Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation: A critical analysis of political discourse in the Caribbean 2021002692, 2021002693, 9789027208613, 9789027259981

Table of contents :
Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation
Editorial page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Table of contents
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 Swept by the Kamlamania
1.2 Caribbean political discourse: A blind spot
1.3 CDS in the postcolonial Caribbean: The master’s tools?
1.4 CDS as postcolonial critique: A way forward
1.5 Structure of the book
1.6 A short note on terminology
Chapter 2. Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago
2.1 A short socio-political history
2.1.1 Afro-Indian relations in colonial Trinidad
2.1.2 Politics and Afro-Indian relations in the post-independence era
2.1.3 The 2010 election: Kamla Persad-Bissessar and The People’s Partnership
2.2 Ethnicity, identity and nationalism
2.2.1 “The African and the Asian will not mix”?: Between plurality and creolization
2.2.2 Callaloo or pelau?: The discursive construction of the postcolonial nation
Chapter 3. Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse
3.1 Contemporary political discourse: A case for visuality and critique
3.2 The discourse-historical approach
3.3 Social semiotics as critique
3.4 Multimodal CDS in action
3.4.1 Textual and visual data
3.4.2 Operationalizating concepts in multimodal analysis
Chapter 4. The leader
4.1 Strategies of positive self-presentation
4.1.1 The mother rhetoric in the 2007 campaign
4.1.2 From “mother” to “woman” in the 2010 campaign
4.1.3 Kamla and the women in partnership
4.1.4 Kamla as the angel of Trinidad and Tobago
4.2 Strategies of negative other-presentation
4.2.1 “Manout” and the discursive construction of the out-group
4.2.2 “The Emperor has no clothes”
4.2.3 Patrick Manning, Eric Williams and the “Inferiority complex”
4.2.4 Trinidadian Creole as a strategy of demontage and bonding
Chapter 5. The party
5.1 Main strategies of nomination and predication
5.1.1 The coalition as a symbol of postcolonial modernity
5.1.2 The People’s Partnership as a “United Force for Change”
5.1.3 From party politics to coalition politics
5.1.4 Showing the backstage: The “United Force for Change” ad campaign
5.2 Building the multi-ethnic coalition
5.2.1 Deixis and strategic vagueness
5.2.2 The People’s Partnership as the big river
5.2.3 Visual strategies of ethnic inclusivity
Chapter 6. The nation
6.1 Building the national “in-group”: Evolving narratives
6.1.1 The 1960s: “One Mother”
6.1.2 The 2010s: “Diversity is Strength”
6.2 Building a common political past: Teaching history as action
6.2.1 “Brothers of the Boat”: Colonial memory and inclusiveness
6.2.2 Beyond slavery: Counter-narratives of resistance and empowerment
6.3 Proud achievements and historic moments: Narrating history as myth
6.4 Exploring patterns of interdiscursivity and intertextuality
6.4.1 Religious discourse as national discourse
6.4.2 Recontextualization as adaptation: “I Have a Dream”
6.4.3 Recontextualization as relocation: Building a common national body
6.4.4 Recontextualization as appropriation: “Forged from the Love of Liberty”
6.4.5 From “Yes We Can” to “We Will Rise”: Celebrating the multi-ethnic nation
Chapter 7. Concluding remarks
7.1 Summary of findings: Unpacking the Kamlamania secret
7.2 Broadening horizons: Towards a postcolonial CDS
7.3 Some final thoughts
7.4 Epilogue: Kamla 2010–2015
References
Index

Citation preview

discourse approaches to politics, society and culture

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation Eleonora Esposito

93

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (DAPSAC) issn 1569-9463

The editors invite contributions that investigate political, social and cultural processes from a linguistic/discourse-analytic point of view. The aim is to publish monographs and edited volumes which combine language-based approaches with disciplines concerned essentially with human interaction – disciplines such as political science, international relations, social psychology, social anthropology, sociology, economics, and gender studies. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac

General Editors

Jo Angouri, Andreas Musolff and Johann Wolfgang Unger

University of Warwick / University of East Anglia / Lancaster University [email protected]; [email protected] and [email protected]

Founding Editors

Paul Chilton and Ruth Wodak

Advisory Board Christine Anthonissen Stellenbosch University

Michael Billig

Loughborough University

Piotr Cap

University of Łódź

Paul Chilton

University of Warwick

Teun A. van Dijk Universitat Pompeu Fabra,

Barcelona

Konrad Ehlich

Free University, Berlin

J.R. Martin

Louis de Saussure

Jacob L. Mey

Hailong Tian

University of Sydney University of Southern Denmark

Greg Myers

Lancaster University

John Richardson

University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia

Luisa Martín Rojo

Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Christina Schäffner Aston University

Volume 93 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation A critical analysis of political discourse in the Caribbean by Eleonora Esposito

University of Neuchâtel Tianjin Foreign Studies University

Joanna Thornborrow Cardiff University

Ruth Wodak

Lancaster University/University of Vienna

Sue Wright

University of Portsmouth

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation A critical analysis of political discourse in the Caribbean

Eleonora Esposito University of Navarra

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/dapsac.93 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2021002692 (print) / 2021002693 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0861 3 isbn 978 90 272 5998 1

(Hb) (e-book)

© 2021 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

To the Memory of my Mother Fiorella di Martino (1957–2019)

Table of contents

List of figures

ix

List of tables

xi

Acknowledgements Foreword

xiii xv

Chapter 1 Introduction1 1.1 Swept by the Kamlamania  1 1.2 Caribbean political discourse: A blind spot  5 1.3 CDS in the postcolonial Caribbean: The master’s tools?  8 1.4 CDS as postcolonial critique: A way forward  12 1.5 Structure of the book  19 1.6 A short note on terminology  21 Chapter 2 Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 2.1 A short socio-political history  23 2.2 Ethnicity, identity and nationalism  39 Chapter 3 Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 3.1 Contemporary political discourse: A case for visuality and critique  51 3.2 The discourse-historical approach  54 3.3 Social semiotics as critique  59 3.4 Multimodal CDS in action  62 Chapter 4 The leader 4.1 Strategies of positive self-presentation  80 4.2 Strategies of negative other-presentation  99

23

51

79

viii Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Chapter 5 The party 5.1 Main strategies of nomination and predication  112 5.2 Building the multi-ethnic coalition  126 Chapter 6 The nation 6.1 Building the national “in-group”: Evolving narratives  138 6.2 Building a common political past: Teaching history as action  142 6.3 Proud achievements and historic moments: Narrating history as myth  147 6.4 Patterns of interdiscursivity and intertextuality  151 Chapter 7 Concluding remarks 7.1 Summary of findings  165 7.2 Towards a postcolonial CDS  170 7.3 Some final thoughts  175 7.4 Epilogue: Kamla 2010–2015  177

111

137

165

References183 Index205

List of figures

Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8. Figure 9. Figure 10. Figure 11. Figure 12. Figure 13. Figure 14. Figure 15. Figure 16. Figure 17. Figure 18. Figure 19. Figure 20.

Trinidad and Tobago – ethnic composition (TTSCO 2011) Electoral map – 2007 Election Trinidad and Tobago (Psephos Election Archive) Electoral Map – 2010 Election Trinidad and Tobago (Psephos Election Archive) Different levels of theory in DHA (In Wodak 2008) Recursivity in DHA (In Meyer 2001) Selected discourse-topics in Persad-Bissessar’s speeches (after Reisigl and Wodak 2015) Dimensions of analysis applied to Persad-Bissessar’s speaking notes “Leading Ladies” – picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet “We Will Rise” – picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet “Silky Serenade” – picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet “I’ll be there” – picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet “The Villafana”- Picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet The Do So ad from the People’s Partnership 2010 campaign Sequence of frames in the opening credits of the United Force for Change video ad Intradiegetic gaze in the United Force for Change video ad Final handshake in the United Force for Change video ad Front cover of the People’s Partnership manifesto 2010 Presentation of candidates in the People’s Partnership manifesto 2010 Frames from the We Will Rise video ad Final frame from the We Will Rise video ad

24 38 38 56 68 70 75 91 93 96 98 100 101 123 125 125 133 136 160 161

List of tables

Table 1. Table 2. Table 3. Table 4. Table 5. Table 6. Table 7. Table 8. Table 9. Table 10. Table 11. Table 12. Table 13. Table 14.

Share of votes and seats in general elections in Trinidad and Tobago (2000–2010) (Psephos Election Archive) 37 Venue and date of Persad-Bissessar’s speeches in the 2010 election campaign 64 Multimodal data from the People’s Partnership campaign 66 Discursive strategies and devices in DHA (in Reisigl and Wodak 2015) 72 Taxonomy of representational structures (in Royce 1999) 76 Taxonomy of interactive meanings (in Royce 1999) 77 Taxonomy of compositional meanings (adapted from Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) 78 Persad-Bissessar’s self-presentation as mother-politician in the 2007 Chaguanas speech 81 Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s picong against Manning 106 Nomination and predication strategies in the KPB 2010 corpus 115 Frequency of personal pronouns in Persad-Bissessar’s campaign speeches 127 Social actors in King’s I Have a Dream and Persad-Bissessar’s Chaguanas speech 154 The discursive construction of a common national body in King’s and Persad-Bissessar’s speeches 155 Intertextual references to the national anthem in Persad-Bissessar’s Chaguanas speech 158

