Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

Recognized as Trinidad and Tobago’s “first Indo-Caribbean professional woman artist,” Wendy Nanan has produced a sophisticated and revealing body of work over the last four decades. In this paper, the author considers how key pieces from Nanan’s repertoire signal and respond to tensions and questions that emerge from Trinidad and Tobago’s experience of postcoloniality. Her Baby Krishna series of papier-mâché sculptures of the Hindu god, for instance, speak to both the problems and possibilities of creolization, and to the connection of cultural representation and production to the heritage of Trinidad’s plantation economy. Her beautiful collection of drawings of cricketers, meanwhile, offer an understated but powerful consideration of the postcolonial Caribbean masculinity, as they present affirmative representations of athletic homosocialism. Other works, such as those from her shows Independence Day and Books and Stupas, take up the notion of postcoloniality more directly, and she provides a complex viewpoint that is at once cynical and hopeful about Caribbean futures.