Repainting the Stifled Canvas: Awakening Personally and Culturally Relevant Artmaking in Postcolonial Classrooms

Abstract

This article explores the idea that teachers, even when aiming to implement culturally and personally relevant pedagogies, are subject to passing on colonial agendas and practices that stultify learning in art classrooms. I argue that even in self-governing, majority non-European societies, well-intentioned teachers can unintentionally perpetuate colonial educational agendas that narrow students’ learning, as well as the ideas students deduce about art, culture, and their roles in contributing to them. I focus on Jamaican and Anglo-Caribbean art classrooms, where many teachers and students have non-European lineages and a shared national heritage rooted in slavery and colonialism. I conclude the article by raising implications for how art educators there and elsewhere might avoid unconsciously engaging in neocolonial pedagogies, especially when teaching non-White students whose heritages are rooted in colonial oppression.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As a participant in the educational and cultural system on which this article focuses, I acknowledge that I have also been complicit in culturally unresponsive practices. My bias and positionality has been informed by my immersion in Jamaican and Caribbean visual and educational culture. However, even admitting this, I do not support the notion that there is “one right way” that authentic personal expression can look (i.e., having no visual resemblance to “formulaic” formalist exercises).

2 After Jamaica won emancipation from slavery in 1838, Jamaica became a pluralist society wherein a Black ethnic majority, referred to by Sherlock and Bennett (1998) as “African-Jamaican” (p. 16), evolved alongside a brown middle class—that is, non-Black, mixed, bi- or multiracial groups who, since slavery, were generally allowed more social, educational, economic, and professional privileges than the Black population. The worldviews and concerns of these two groups have historically been in tension with each other. The consciousness of Jamaica’s Black majority group was grounded in race (i.e., being “deeply imbedded in the island’s psychology and cultural DNA”; Palmer, 2014, p. 23), while the Brown middle class promoted a nonracial basis for moving forward as a nation after emancipation. This division is framed by Thomas (2004) as “ongoing tensions between race and nation” (p. 6) that continue to define Jamaica’s implicit struggle for a unified national cultural identity. “It has been the constant feature of social movements in Jamaica in the last hundred years, that while the leaders may define the movement in terms of national, class, or social goals, the people have invariably redefined it in terms of race” (Thomas, 2004, p. 6). An assumption of this article is that conflict has also factored into the contemporary questions: (1) What counts as an authentic postcolonial national culture (e.g., “Jamaican” or “Caribbean” culture)?; (2) Who gets to determine these cultures?; and (3) How are these cultures defined and understood within the nation or region (i.e., internally), and how are they promoted to external markets and populations?

3 In using the term “the Caribbean” here while discussing the “tourist gaze,” I acknowledge that while most English-speaking Caribbean islands (e.g., Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, and the Cayman Islands) are heavily driven by a tourism-based economy, the economies of other English-speaking Caribbean countries are not tourism driven. For example, Trinidad and Tobago’s economy is largely driven by the petroleum industry, and Guyana’s and St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ economies are generally driven by agriculture and mining.

4 I append to this statement that I do not support the notion that there is “one right way” that authentic personal expression can look. The “one right way” concept is associated with European paternalism and implies for me (1) the view that there is something inherently wrong with the way(s) that others who do not belong to the dominant or more powerful group do things—that is, usually persons or cultures that have been subordinated by another and (2) the imposition of a “standard” onto the other, which is meant to maintain control over the other and to try to remove, or at least severely reduce, the other’s agency, creativity, and potential for resistance. Despite this, I acknowledge that artworks, regardless of age, culture, and aesthetic exposure of their maker(s), can intentionally or unintentionally share stylistic and formal qualities with other artworks, whether this is as a consequence of exposure to other works made in similar aesthetic styles, or through consequence of the maker’s individual aesthetic purposes and preferences. Therefore, the artwork a student creates in response to deeply meaningful and personally and/or culturally relevant ideas could, in theory, have visual resemblance to the kinds of school art that in many ways reflect impersonal exercises whose products have been typically classified as “formulaic” school art.

5 Discussing open-endedness within the context of this examination, I preface the term “open-ended” with qualifying terms such as “somewhat” or “relatively” to reflect the idea that open-endedness is a subjective concept and can be widely interpreted. Given the context of the CSEC examination and examiners’ requirement to mark according to established criteria, for rating and moderation purposes, the examples I call open-ended are interpreted as being more open-ended than some of the other production paper prompts that appear very closed.

6 Critical consciousness (or “sociopolitical consciousness”) is defined by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) as a consciously developed awareness of inequities within the social power structure that allows students (and teachers) to “critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain [these] social inequities” (p. 162).