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of a long journey that, luckily, I did not have to take alone. Mentors, colleagues, friends, and family members walked with me as I wrote these pages between Italy, the United Kingdom, the Sultanate of Oman and Spain. I have drawn on the knowledge, support, and kindness of so many over these past years, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of them. Yet, any shortcomings remain my responsibility alone. It is no exaggeration to say that this book would have never happened without the help and encouragement of Ruth Breeze, my selfless, hard-working, and energetic mentor at the University of Navarra. Not only has she pushed me to take my manuscript out of the drawer, but she has been unflinchingly generous in her counsel, inspiring and supporting me at every step. I am indebted to Johnny Unger, for his patient readings of the roughest drafts of this work and the unyielding academic support he gave me during my year as visiting PhD student at Lancaster University. I thank Anton Allahar for the inspirational insights he shared with me on politics, ethnicity and democracy in Trinidad and Tobago, and for reassuring me that “there is nothing like an ‘impostor syndrome’ when it comes to committed scholarship”. I want to express my gratitude to my colleague and friend Majid KhosraviNik for unfailingly believing in my research and for encouraging me to be, always and unapologetically, critical. Heartfelt thanks go to Carolina Pérez-Arredondo for her endless, sisterly support. Together with John Heywood and Kristof Savski she has been the best housemate and friend that I could ever hope for, lightening the load of doctoral research with scrumptious food and comic relief. I am grateful to my colleagues and friends Giuseppe Balirano, Antonio Fruttaldo and Antonio Compagnone for constructive comments and well-needed distractions over countless espressos and pizza slices in the busy street cafes of our beloved Napoli. I thank my colleague and friend Francesco L. Sinatora, who persuaded me that my COVID-19-induced lockdown in Newcastle upon Tyne was actually the best time to write this up, or fare i pani, as he likes to say in a baking metaphor. I thank my friends and colleagues in the Sultanate of Oman, where I lectured at Sultan Qaboos University. Angioletta Ciuffreda, Taz Al Shaibani, Mounira Hejaiej,

xiv Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Mickael Joseph, Marco Schifano, Abdul Gabbar Al-Sharafi are only some of the many people who touched my heart in the two beautiful and dense years I spent in Muscat. I thank the #GDM for our twenty years of friendship. For always being on the other side of the phone across the global time zones. For defusing everything. For helping me to stay grounded and being there to share the best and worst moments of each other’s lives. I am grateful to my dearest friend Eduardo Valles Galmes. For believing in me so much that I started to believe in myself too. For sharing a safe space for the most brutally honest conversations. For holding my heart when I needed it the most. But, above all, I am deeply and eternally grateful to my father Michele and my mother Fiorella. This book exists because my parents gifted me with the warmth of a home where I could grow at my own pace, where there was always dinner on the table, vinyls to play and a drawer to ‘steal’ a few coins for ice-creams and magazines from. This book exists because my parents encouraged me to dream big and aim high. I was the first member of my whole extended family to get a university degree, let alone a PhD. This also meant I elbowed my way through my university years, since being a Professoressa was a suitable job for the girls from the good neighbourhoods, the ones where you can see the Gulf of Napoli from your living room window. This book exists because of the long afternoons I spent in my childhood room, with my mother helping me with my school homework. She instilled in me her patience and humility in learning, her strong sense of determination and duty, her commitment to growth. As my studies progressed, she would keep me company in my room anyway, brewing coffee and staying up late in solidarity while I read. My success, her ornament. My mother Fiorella grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in the outskirts of Napoli, in a small house dominated by a massive asbestos factory. From the shy and stuttering youngest child of an unsupportive family, she blossomed into one of the strongest, most generous, life-affirming and wholehearted women that I have ever met. As we travelled, laughed, and grew up together, my mother taught me everything I needed to know in life. She taught me about feminism as a practice to live by, persuading me that few things are more urgent in a woman’s life than getting a sound education, a driving license, a good job, and a credit card with her name on it. She taught me about resilience in the face of the deepest darkness, as she battled with poise an incurable, asbestos-induced lung cancer that took her breath away too soon. She taught me about loving beyond measure, and it is to her ever-present and ever-bright memory that this book is dedicated.

Foreword Teun A. van Dijk When Eleonora Esposito invited me to write this preface for her book on political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago, I had just spent 4 months in that country. A remarkable coincidence, and one of the many reasons to gladly accept the invitation. Another personal reason was that my first visits and lectures in the Americas in the 1970s took place in Puerto Rico, another island-nation of the Caribbean, followed by many other visits, both for tourism as well as lectures and conferences, to other parts of the region until the first conference in the Caribbean – after its foundation in 1995 – of the Latin American Association of Discourse Studies (ALED) in Santo Domingo in December 2019. In other words, there were many personal reasons motivating to learn from Eleonora Esposito’s book about politics and discourse in Trinidad. But these were merely a personal pretext for the more relevant academic reasons. First of all, together with other esteemed colleagues in Latin America, Eleonora Esposito had just published a unique edited book about discourses in Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the main interests of my work. Moreover, in that book she included a crucial chapter on a campaign of a Caribbean commission on reparations for slavery, colonialism and racism against the United Kingdom, France and the Netherland, a form of resistance within the domain of my last books on antiracist discourse. That same book also featured a chapter on the Chilean student movement by my brilliant former PhD student Camila Cárdenas (together with Carolina Pérez-Arredondo). Whereas these are still secondary academic reasons to read Eleonora’s book with special interest, there are even more relevant scholarly reasons to write this preface, such as its framework of Critical Discourse Studies, in general, and the perspective of the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA), founded by Ruth Wodak, as well as the Social Semiotics as presented by Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen and others, in particular. The first major contribution of the book, therefore, is its presentation and application of these approaches in (multimodal) CDS, especially also because for the first time this happens in a study on discourses in the Caribbean. This is also the reason

xvi Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

why this study is one of the few monographs that connects CDS with a postcolonial framework, two critical approaches unfortunately developed independently. It is within this broad scholarly framework of different approaches and methods, that this book offers a unique case study of the successful campaign discourses of lawyer and politician Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who won the 2010 elections, and the first woman to become Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. Characteristic of the DHA approach of this study is not only the detailed analysis of these discourses, but also a systematic account of the historical and political context of these elections, the politicians, the candidate as well as Trinidad and Tobago as a nation. The analysis at the same time is an ideological analysis in that it carefully examines the multimodal and textual polarization between the positive self-presentation of Kamla Persad-Bissessar, leader of the United National Congress (UNC) and her new coalition of People’s Partnership, on the one hand, and the negative other-presentation of incumbent Patrick Manning of the dominant People’s National Movement (PNM) party. This discursive polarization at the same time indexes the historical, political and ethnic polarization between the East Indian-Caribbean and the African-Caribbean segments of the population defining many aspects of everyday life in Trinidad, explained in great detail in this book. Beyond the personal and political polarization and opposition between the party leaders and the parties, the book more broadly examines the discursive expression of the nation, its identity and its past – other prominent topics of a DHA approach. Besides the usual linguistic aspects of discursive polarization, Eleonora Esposito pays special attention to the analysis of the multimodal aspects of election campaigns, such as calypso music, songs, videos, images, flags, buttons, posters and much more. At the same time, the analyses show that CDS still needs to develop notions and methods far beyond linguistic and multimodal approaches prevalent in the field today. Discourse, and especially political discourse, in still barely explored ways, expresses, indexes and reproduces political cognition and power for which at the moment we only have impressionistic categories or abstract notions of political science. As is the case for all areas of discourse studies, broad multidisciplinary cooperation with the cognitive and social sciences in this case is imperative. Systemic analytical detail in this book is based on a sophisticated theoretical framework consisting of an impressive number of references in discourse studies and other disciplines, to which this book makes an original contribution. More specifically, Eleonora Esposito’s book contributes first of all to the study of political discourse. Secondly, it is a unique discourse analytical contribution to Caribbean studies, until now dominated by the social sciences. Thirdly, the detailed analysis of the discourse and campaign of Kamla Persad-Bissessar and her leadership is a

Foreword xvii

valuable contribution to the study of gender and politics. And finally, as emphasized by Eleonora Esposito herself, the study persuasively advocates the necessary integration of Critical Discourse Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Indeed, much CDS so far has largely focused on Western Europe, the USA and Australia, and barely touched an important region such as the Caribbean, and thus may correct its ‘North-Western’ bias by taking into account the ideas, results and perspective of Postcolonial Studies.   

Teun A. van Dijk Center of Discourse Studies, Barcelona September 2020

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1

Swept by the Kamlamania

It is often said in the Caribbean that politics, just like cricket, is a game of glorious uncertainties. In January 2010, Siparia MP Kamla Persad-Bissessar probably surprised even herself at the extent of her sweeping landslide victory over Couva North MP Basdeo Panday, as they were both competing for the leadership of the United National Congress (UNC). Iconic trade unionist of the Trinidadian sugar belt and UNC founding leader since 1989, Panday was nothing short of a political stalwart. Fond of telling his supporters “if you see me and a lion fighting, feel sorry for the lion” (Loubon 2010), Panday managed to become the first person of East Indian descent to hold the office of Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1995 to 2001. Many thought that it would be a political suicide to challenge Panday at that level, and in fact, the campaign for internal leadership came to be one of the most bruising ones that Persad-Bissessar ever had to face. Not that she was a political novice: born in 1952 into a Hindu Brahmin family in rural Trinidad, she had served as MP for the Siparia constituency since 1995. Many of her accomplishments she owed to Panday himself: he had appointed her as Attorney General and Minister of Education during the UNC’s first stint in office. She even acted as Leader of the Opposition in 2006, after Panday was convicted of failing to declare a bank account in London and eventually imprisoned. Yet Panday had always refused to resign his seat, even in the lead-up to the 2007 general election, when he was still recovering from the bank account scandal, and it was clear to many that Persad-Bissessar would have been a better leader for the UNC. On the eve of those very 2007 elections that the UNC was bound to lose, Persad-Bissessar famously quoted Bob Marley’s song in what has been dubbed her No Woman, No Cry speech, as she dug in against the treatment from Panday and stated she would no longer allow herself to be trampled underfoot by her male colleagues. In order to prevail in the 2010 UNC internal elections campaign, Panday engaged in an aggressive smear campaign centred on Persad-Bissessar’s personality: in an infamous declaration, he stated that Kamla certainly had “a place in politics” but she “was not ready to lead” because of an “awful weakness” that made her

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Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

“vulnerable”, hinting at an alcohol addiction (Ramdass 2010). This rumour would prove to be so pervasive that Persad-Bissessar would be often called to dismiss it publicly in the years to come. On her side of the campaign, Persad-Bissessar made it clear that she was “not anybody’s political dulahin” and certainly not Panday’s anymore (Boodan 2009).1 On January 24th 2010, she was appointed party leader with 13,493 votes to Panday’s 1,359, becoming the first female leader of a major political party and leader of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago (Ranjitsingh 2016). Meanwhile on the opposite side of the House, Patrick Manning was being grilled by the media over rising crime and corruption allegations in the middle of his second term as PM. The last straw came with the UDeCOTT scandal, named after the government agency established to carry out the development of many large-scale, costly and apparently opaquely procured building projects. Back in 1987, Manning had been appointed as the fresh face of the People’s National Movement (PNM), the longest-serving and oldest active political party in Trinidad and Tobago, largely supported by the Afro-Trinidadian population. His leadership was now being questioned, as he was ruling the country from his palatial residence quickly labelled by the local press as the Emperor’s Palace. Manning dissolved the Parliament on April 9th, 2010, after a threatened vote of no-confidence. With a General Election announced to be held the following month, the recently appointed UNC leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar suddenly became the first woman candidate for prime ministership in Trinidad and Tobago. The following six weeks saw the advent of a social phenomenon quickly labelled as Kamlamania by the local media. Surrounded by a growing sense of euphoria and widespread support, Persad-Bissessar rallied the country, engaging in a slick campaign that capitalized on the electorate’s dissatisfaction with Manning and the PNM, focusing on unity, anti-corruption and anti-authoritarianism. With Kamlamania spreading like wildfire, Persad-Bissessar compacted the opposition against Manning’s PNM in a new coalition party called the People’s Partnership. An impressive number of both East Indian and African political forces joined the UNC in the People’s Partnership coalition, encompassing the Congress of the People (COP), the Movement for Social Justice (MSJ), the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and the Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP), ready to forge unity out of a long-standing ethno-political divide in the country. Many trade unions, environmental and women’s NGOs also aligned with the People’s Partnership, resulting in a broad-based, multi-ethnic formation that Manning could have hardly anticipated. It is a game of glorious uncertainties, after all.

