal and external to geographical borders, rhizome theory as expounded by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari offers a way out of this incommensurable binary. Rhizome theory is a counter to linear histories that are often inscribed when nationhood is asserted in terms such as those professed by Cooke.

Writing in the early 1990s, the postcolonial theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah argued that third world cultural practice is constructed as an ever-evolving continuum rather than a concern, in the popular culture, with transcendence or space-clearing opportunities that are associated with poststructuralism or postmodernism.² It may be argued that under such conditions rhizome theory has little relevance in third world contexts, since as Appiah asserts such theories are ruminations of a minority intelligentsia and have little effect on the quotidian. However, the cultural impact of immigration, a trend that began in the late nineteenth century and reached pinnacles in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s in the Caribbean in general and Jamaica in particular, and now allows for considerations of a Caribbean diaspora, cannot be overstated. Moreover, while less than 10 percent of the world has access to computer technology, Jamaican contemporary culture reflects in part a technologically driven transculturation. The availability, for instance, of American cable television allows one to keep abreast of events in New York City or Miami without having to be in either locale. In the same vein increased access to the Internet permits one to sit at one's computer in London or Virginia listening to a live feed of broadcasts from Jamaica. Such possibilities contribute to the blurring of national boundaries, making fixed cultural categories such as third world, Jamaican, Jamaican artist, and Jamaican art indeterminate and the grand narrative that may incorporate these terms, inconsistent.

Writing in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari formulate rhizome theory as an alternative to linear genealogies or grand narratives reflective of the modernist position, and advocate a multidirectional dialogue on cultural formation. Metaphorically, the authors proffer the image of the tree, which develops hierarchically and vertically, to describe the metanarrative. This metanarrative, they argue, is "always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary state apparatus" rather than of the populace.³ In contrast, rhizome theory (patterned after the rhizome, the horizontal subterranean plant stem that...