1. Hindi word for ‘bride’.



Chapter 1. Introduction

On the evening of May 24th 2010, the People’s Partnership defeated the incumbent Manning and managed to snatch a whopping 29 seats out of the 41 in the House of Representatives, even in constituencies that were traditionally considered PNM strongholds. Persad-Bissessar was elected as the seventh Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and was eagerly saluted as the political figure that could finally be able to “give meaning to a new political culture in T&T, a country too long stuck in the mud of race-based and men-led politics” (Fraser 2010) – a change that, at least on paper, she had all the numbers to deliver. Against “race-based politics”, Persad-Bissessar brought to power a new coalition party comprising political forces and figures associated with both lower- and middle-class African and East Indian groups. This, in itself, was a major novelty in a postcolonial country where these two main ethnic groups had come to represent two ready-made constituencies in the context of a colonially inherited, Westminster-style Parliament. While both political parties had sought to broaden their purview, most Afro-Trinidadians had been supporting the People’s National Movement (PNM) and most Indo-Trinidadians supporting various East Indian-majority parties, such as the United National Congress (UNC) or its predecessors. In a country characterized by such a high correlation between ethnic background and political affiliation, elections had largely been serving as “the critical arbiter in adjudicating the rival claims by the main ethno-cultural communities for power and privilege” (Premdas 2004: 19). Among the two parties, the African-based PNM had largely prevailed under the leadership of the charismatic Father of the Nation Eric Williams, governing through several elections for an unbroken thirty years. As a result, Persad-Bissessar was only the second person of East Indian origin to hold the PM office in 48 years of independence and the People’s Partnership was only the second coalition to win an election, in an ethno-political system where coalitions have historically been rare and short-lived. Against “men-led politics”, Persad-Bissessar celebrated an authentic string of firsts. She became the first female PM in the history of Trinidad and Tobago, having been previously appointed as the first woman leader of a major political party and the first female leader of the opposition. Upon her election, Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar joined the ranks of the women leaders in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean, including trailblazer Dame Eugenia Charles in Dominica (1980–1995), Janet Jagan in Guyana (1997–1999) and Portia Simpson-Miller in Jamaica (2006–2007; 2012–2016). But in order to join those ranks, Persad-Bissessar had to navigate a social, cultural and political system where all forms of gender discrimination are constitutionally prohibited, yet gender roles are still markedly influenced by traditional colonial and patriarchal structures and by the persistence of several structural and cultural barriers to women’s access to political power and effective leadership.

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4

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Persad-Bissessar succeeded in doing “something few women, and no Indian woman, had ever done in politics globally. She came into power independently and on her own terms with no family connections to legitimize her name” (Hosein 2010). In order to prevail, she had to overcome the “patricentric Hindu cultural ideas” (Gilkes 2010) in her predominantly East Indian political party, ideas that founding leader Basdeo Panday incarnated to perfection. As such, her impending election was seen by many a victory for all women in Trinidad, and saluted as the beginning of a shift away from masculinist, male-dominated politics towards a more equitable society. Persad-Bissessar’s six weeks of political campaign represent the main timeframe of this book, which retraces her journey to victory. With Persad-Bissessar’s unprecedented political success as its starting point, this book is informed by two main, different yet enmeshed, aims. On the one hand, this book aims at exploring the discursive and political strategies behind Persad-Bissessar’s election as PM. In her 2010 campaign, Persad-Bissessar had to engage in a multi-levelled discursive construction of identities, positively defining her role as the first woman PM candidate in the history of the country and legitimizing her coalition solution to political tribalism. Focusing on a vast array of meaning-making resources for political advertising, such as election speeches, video and printed ads as well as official portraits, the analysis aims at showing how Persad-Bissessar broadened her electorate not only by presenting a carefully engineered multi-ethnic coalition party but also by discursively positing an ideal inclusive identity space and advocating a politics of inter-ethnic harmony in the country. In this respect, Persad-Bissessar successfully presented herself as a new leader, of a new party, for a new nation. On the other hand, this book is characterized by the broader aim of representing a call for more critical discursive attention for contemporary political, institutional and media discourses from the Caribbean. With the 2010 People’s Partnership campaign as a case-study, this book explores the potential of a critical multimodal approach to Caribbean political discourse, drawing on the tradition of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) (Reisigl and Wodak 2015), integrated with a Social Semiotic approach as developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), and enriched in the light of the postcolonial critical imperative. As such, the next sections are dedicated to theoretical reflections that are aimed at mapping political discourse from the Caribbean as an understudied area of research across the Social Sciences (1.2). Prior to a necessary problematization of its application in postcolonial socio-political contexts (1.3), this book hopes to introduce the reader to the great potential of CDS as a postcolonial critique in the Caribbean and beyond (1.4).



1.2

Chapter 1. Introduction

Caribbean political discourse: A blind spot

The half millennium of European colonialism and imperialism has shaped the world in ways that defy our imagination. The collective loss to humanity caused by the colonial enterprise is beyond measure, as it wiped out countless languages, cultures, traditions and ways of life. Entire continents were restructured through war, genocide, slavery and racism: new borders were drawn, new power balances were created. In particular, the world’s economy was reconfigured under the rubric of inequality, with major effects and consequences still framing structures of underdevelopment, state fragility, ethnic conflicts and migratory flows in today’s world. While colonialism was globally systematic in putting in place practices of normalized control, domination and exploitation fuelled by shared underlying premises, it also came to be shaped in very different configurations and modes of subordination across the world. Within the broader colonial system, compared to the butchered African continent or the abandoned Indian Raj, the Caribbean experience was uniquely characterized by massive migration flows – both coerced and free – that gave life to what the Jamaican linguist Frederic Cassidy (1959) described as an unparalleled “complex human mixture” of Amerindian, European, African, East Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern people. Not only did these diverse people arrive in the Caribbean, but they stayed and changed its face, transforming the Archipelago into a region where “many different people, value systems and logics cohabit in such a limited space” like nowhere else in the world (Henke 1997: 43). As a result, the metaphorical imagery of the Caribbean Archipelago as one of those skeins of yarn impossible to fully untangle has been around for so many decades, and has been upheld by so many eminent scholars in the field, that it has become almost an axiom. As a former colonized area that is highly racially, culturally and linguistically diverse, the mainstream definitions of the Caribbean largely highlight “its fragmentation; its instability; its reciprocal isolation; its uprootedness; its cultural heterogeneity; its lack of historiography and historical continuity; its contingency and impermanence; its syncretism” (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 1). As Benítez-Rojo (ibid.) points out, the real paradox consists in the fact that these distinctive features work both as definitions of the Caribbean and as challenges to its definition at the same time, “an unexpected mix of obstacles and properties”. From this perspective, it is somewhat unsurprising that the tangled skein of yarn has established itself as a topos in discourses on and from the Caribbean, and yet it turns out to be a shortcut to a commonplace that is too often an empty place, where little is said about the actual ontology of this plural and fragmented Archipelago. To some extent, this is because dealing with the unique configuration of history, identity and politics in the Caribbean inevitably entails dealing with complexity.

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The utmost past and present multifariousness of the region triggers the academic hybris of creating order out of chaos, and at the same time puts to the test the academic toolbox usually employed to systematize and historicize the political, economic, social and anthropological dynamics of our life-worlds. The Caribbean as it appears today, shaped by a monumental man-made colonial mess, has come to represent both an epistemic limit point and a “theoretical hotbed” (Munasinghe 2006: 550), thanks to its power to challenge scholarly dogmas and resist conventional methods across the Social Sciences. And yet, it is by trying my luck with that terribly tangled skein, not being the first and certainly not the last to attempt this enterprise, that I came to write this book. Since the 1950s, there have been many and diverse scholarly attempts to investigate the complexities of Caribbean life, cultures and practices. However, for a combination of concurrent reasons, the critical analysis of political discourse from the Caribbean has come to represent an authentic blind spot across the field. On the one hand, Caribbean Linguistics, and Caribbean Studies more largely, are yet to explore the potential of a critical discursive approach. On the other hand, Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) are guilty of not having devoted enough attention to discourses from the Archipelago. One of the few, if the not the only, attempt available in literature is attributable to Lloyd Waller (2006), who had aimed at drawing the attention of Caribbean social scientists towards Fairclough’s Dialectical Relational approach for the study of discourse and society in the Caribbean. Still, the huge potential of a systematic and rigorous analysis of the discourses shaping Caribbean social life remains largely unexplored. This section explores how this blind spot came to be, while the following ones discuss the challenges and possibilities of CDS as a theory and methods to critically account for the ethnic and national power dynamics in the postcolonial Caribbean. The linguistic landscape of the Caribbean is as multifaceted as its social composition, with language users managing a complex interface of Amerindian, European, Caribbean creole as well as immigrant and religious languages. Notwithstanding an ongoing process of dramatic language loss over the past five centuries, there are at least seventy surviving languages in the Caribbean region. Some of these languages are very ancient, such as the twenty-three heritage Amerindian languages that have resisted extinction and death, but there are also at least twenty-three recognizably distinct Creole languages that were created in the area as a result of colonial encounters (Ferreira 2012). In particular, these fascinating and complex processes of language creation and linguistic creolization have absorbed the undivided attention of Caribbean linguists over the past 60 years. Countless studies have been conducted in the subfield of Creole Linguistics (or Creolistics) to determine each language’s genesis, typology or structure, analyzing the phenomenon from a linguistic and socio-historical viewpoint (Devonish 2010). Up



Chapter 1. Introduction

until the 1960s, creole languages had usually been reserved a “half-blood treatment” (Dwivedi 2015) and pictured as departing from (and, as a consequence, deforming and breaking) higher, European languages (Holm 2000). Largely under the impulse of Caribbean thinkers, writers and poets from the 1950s and 1960s, Creole languages have undergone a process of refashioning and the Euro-centric hierarchical model has been long abandoned. However, the long history of controversy over “the definitions of pidgins and Creoles and the specific criteria that distinguish them from other languages and each other” (Winford 1997: 1) shows no signs of abating. In particular, at the heart of the debate is the quest for a model on how to account for the genesis of a Creole, and to what extent it is actually different from its lexifier language, giving life to competing “universalist”, “substratist”, and “superstratist” hypotheses (Kouwenberg and Singler 2008; Lefebvre 2004). These formal and typological debates have come to largely monopolize the field of Caribbean Linguistics, to the point that in her inaugural lecture at the University of the West Indies entitled The Future of Caribbean Linguistics, Professor Silvia Kouwenberg (2011) envisioned the future of the field by exclusively highlighting the need for even more theoretical models of language structure and language contact in the Caribbean. The study of the phenomenon of linguistic creolization in the Caribbean is indirectly related to the second major strand of Caribbean linguistics, which is more applied in nature, namely Language Policy and Planning. Answering thorny questions like is Creole a Language? has major implications in mediating between social structures and forms of talk on the creole continuum in Caribbean societies. Language ideology, in fact, informs crucial decisions on which language should be taught and learned at school, which one should be only spoken or also written, and which should be used in more or less formal settings, including government administration and official documentation, and in the country’s media. At least in the Anglophone Caribbean, most governments still operate in the context of general non-acceptance of Creole as an appropriate medium of instruction in educational institutions, especially at higher educational stages (Thomas 2014). While issues and debates in Creole Linguistics and Language Policy have kept linguists focusing on the Caribbean busy, a rather Western-centric attention on political, media and institutional discourses from the Euro-American zone has characterized the research agenda of most (Critical) Discourse Studies scholars. To start with, we must acknowledge the nature of CDS as predominantly, albeit not exclusively, Anglophone. Major U.S. American political figures who came into the limelight in the past decade (such as Barack Obama and Donald Trump), as well as highly debated political processes (the controversial Brexit above all), seem to have capitalized the interest of Anglophone discourse analysts. At the same time, it would definitely enrich the field and its related debates if more CDS scholars took into account that English is the official language of politics and government in 58

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sovereign states around the world. A lot is happening, by means of the English language, all over the world. Examples of this are studies emerging sparingly from Africa or the Indian Sub-Continent, employing a critical discursive approach to investigate the political discourse of African leaders (Adedun and Atolagbe 2011; Al-Faki 2014), Indo-Pakistan relations and their media representation (Saleem et al. 2014) or water policy making process in Delhi, India (Asthana 2011). In this respect, the Caribbean context has the potential to represent an authentic data haul of political discourse, as it represents the largest set of continuing democracies among postcolonial countries across the world. Outside the Euro-American zone, critical discursive approaches have been fruitfully applied to the investigation of socio-political developments in Latin America, encompassing a vast range of issues, including post- and neo-colonialism, dictatorship and transitions to democracy, identity and inter-ethnic relationships, migration and social movements, among others. The arrival of CDS in Latin America is largely owed to Teun van Dijk’s research interest and activity in the region, as shown by his major contribution to the foundation of the Asociación Latino-americana de Estudios del Discurso (ALED) in 1995 and some of his publications (van Dijk 2005, 2009). The interest CDS has sparked in the region is grounded in the potential of the approach to provide both a theory and hands-on method for the investigation of the existing structural socio-political issues in the postcolonial scenario of the Latin America subcontinent (Bolívar 2015). If we take into account the parallels between the two neighbouring regions, the application of CDS in the Caribbean appears both viable and extremely promising (see Esposito et al. 2019). In both Latin America and the Caribbean, in fact, the critical discursive focus seems to find its natural fit in the investigation of how individual, national and regional identities are discursively constructed and negotiated, in a context affected by post- and neo-colonial patterns of inequality, discrimination and power abuse. At the same time, it would be naive to consider the application of CDS in a postcolonial setting such as the Caribbean as unproblematic and almost automatic. The following two sections aim at problematizing CDS in light of postcolonial theory, and account for some key concepts of CDS (such as critique, power and ideology, among others) in search of their potential application as part of a postcolonial critique. 1.3

CDS in the postcolonial Caribbean: The master’s tools?

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) emerged as a network of scholars across Europe in the early 1990s around some seminal publications, such as Norman Fairclough’s Language and Power and Ruth Wodak’s Language Power and Ideology in 1989, as



Chapter 1. Introduction 9

well as with Teun van Dijk’s launch of the journal Discourse and Society in 1990. Referred to either as a programme of study (Wodak and Meyer 2015) or as a form of critical social research (Fairclough 2003; 2006), the approach was quite innovative in “establishing the legitimacy of a linguistically oriented discourse analysis, firmly anchored in social reality and with a deep interest in actual problems and forms of inequality in societies” (Blommaert 2005: 6). Although grounded in the field of Linguistics, CDS is essentially transdisciplinary, holistically integrating theoretical approaches across disciplines rather than applying them separately. One of the reasons behind this distinctive transdisciplinarity is that the influences of CDS are very diverse and can be traced to a large number of thinkers. Unger (2013a: 29) pertinently summarizes the complexity of the theoretical influences on CDS by analyzing its genealogy and etymology: “the critical part of CDS comes partly from critical theory (Habermas) and is shared with critical linguistics (Fowler, Halliday), while the discourse part owes a lot to Foucault’s and Habermas’s conceptions of this term”. The notion of critique seems to be marking the very identity of CDS as a field. The juxtaposition of the adjective critical to discourse studies, in fact, has customarily been intended as drawing a line between a non-critical (that is, formal-linguistic) and a critical form of discourse analysis that is first of all interested in social and political issues, such as racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and sexism (see Reisigl 2018). However, the definition of critique in CDS is somewhat challenging and it has been the object of some reservations (Breeze 2011). This is largely due to the fact that different scholars usually associated with core strands in CDS (the aforementioned Fairclough, van Dijk and Wodak) have been drawing on different social theories to frame their discursive critique, ranging from Marx to Gramsci, from the critical theory of the Frankfurt school and Bourdieu to Michel Foucault and other post-structuralists (see Forchtner 2018). As expectable, this complexity is taken to the next level when adding the postcolonial Caribbean to the picture, and with it, necessary references to postcolonial theory and critique. Postcolonial studies is a very broad and widely contested field in itself, with many intellectual currents and centres across the world, encompassing Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia as well as colonial diasporas in Western countries, such as the UK and the United States. The postcolonial is, in fact, polysemous, variously defined and deeply interrelated with a number of political, economic, cultural, religious and ethical issues emerging in the different contemporary postcolonial contexts (see Lazarus 2004; Young 2016). However, if we were to identify a very general, overarching aim of postcolonial studies, it would be to contest the representation of former colonies as simply mimicking Europe and following its footsteps, paired with an equal effort to account for the geopolitical, historical, human differences of postcolonial contexts and to give them resonance

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Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

from the margins. As a result, Western social theories, accounting for modernity, liberalism and capitalism with their conventional terms and categories emerging out of a particular experience of the West, are largely regarded as controversial in their application to the understanding of the socio-political modernity of the postcolonial. While the influence of Marxism in the anti-colonial enterprise has been widely acknowledged (Fanon 1961), ebbs and flows of anti-Marxism have always been present, sometimes with a particular resonance as coming from eminent postcolonial scholars, like Edward Said (1978), who famously accused Marx of being an Orientalist, or Homi Bhabha (1994), who could not reconcile Marxism with the potential of the “third” politics of his “interstice” as free from past determinations. Postcolonial theorists have been largely critical of orthodox Marxism, especially of tenets like the universality of historical materialism and the universality of capital, denouncing a perceived historical and theoretical homogeneity which they interpreted as highly Eurocentric and reductionist concerning postcolonial differences (Chandra 2017). This is particularly true for scholars belonging to the Subaltern Studies Group (SSG), as exemplified by recent debates between leading subalternists (including Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty) and the Marxist scholar Vivek Chibber, author of the controversial book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013).2 In the same vein, Critical Theory (henceforth in capitals, with a specific reference to the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research), has often been regarded as an essentially parochial, Euro-American enterprise by postcolonial theorists. Edward Said (1993: 278) accused scholars of the Frankfurt School of being “stunningly silent on racist theory, anti-imperialist resistance, and oppositional practice in the empire”. A main point of postcolonial criticism consists in the fact that Frankfurt School thinkers have been largely aware of Western domination as an ongoing phenomenon since the age of high imperialism and into present times, but they have dismissed it as simply one of the many instantiations of the violence, irrationality and hostility that characterizes Western modernity (Ingram 2018). Despite its antecedent nature to the emergence of the postcolonial agenda, postcolonialism somehow stands closer to the first generation of Critical Theory, with particular reference to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamins. Later Frankfurt School thinkers, such as Jürgen Habermas, have proved much more controversial for postcolonial theorists. Albeit acknowledged for his engagement with more global issues (such as cultural and religious pluralism, the universality of human rights and the prospects for democratic global governance), Habermas has been 2. Some of the main voices and stances of the debate are collected in the Special Issue Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What’s Left of the Debate? (Sinha and Varma 2017).



Chapter 1. Introduction 11

highly debated, especially in relation to whether he should be regarded as provincial and, even worse, blind to his provinciality, embedded as he was in the socio-cultural context of post-Enlightenment, Western modernity (see Bailey 2013). More generally, postcolonial theory emphasizes how both the European identity and modernity have been largely constituted against – and through the subordination of – a non-Western Other, one of the most famous examples being the role and reputation of the values of Enlightenment in the context of early European colonial ambitions. Relying on Western social theories would, therefore, still entail taking the West as the norm for the rest of the world, only to undermine the postcolonial effort to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000) and to pluralize the history of global political modernity. To sum up, postcolonial thinking has been informed by a shared belief that, in the words of Audre Lorde (1984), “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. It is apparent that CDS and its theorization of discourse and society established itself in a markedly European scholarly milieu, drawing on European thinkers (the aforementioned Habermas and Foucault being only two of the many influences) and arising from the specific cultural and socio-historical configurations of some European countries (Austria and the UK above all). As a result, its application in non-Western, postcolonial settings should trigger some necessary reflections, which have been largely absent in the existing studies on non-Western political and social contexts within the CDS paradigm. This lack of self-reflection was denounced by Blommaert (2005: 35), who found CDS guilty of restricting critical analyses of discourse to “highly integrated, Late Modern, and post-industrial, densely semiotised First-World societies” and eventually using these as a model for understanding discourse in different contemporary societies across the world. A few years later, Chilton (2011) eventually drew attention to the major and quite urgent theoretical problems that are emerging as the critical analysis of political discourse (actually, of any discourse) becomes more popular in the globalized academic context (see also Chilton et al. 2010). However, such a context-dependent conceptualization of core concepts (such as critique, its role and aspirations, but also power and ideology, to name a few) remains largely unaccounted for and “sorely needed” (KhosraviNik 2015: 77) in the CDS literature. This is where CDS may learn from postcolonial studies, by embarking on a process of renewed self-consciousness in the late capitalist, neocolonial, informational, postindustrial 21st century. In particular, as Hiddleston (2010) explains, postcolonial theory has been characterized from its very beginnings by a profound awareness of thorny questions of self and other, cultural difference and diversity in a context of unequal global power relations. At the same time, this has come with a heightened consciousness of the dangers of assimilating the cultural other into a familiar framework of knowledge, and thereby repeating colonial gestures of

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Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

either appropriation or over-determination and further creating and propagating inequalities in discourse. This is too often a missing link in CDS, and it is exactly what this exploration of CDS as a postcolonial discursive critique aims at avoiding. One of the main advantages of a postcolonial reading of CDS as theory is its potential to provincialize it, borrowing Chakrabarty’s term, by making it aware of the more parochial aspects of its concepts, categories, assumptions and frames of reference. More specifically, in order to explore whether CDS can represent a theory and method for a postcolonial discursive critique, it is necessary to carefully consider the more or less possible overlaps between the critical aims of CDS and those of postcolonial theory. This includes taking into account the complex, antagonistic and collaborative, relationships between postcoloniality and the main theories that have traditionally been framing CDS critique, as illustrated in the following section. 1.4

CDS as postcolonial critique: A way forward

The conceptualization of CDS as a postcolonial critique is relatively new to the field. In her investigation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ruth Sanz Sabido has recently advanced a theoretical and methodological framework that she labelled “Postcolonial Critical Discourse Analysis (PCDA)”, which “foregrounds the need to analyse media representations by placing postcolonial power relations at the centre of the enquiry” (Sanz Sabido 2019: 19). While Sanz Sabido’s acknowledgement of the broadly common aims and principles of the two fields is absolutely valid, she does not seem to problematize the complex relationship between postcolonialism and the main (Western) theories which have been traditionally framing CDS critique, such as the neo-Marxist Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Foucauldian post-structuralism, among others. If a Postcolonial CDS can exist, both commonalities and tensions are to be taken into account, and the way forward can only be traced by tackling core questions such as: how do we interpret and perform critique?, what is power and how are power relations configured?, how do we define and detect ideology? at the intersection of CDS and Postcolonial Theory. Instead of seeing CDS as a set of tools that can be interchangeably applied to any context, this work posits that the postcolonial holds just as much importance for CDS theorizing, as it pushes for a higher awareness of the more contemporary debates around critical (discursive) theories and how the focus on conditions of geopolitical and historical difference necessarily compels revisions and/or integrations to the framework. One of the main challenges to this contrapuntal endeavour is that both CDS and postcolonial studies can be regarded as more of a shared perspective across a



Chapter 1. Introduction 13

range of strands with different approaches rather than just one school. On the one hand, founding CDS scholars themselves have been very vocal about its multifacetedness and the lack of a unique theory or method that is uniform and consistent throughout the discipline (van Dijk 2001; Weiss and Wodak 2003). On the other hand, postcolonialism has never had a centre and developed as the convergence of eclectic intellectual currents originating in very different corners of the world and catering for the very diverse particularities of their colonial, postcolonial and diasporic experiences. The following discussion does not aim at erasing these differences by pointing out affinities but rather emerges from the very acknowledgement of the multiplicity of voices that co-exist under a same label. Shying away from a construction of a misleading uniformity, and yet looking for a starting point, the following reflections are grounded in a review of five very broad key concepts in CDS (namely, discourse, critique, power, ideology and agency) in the light of both critical and postcolonial theory. Discourse, both as concept and unit of analysis, plays a crucial role in CDS as it does in postcolonial theory. In particular, both fields have been largely influenced by the theory of discourse advanced by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969. With his seminal work Orientalism (1978), Edward Said played a key role in introducing Foucault’s work in the field of postcolonial studies. Maintaining that there is “no such thing as a delivered presence; there is only a re-presence, or a representation”, Said conceptualized Orientalism as a “systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (Said 1978: 3). Discourse, therefore, was regarded as serving Europe’s geopolitical imagination, playing a key role in the discursive dichotomization between East and West and the discursive creation of the Orient.3 Said’s deconstructive reading strategies are aimed at uncovering blind spots in colonial discourse, casting a critical eye on the colonial framing of cultural difference in ultimately oppressive and subalternizing ways, encompassing assimilation, reduction, over-determination or exclusion of 3. Eventually a criticism of Foucault’s Eurocentrism and his tendency to universalize from French case studies marked Said’s (1984a) move from a Foucauldian discourse analysis to a more Gramscian investigation of ideological representations (another theme which stands very close to CDS practitioners). In more recent studies, Foucault has been blamed for his “silence on the colonial construction of European modernity and the mutual constitution of ‘metropole’ and ‘periphery’” (Legg 2007: 265), while at the same time being praised for having provided tools to investigate colonial power-knowledge relationships. Robert Nichols (2010: 139) fittingly summarizes this tension, describing how “Foucault himself has become a discourse”, and points out how critics and defenders alike acknowledge Foucault as a crucial point in the problematization of postcolonialism, “understood as a problem of knowledge” (ibid., my emphasis).

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the native other. In postcolonial studies, discourse came to be broadly understood as “the horizontal integration of a system of representation across a broad set of disciplines (literature, philosophy, social sciences, art, etc.)” which served the “colonization of the imagination, of forms of possible knowledge, of the representation of other times and places” (Nichols 2010: 139). Such a strategy had equal (if not greater) importance to the physical invasion, the occupation of land and the implementation of a formal system of governance in the colonial and imperial systems. These reflections show a certain degree of closeness to a CDS interpretation of language use as not only responsible for constructing social identities, but as constitutive in creating systems of knowledge and belief. Discourses, in the Foucauldian sense, have a material effect, they are practices that “form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 1972: 49). From here stems the staple CDS definition of discourse as “a form of social practice” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 258), both structured by and structuring action, that eventually developed in a framework exploring the tension between these two sides of language use, “the socially shaped” and the “socially constitutive” (Fairclough 2010: 92). In this sense, CDS conceptualizes this dialectical relationship between “a discursive event and the situations, institutions and social structures which frame it” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 258). Discursive practices may serve to construct collective subjects and social conditions and perpetuate (by re-producing or justifying it) a certain social status quo, but they are also instrumental in transforming, dismantling and even destroying that very status quo (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 40). Clearly, both in postcolonial studies and in CDS, discourse is not regarded as the only ingredient of social practice, but it certainly represents a form of social practice which “internalizes all the other elements without being reduced to them, because social relations, social identities, cultural values, and consciousness are in part semiotic” (Fairclough 2001: 231). Drawing on a broadly Foucauldian sense of discourse, both CDS and postcolonial studies orient themselves to “unpick the power-knowledge relationships of post-Enlightenment Europe” (Legg 2007: 265). Emerging from Foucault, in fact, is a new conceptual architecture of power that expands the conventional identification of power simply with repression and domination in purely material or institutional terms. Power is understood as productive and creative of subjects and intimately linked to knowledge: it is constructed and supported by the production and dissemination of knowledge, not only because power is directly proportional to one’s degree of access to knowledge, but also, and more importantly, in terms of the power to produce commonly acknowledged truths. This resulted in a higher attention of postcolonial scholars for the language and philosophy of empire, for Western metaphysics and ethnocentric structures of knowledge. As mentioned, Edward Said in his Orientalism aimed at demonstrating how knowledge and power went hand in hand in the creation of the Orient, as the management of dominant knowledge



Chapter 1. Introduction 15

allowed the creation of a vast array of hegemonic narratives that represented the Orient as the second term in a binary opposition with the West. Given its particular resonance in analyses of colonial and postcolonial relationships, postcolonial scholarship has devoted considerable attention to the power/ knowledge nexus and the related role of discourse. In the same vein, as power is a central element of social life, CDS too has explored the rethinking of power from a discursive perspective. Like its precursor Critical Linguistics (Fowler et al. 1979), CDS stems from the Bakhtinian (1981; 1986) notion that language is never neutral but emerges from sociocultural interaction and is motivated by struggles among different social groups. In the foundational CDS work Language and Power, Norman Fairclough aimed at correcting “a widespread underestimation of the significance of language in the production, maintenance, and change of social relations of power”, as well as increasing consciousness of how “language contributes to the domination of some people by others” (1989: 1). CDS “takes an interest in the ways linguistic forms are used in various expressions and manipulations of power” (Weiss and Wodak 2003: 15), arriving at a conceptualization of power both in terms of asymmetries between participants in discourse events and in terms of unequal capacity to control how texts are produced, distributed and consumed in particular social contexts. The new conceptual architecture of power beyond coercion allows for the acknowledgement of discursive structures and strategies that help to instal and uphold new ideologies or reinforce ones that are already present. The conceptual link with the Foucauldian power/knowledge is made more explicit by the nature of ideologies as more than simply individual ideas or beliefs formed through experience but as “ways of thinking in which historically transient exploitative forms of social organisation are represented as eternal, natural, inevitable or ‘rational’” (Jones 2001: 227). From a critical discursive perspective, ideology refers to those discursively manifest societal interpretations and explanations which “can be shown to be not just inadequate but also necessary – necessary to establish and keep in place particular relations of power” (Fairclough 2010: 9). For this reason, most strands of CDS (Fairclough’s Dialectical-Relational approach in particular) argue for combining the critique of power with a critique of ideology: this integration translates into a focus not just on power in discourse but also power behind discourse, where the “critique of manipulation” related to “particular aspects of existing social reality” is paired with a critique of “its capitalist character and how that impacts upon all its aspects” (Fairclough 2018: 14, see also Fairclough 1989). As a matter of fact, part of the established attention of CDS for political discourse analysis is related to the fact that ideologies are also best observable in practices and discourses typical of the political field, because these are thoroughly ideological. In particular, forms and meanings of political discursive practices make ideologies observable

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in the sense that it is “only in discourse that they may be explicitly ‘expressed’ and ‘formulated’” (van Dijk 2006: 728ff). CDS also emphasizes how ideologies become most effective, that is, hegemonic in the Gramscian sense, when naturalized or perceived as common sense. Gramsci’s (1975) theory of hegemony accounts for the covert exercise of power by means of discourse and ideology, ultimately creating a hegemonic culture disseminating its own beliefs, values and norms as higher standards (for example by means of organisations such as the church, unions and schools), instead of domination through sheer coercion, violent revolution and the capturing of the state apparatus. Thus, a hegemonic ruling class is one that gains support for itself from other, less powerful classes who acknowledge their institutions and values and embrace them rather than contesting them. From a discursive perspective, this relationship is referred to by Fairclough as “discursive hegemony” (2003: 218). In fact, language plays a fundamental role in this process of “naturalisation” of ideologies: being “a material form of ideology” and “invested by ideology” (Fairclough 2010: 59), language helps establishing, maintaining or transforming those significations or constructions of reality which contribute to the (re)production or transformation of relations of domination” (Fairclough 1992: 87). The Gramscian concept of hegemony has been further problematized by its postcolonial readings. In colonial contexts, the capturing of the state apparatus and the implementation of cultural hegemony were developed in a non-exclusive manner. As such, some postcolonial readings of Gramsci have contested his conceptualization of hegemony, especially in light of the mechanics of common sense and the relationship between coercion and consent. There has been a postcolonial eagerness to rule out the possibility of the colonial state being anything but a coercive state, where collaboration by the colonized people had to be either framed as betrayal or dismissed as a fictional colonial narrative (see Guha 1997). Nevertheless, the reality of the master-servant relationships in colonial contexts usually generated a much more complex configuration of dominance and subordination, encompassing persuasion and coercion, collaboration and resistance. While more or less subtle forms of resistance belonged to the everyday of the colonial experience (and are too often unacknowledged by history books), colonial hegemony also managed to compromise with local traditional values by overdetermining them in the light of modernism, a process of which the British Raj represents an excellent example (see the discussion in Chaudhury 1994). Applying psychoanalysis to the investigation of the feelings of colonial dependency and inadequacy, also Frantz Fanon (1952) discussed colonial oppression as a form of interiorized hegemony in his iconic Black Skin, White Masks, drawing together the existential experience of racialized subjectivity and the calculative logic of colonial rule. Such an exploration of the colonial ideology/hegemony interface also underlies the investigation



Chapter 1. Introduction 17

of the significance and implications of the contested term post in postcolonialism. While it signifies the demise of colonialism as direct domination, at the same time it should be interpreted as signalling the configuration of new and evolving global systems of hegemonic power in a “post-colonial neo-colonized world”, in the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1989: 290). The persistence of imperialist wars, class struggles, and waves of protest is a tangible demonstration that power does remain with the powerful few: you cannot have “a spider’s web without the spider” (Said 1984b: 221). Not accepting at face value any given categorization, and trying to establish how certain ways of understanding and representing became dominant, lie at the heart of critique as practice in both CDS and postcolonial reflection. The notion of critique has been marking the very identity of CDS as a “discourse study with an attitude” (van Dijk 2015: 466), where it conventionally denotes an effort to make visible “the interconnectedness with the rest of social life” (Fairclough 2010: 303). Critique represents an assessment aimed at disclosing structures of power and to unmask ideologies with the final goal of weakening those very positions of the power elites “that enact, sustain, legitimate, condone or ignore social inequality and injustice” (van Dijk 1993: 252). Postcolonial critique stands close to Critical Theory as they are both characterized by an ethical imperative (from the first generation of the Frankfurt School) and a practice of immanent critique (from the second and third generations). In particular, the bulk of work by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamins represents the most solid bridge between the two fields, as their very need to be critical arose from a conviction that all historical and contemporary attempts to take a universal perspective were fundamentally compromised and deeply implicated in structures of domination. Their view of modernity as a negative whole, unified in its tendency to assimilate, dominate, and control, would resonate deeply with postcolonial concerns. Also, both CDS and postcolonial theory embrace transdisciplinarity in an effort to achieve a broad and inclusive view in the investigation of complex histories and current relations of power in which they are themselves situated. Not only do they transcend the boundaries of academic disciplines, but they challenge and stretch them, usually by integrating new methods and materials. Transdisciplinarity also supports triangulation in both fields, as critique entails a high degree of self-reflexivity, “asking how it is possible to arrive at knowledge that rises above the forces that produced it” (Ingram 2018: 500) and making academic and personal subjectivity and positionality broadly explicit. In particular, postcolonial theory has pioneered this reflection upon one’s own contextuality and resultant agenda-setting, with a specific consideration of the spaces and times from which and about which one theorizes, aimed at “clarifying the ways in which all theory

18

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

operates with certain assumptions about space and time” (Mendieta 2001: 178). After all, as Horkheimer and Adorno put it in the 1969 Preface to their Dialectic of Enlightenment, truth has a “temporal core” (2002: xi). At the same time, as Ingram (2018) points out, these commonalities do not erase the fact that the Frankfurt School has been either ignoring postcolonialism or treating it as an afterthought, which results in a lack of problematization of how the concept of negative universal history might have appeared from a non-Western point of view (see also Vázquez-Arroyo 2008). It also does not change the fact that the critical enterprise in Critical Theory has always been more devoted to making sense of the whole in comparison with the attention towards more concrete geo-historical configurations in postcolonial theory. At the same time, Ingram (2018) acknowledges how more recent work has moved toward the direction of postcolonizing critical theory. Examples of this are the work of Enrique Dussel and Eduardo Mendieta, combining the insights of Habermasian Critical Theory, postcolonialism, and pragmatism. On the other hand, also U.S. American theorists like Thomas McCarthy, Amy Allen, and Susan Buck-Morss have been reconsidering the terms of Critical Theory in light of issues and problematics taken from postcolonialism and the history of imperialism. One of the most meaningful commonalities between CDS and postcolonialism is marked by a conceptualization of critique as deeply related to an emancipatory agenda and to an idea of agency framed around narratives of dissent, opposition and resistance. This accent on agency and resistance has been crucial in postcolonialism, where subaltern agency has been conceptualized as the ability of colonial and postcolonial subjects to initiate action in engaging, resisting and transforming existing hierarchies of power from their subaltern and marginalized position. In CDS, the increased understanding of relations between discourse and the existing social reality (with its problems and possibilities) that derives from critique are regarded as a basis for action to change reality for the better (Fairclough 2018). This is reinforced by a conceptualization of the relationship between language and power as dialectic and non-deterministic: language is not merely seen as an instrument for indexing and expressing power, but also as a powerful element of change, as it can be used to “challenge power, to subvert it, to alter distributions of power in the short and the long term” (Wodak and Meyer 2015: 12). We can identify a common practical aspiration between the two fields, oriented towards seeking knowledge in the name of emancipation, in order to help reverse the domination and violence that mark past and present history. However, this idea of intervention is not free from controversies and a postcolonial CDS is bound to reflect more on whether its criticism is grounded in a universal normative basis and, as a result, prescribes general remedies. Moreover, whether this emancipatory afflatus can actually result in tangible outcomes is a hot topic in both CDS and

Chapter 1. Introduction 19



postcolonial theory. Too often, in fact, one of the main points of criticism against CDS has targeted its supposed aspiration to change the world from university departments, with a specific focus on the definition of “prognostic critique” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) as an explicit attempt to transform the current state of affairs via direct engagement. While it should be widely acknowledged that “academic critique alone cannot change reality” (Fairclough 2018: 13), there can exist no action without knowledge. A discursive critique is a step towards action, as it can provide better understanding and explanations of how “discourse figures in existing social reality as a basis for action to change reality”, therefore “identifying and sometimes advocating lines of action” (Fairclough 2018: 13). In the same vein, the interpretation of power and resistance in some postcolonial scholars, such as Achille Mbembe, is pessimistic regarding the capacity of postcolonial struggles. Yet when Spivak was asking the world if the Subaltern could speak her words proposed reclaiming the space of the silenced in history. The action of writing back is in itself a form of resistance, an attempt at disassembling the hegemonic narratives through which the West has constructed itself and the Other, an attempt at locating resistance in the reaffirmation of hybridity. Without this foundational reconfiguration of the conceptual space in which we understand (discursive) power relations in the world, it is impossible to create the space for alternative ways of being and acting. 1.5

Structure of the book

Understanding the complexity of Trinidad and Tobago’s political and social environment today requires a grasp of its complex socio-historical background, essential in addressing the main issues and themes of this study. Chapter 2 provides a historical portrait of the emergence of Trinidad and Tobago’s diverse society, reconstructing how Spanish, French and British colonialism shaped the country as we know it today. The chapter explores Afro-Indian relations during British rule, when the diversity of peoples in a colonial context favoured social status differentiation along ethnic lines and allowed ethnic prejudice to pervade the practices and customs of the society. The chapter also accounts for the political history of the independent nation, with Africans and East Indians standing in direct competition for leadership, and for how the long-standing political success of the Afro-Trinidadian People’s National Movement (PNM) shaped the country as we know it today. Finally, the chapter focuses on the 2010 General Election, giving more details on the composition of the People’s Partnership and on its political success. Chapter 3 presents the main theoretical framework underpinning this research. While the study of political discourse can be traced back to Aristotle, this book

20 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

starts from the assumption that one of the most interesting approaches to political discourse is both a critical and multimodal one. The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is treated in detail in this chapter, which also shows how Kress and van Leeuwen’s “Visual Grammar” (1996) represented a fruitful theoretical integration within a wider critical approach. The chapter also illustrates the textual and visual data collected from the People’s Partnership campaign and explains how the critical multimodal approach was operationalized in the analysis. Chapter 4 – The Leader – focuses on Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s role as PM candidate and Leader during the 2010 General Election Campaign. The first section of this chapter focuses on Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s positive self-presentation, with a focus on how Persad-Bissessar discursively created for herself a winning image as the first woman PM candidate in the history of the nation. As in any election campaign, Persad-Bissessar devoted a substantial amount of energy to building her image of leadership and her network of supporters, and a parallel amount of energy to discrediting her opponent, Patrick Manning. The second section of the chapter focuses on Persad-Bissessar’s strategies of negative other-presentation and demontage of her opponent in the campaign. Chapter 5 – The Party – sets out to investigate how Persad-Bissessar’s campaign aimed to discursively create a distinctive party identity for the new People’s Partnership coalition. In a timespan of six weeks, the coalition had to occupy a definite identity space, highly polarized in respect to its opponent, the longstanding People’s National Movement. As coalitions have been particularly unsuccessful or short-lived in the history of Trinidad and Tobago, Persad-Bissessar’s enterprise of political advertising was committed to the positive self-presentation of the new coalition and its leadership team as the best political solution for the country. Chapter 6 – The Nation – focuses on the attempt to imagine and construct a cohesive national identity within the discourses produced for, on and from the 2010 Election Campaign by the PM candidate Kamla Persad-Bissessar. Advertising the multi-ethnic nature of the People’s Partnership became an opportunity for Persad-Bissessar to engage with the traumatic colonial past and the complexities of the national present. The concluding section draws together the most important themes that have developed across the chapters and focuses on how ethnic diversity, colonial history and postcolonial national identity are discursively represented and negotiated by means of political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago. The book closes with a short epilogue on Persad-Bissessar’s mandate and the most recent political events in the country. This book is thus intended to introduce a new, critical discursive perspective on the complex power dynamics of the contemporary, postcolonial Caribbean.

Chapter 1. Introduction 21



By focusing on political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago, it sheds light not only on Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s successful political campaign in the 2010 General Elections but it also aims to offer insights on how women leaders negotiate gender and politics and how female leadership is discursively constructed in the Caribbean. My ambition is also to illustrate how issues of political representativity and democracy are negotiated in multi-ethnic postcolonial settings, in the context of colonially inherited political institutions. Furthermore, I hope to address how contemporary politics engages in the challenging construction of a Trinidadian nation united in diversity, a project that has kept politicians busy ever since independence in 1962. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, the transdisciplinary, critical discursive focus adopted in this book represents an addition to the field of (Critical) Political Discourse Analysis, but also has potentially major implications in the field of Postcolonial and Caribbean Studies. 1.6

A short note on terminology

In the present book, as in most work on postcolonial and diverse contexts, terminologies of identity are of great significance and should be clarified. To start with, Trinidad is mostly used as a short form for Trinidad and Tobago. This is only partly done for convenience, as it also denotes a privileging of the larger and multicultural Trinidad as a site of political power and for its investigation. Tobago, on the contrary, is a much smaller island almost entirely populated by citizens of African ancestry. Regarding the different ethnic groups in the country, in the Trinidad and Tobago Census, the terms used to refer to people of African and East Indian are African and East Indian. Academic discourse seems to prefer Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian as the analyst’s categories (Munasinghe 2001: 8). In this study, East Indian, Indo-Trinidadian as well as Indo-Caribbean are used interchangeably to refer to citizens of Trinidad and Tobago claiming an Indian ancestry. I tend to prefer East Indian to Indian, in order to avoid any possible misinterpretation of the latter as Amerindian, the original natives of the Caribbean. Similarly, terms like African, Afro-Trinidadian or Afro-Caribbean are used interchangeably to refer to citizens of Trinidad and Tobago claiming an African ancestry. The usage of adjectives like Creole and Afro-Creole entail precise ideological implications (see Chapter 2) and therefore will not be used for Trinidadians and Tobagonians of African descent in this research, except than in quotations. Finally, this study draws on an established academic trend in Caribbean studies, as it frames social heterogeneity in Trinidad and Tobago within the discourse of ethnicity and ethnic relations rather than that of race and race relations (see Munasinghe

22

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

2001). Although grounded in an awareness that race and race relations are the most employed terms in the local context of Trinidad and Tobago, such a choice is motivated by different heuristic and practical purposes. In-depth explanations, and references to the heated debate on these complex terminologies, are beyond the scope of this section. However, it is important to clarify that this choice does not imply that race and ethnicity are interchangeable concepts, nor that race is reducible to ethnicity, or that ethnicity is used in this work to euphemize race and its long history as a factor of inequality and exclusion, as it has been suggested by the North American criticism of this terminological turn (see Sanjek 1994). Also, I am aware of the fact that the terms race and race relations are commonly employed in Trinidadian political, media and lay discourse mainly to refer to what, in academic discourse, we would call ethnicity. A crucial motive behind this choice in this study is actually detaching the Carib­ bean context from the Euro-American model, where race relations usually entail the presence of a White and (at least one) non-White group sharing a national space, with the latter usually experiencing different forms of crystallized social inequality (racism). This model is less appropriate in the demographic context of Trinidad and Tobago, a country where Caucasians (as they are labelled in the census categories of Trinidad and Tobago) represent just 0.59% of the total population (TTSCO 2011). On the contrary, ethnicity, with its emphasis on cultural aspects, serves as a better term to explore the relations and the complex cultural demarcation between the African and the East Indian as the two main ethnic groups in the country.

Chapter 2

Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago

2.1

A short socio-political history

While the entire Caribbean space is “saturated with messages” (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 2), and density (ethnic, cultural, linguistic) is one of its most distinctive contrapuntal qualities, the twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago is certainly one of the densest islands of the Archipelago. The southernmost islands of the Caribbean Archipelago, seven miles off the coast of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago were in fact shaped by a long history of Spanish, French and British colonialism and by the related, overlapping fluxes of immigration coming to share two tiny islands, with a land mass of little more than 5000 square kilometres combined. Nowadays, many different minorities live in the country, including Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, Portuguese and even people who claim to descend from the original native Kalinago inhabitants of the Archipelago. However, as shown in Figure 1, two main ethnic groups strongly predominate in the demographic composition of the country, one being of East Indian descent (35.4%) and the other of African descent (34.2%) (TTCSO 2011), with the result that Trinidad and Tobago is commonly labelled as ethnically “plural” (Wilson 2012), as well as “bifurcated” (Premdas 2002) or “bipolar” (Premdas 2007). According to the 2011 Census, Trinidad is the larger island both in terms of geographical size and population. Trinidad has more than 1.2 million inhabitants and an ethnically varied population. Conversely, the smaller population of Tobago is predominantly (85.3%) of African ancestry. This difference mainly resulted from Tobago’s separate history: Tobagonian society and social institutions developed independently from Trinidad’s until 1889, when the British colonial power decided to unite the two administrations. The demographic ratios between and among the various ethnic groups is only one of the many predisposing factors that have contributed to shaping the contemporary political scene in Trinidad and Tobago, which encompass “the nature of economy, […] the settlement patterns, size of the country, its position in the context of international politics and the nature of its stratification system” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 17). Yet, the Indo-Afro ethnic divide has greatly contributed to shape the environment in which many political outcomes were determined throughout

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

40 35.43

35

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24

Figure 1.  Trinidad and Tobago – ethnic composition (TTSCO 2011)

the 20th century: decolonization crystallized the horizontal competition between Africans and East Indians, and divided patterns of occupation, residence and class between the two ethnic groups have been acting as powerful centrifugal force against national cohesion. Throughout the post-independence era, heavy colonial legacies and perceived differences between these two major ethnic groups in the country have influenced countless aspects of life in Trinidad and Tobago, but the impact has been particularly dramatic in the case of politics and governance. In the attempt to provide an overview of the complex political and social environment in the country, the first part of this chapter accounts for the major historical events and political turning points in the history of Trinidad and Tobago from colonial to present times. Subsequently, the second part of this chapter frames the country in relation to key social theories on ethnicity and nationalism in the postcolonial Caribbean, highlighting their possible relations with the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (Reisigl and Wodak 2015).1 1. The historical overview provided is necessarily brief and non-comprehensive, illustrating only the most relevant events over a very long course of time. For a more extensive history of



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 25

2.1.1 Afro-Indian relations in colonial Trinidad Claimed by Spain in 1498, during Christopher Columbus’ third voyage to the New World, Trinidad did not attract extensive settlement until the late 18th century, largely because of its lack of precious metals (Brereton 1981). In an effort to make the colony more lucrative, Spain opened Trinidad to a transnational immigration wave in 1777 and a large number of French settlers from the Eastern Caribbean was attracted by Spanish promises of land grants and tax concessions (Wood 1968). As they arrived in Trinidad with their African slaves, they revolutionized the local economy by establishing a plantation system for the large-scale production of sugar. In the following two decades, hundreds of plantations were born, and the population of the island swelled to 17,718, of which about 56 percent were African slaves (Premdas 2007). By the time the British conquered Trinidad in 1797, the island was largely a French speaking territory. Trinidad was formally ceded to Britain in 1802, and ruled as a Crown Colony under a Governor: compared to the old representative system, the Crown Colony diminished the planters’ governmental power, in order to push the introduction of slave reforms. In fact, in 1806 the Slave Trade was abolished in British law and slavery itself was abolished a few decades later, by the Act of Emancipation in August 1833 that became law on August 1st, 1834. Enslaved African labour was the backbone of the plantation system and emancipation compelled a search for new sources of labour supply to prevent the plantation system from collapsing (Tinker 1974). Many former slaves continued to give at least part-time labour to the sugar estates. However, the majority of them left the estates and started founding new villages along the eastern main road between Port of Spain and Arima, as well as enlarging the suburbs of the cities of Port of Spain and San Fernando, many of them eventually emerging as skilled factory workers (Premdas 2007). The waiting apprenticeship period finally ended the system of slavery on August 1st, 1838. As freed slaves looked for alternative places to live and ways to survive on the island away from the plantations, the planters and the colonial government anxiously experimented with a variety of sources for new recruits, encompassing free African labourers from across the Caribbean, Black soldiers from the United States, freed African slaves from Sierra Leone and St. Helena, as well as Portuguese and Chinese indentured labourers (Premdas 2007). Although none of these sources proved to be particularly lucrative for the plantation system, the arrival of new

Trinidad and Tobago see Brereton (1996), for political history see also Bissessar and La Guerre (2013); Wilson (2012).

26 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

immigrant laborers from different countries contributed to further enriching the multi-cultural population of the island. In 1845, Trinidad became part of a larger colonial programme of labour recruitment to the Caribbean and other British colonies from India, which proved to be a rewarding source of workforce for the maintenance of the European plantations. In his 1974 study, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1820-1920, Hugh Tinker postulates that Indian indentureship was hardly any different from slavery itself and that deception, kidnapping and coercion were the hallmarks of its recruitment. The first 225 Indian labourers arrived in Trinidad on the Fath Al Razack vessel on May 3rd, 1845, a date that is still celebrated as Indian Arrival Day throughout the nation (Dabydeen and Samaroo 1996). The consequences of the Indian indentureship system are still evident throughout the Archipelago: people of East Indian ancestry now constitute about 20 per cent of the population of the whole English Commonwealth Caribbean. East Indians are concentrated mainly in Suriname, Trinidad and Guyana, where they represent the majority ethnic group, while they still constitute a substantial minority in Jamaica, Grenada, Barbados, and other Caribbean islands (Puri 2004). From 1845 to 1917, Trinidad’s population growth came primarily from East Indian indentured labourers, who for the most part came as young single men of Hindu faith from the Gangetic plains of the North of India (Nevadomsky 1980a; 1980b). According to Premdas (2007), some 143,939 indentured workers arrived in Trinidad: initially recruited on five-year contracts (and then on an additional five-year period in order to be eligible for free repatriation), they eventually became settlers on the expiry of the contract. Some benefited from the land commutation scheme introduced between 1869 and 1889, offering a grant in land to those East Indians who decided not to repatriate, while many others purchased Crown Land at the end of the indentureship period and introduced a rice industry on the island (Ramesar 1976; Ramsaran 1993). In a few decades, an East Indian peasantry was born, and by the time the British indentureship system terminated in 1917, the East Indian ethnic group was distinct and well demarcated in the country’s multi-ethnic society, although positioned at the very bottom of the stratified colonial social system (Cross 1996). The extreme diversity of peoples in a colonial context on the island favoured social status differentiation along ethnic lines, and allowed ethnic prejudice to pervade the practices and customs of the society (Brereton 1979). Relations between freed African slaves and East Indian indentured workers were conflictual from the very start, with negative stereotypes based on their different cultural practices and religion fostered under the divide et impera policy of the colonial authorities (Samaroo 1985). The pattern of residence was also ethnically divided, with the East Indian peasants mostly living in the rural areas while liberated African slaves were



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 27

moving away from the plantations and progressively occupying the urban areas in the North of the country (Clarke 1993). This geographical segregation did not favour mutual understanding and fostered the development of racial stereotypes and a general feeling of animosity between the two groups, only encouraged by the colonial masters.2 Exacerbated by plantation managers and local authorities, racism and mutual distrust was also defensive. On the one hand, in the eyes of the African community, East Indians had come to undermine the newly liberated work market. Regarded as blackleg labour, they had agreed to enter the inhumane system of plantation life at a time when liberated slaves were demanding better wages and working conditions (Ramesar 1985). As a result, East Indians were labelled as coolies and were often considered no more than temporary outsiders, although by the time the indentureship system ended in 1917, the Trinidadian population of East Indian ancestry was entirely locally born (Brereton 1979).3 On the other hand, when East Indians arrived in Trinidad, “a discourse deriding the moral, mental, and physical attributes” of the liberated African slaves was “already in place for Indians to learn, and later to use, for their own ends” (Munasinghe 2001: 64). The East Indian community, largely of Hindu faith and still attached to a caste-inspired hierarchical social system, initially considered Africans almost as untouchables, on account of their skin-colour and impure eating habits (Clarke 1993). According to Geer (2007: 113), the colonial stereotypes of the “urban sophisticated black” and of the “traditional rural Indian” are still largely persistent in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, often painting East Indians as “greedy or thrifty, hardworking, backwards and traditional” while Africans are considered “lazy, foolish, Europeanized and lacking family values”. 2. The colonial process of ethnic group formation in Trinidad and Tobago was grounded in the portrayal of the African and the East Indian as two ethnically and culturally homogeneous groups. In reality, the East Indians were far from being a perfectly homogeneous ethnic group at their arrival: the majority of indentured labourers came from a vast area in the North of India (Bihar and Uttar Pradesh) but there were some from the South (Madras). They were Hindu, but also included a Muslim minority, and spoke a variety of languages, including Urdu and Bhojpuri. Similarly, the Afro-Trinidadians also represented a highly differentiated ethnic group with a complex history of creolization, having its origins not only in Africa, but also in other Caribbean islands as well as in the United States (see Premdas 2007). 3. Imported into English from the Hindi kuli (day labourer), the word coolie came to have a pejorative connotation in the West Indies, as the term was used as a racial slur for unskilled manual laborers brought from Asia (India, but also China) to the British colonies all over the world during the 19th and early 20th century. As it often happens with stigmatizing labels, since the 1970s the word has been undergoing a process of politicization (see Singh 1973) as well as re-appropriation and re-fashioning by the Indo-Caribbean community, as in Torabully’s Coolitude (2002).

28

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

In the 20th century, the African population emerged as dominant on the socio-political scene, embracing urban life, formal education, the Civil Service and other professions before the East Indians (Brereton 1981). This fostered a deep feeling of exclusion in the East Indian community, who felt inadequately represented and only marginally involved in Trinidadian social life (Palmer 2006). Education, in particular, seemed to be one of the factors heavily affecting East Indian mobility: there was a widespread fear in the East Indian community of educating their children in schools of different faiths. In 1890, the Canadian Presbyterian mission started offering dedicated instruction in Hindi: however, this had a negative impact on the levels of social interaction and perpetuated prejudice and low fluency in English in the younger generations (Munasinghe 2001). During colonial times, education in Trinidad and Tobago was segregated into Hindu, Muslim and Christian schools, and public schools were also largely mono-ethnic (Tewarie 1984). Samaroo (1975) suggested that this was a deliberate colonial strategy, which saw complicity between missionaries and planters, to keep the different ethnic groups apart. Concerning politics, the elections between 1925 and 1946 are often considered as “dress rehearsals for later political developments” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 21), as they marked important milestones in the development of party systems, political leadership and in consolidating the relationship between ethnicity, culture and political affiliation. In 1925, the Crown Colony system was abandoned in favour of a partially elective principle of representation. Progressively, Trinidad and Tobago moved towards universal adult suffrage in 1946, internal self-government in 1956, and, finally, independence in 1962. With postcolonial self-rule in sight, Afro-Creoles were perceived by the British colonial power as the best candidates for leadership (as they had been for slavery), because of the inherently racist and misguided belief that they were brought to the Caribbean as “culturally naked” (Lewis 1983: 4). Africans were seen as the perfect tabula rasa upon which Western ideals, morality, religion, and systems of government could be easily imprinted. On the contrary, East Indians in Trinidad and Tobago had always been deemed unmixable, completely saturated with an ancient and complex (albeit pagan and inferior) civilization. The country’s ethnic composition was bound to have a major impact on political life and power distribution in the newly independent nation (Premdas 2007: 44). Although the African and the Indian ethnic groups are nowadays almost equivalent in number, demography has not always been so balanced. Until the mid-20th century, Afro-Trinidadians constituted the largest ethnic group (47% compared to 35% of East Indians in the 1946 Census). Moreover, with Africans not being particularly concerned with the Hindu-derived philosophy of caste and purity, also the growing segment of mixed population in the country tended to be more easily affiliated to the Africans, rather than the Indians. The size of an ethnic community has been



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 29

commonly taken by public opinion as an indication of its potential political and social strength in the country. Bissessar and La Guerre (2013: 106) reported how critics and commentators on both the 1871 and 1891 census data speculated on the political repercussions of a growing East Indian community and how the exactly same comments were made in 1990 when the East Indian population finally overtook the African in the census. Ethnic friction became overtly political when universal adult suffrage was granted in 1946. As self-government was gradually increased, the Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians were in direct competition for leadership. Among the factors that gave the ethnicity issue the primacy that it had in the 1946 election was the “language test controversy” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 25). Following the publication of the Franchise Committee Report in 1943, the proposed language requirement of competence in English as a necessary qualification to vote became an issue of major political and ethnic tension, at a time when almost 50% of the East Indian community was illiterate (Ryan 1972). Between 1936 and 1943, Africans and East Indians had joined together as a fairly united front against British colonial power, leading the 1937-38 Trinidadian labour unrest throughout the oilfields, the sugar belt and the towns (Brereton and Yelvington 1999). However, the 1946 Language Test controversy contributed to linking ethnic tension to political competition, and “prompted Indo-Trinidadian leaders to close ranks once again” (Munasinghe 2001: 193). For Ryan (1996: 5), “the bulk of the Indian population, working-class or otherwise, did not identify with the nationalist movement”, and the fear of being ruled by a strong Afro-Trinidadian majority made Indo-Trinidadian leaders wanting to postpone the colonial handover of power to local politicians. Throughout the 1940s, Indian consciousness amongst the East Indians in Trinidad and Tobago was strengthened by the independence movement in India, which resuscitated and enhanced the social and cultural exchanges between India and the Caribbean (encompassing music, cinema as well as Hindu religious and cultural missions to the Archipelago) and contributed to reinforcing the notion that East Indians in Trinidad were largely “bearers of a foreign culture” (Munasinghe 2001: 200). Following the introduction of universal adult suffrage in 1946, a new political arena was constructed and the two East Indian and African ethnic groups became two ready-made constituencies for two major parties with largely ethnic bases. The context of a colonially inherited Westminster-style parliament, instituted on the very eve of independence in December 1961, would only exacerbate this polarization (Brereton 1981; Yelvington 1993). The pre-independence 1956 General Election saw the emergence of the People’s National Movement (PNM) under the leadership of the charismatic Eric Williams, winning 13 out of the 24 seats: the party’s manifesto was committed to independence and equality “across

30

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

race and religion, class and colour” (Ryan 1972), but it was largely supported by the urban-based middle and lower classes, who were mainly of African ancestry. The People’s Democratic Party (PDP), founded by Bhadase Maraj (the founder of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, the major Hindu organization in Trinidad and Tobago since 1952), was isolated in the rural, orthodox Hindu districts and captured only five of the 24 elected seats in the Legislative Council. By the pre-independence 1961 General Election, the major opposition to the PNM became the stronger Democratic Labour Party (DLP), led by Rudranath Capildeo, uncle of Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul. Initially a coalition of East Indian and French Creole forces, the DLP became the political expression of the rural, more conservative East Indian middle and upper-middle class, a traditional élite with a primarily Hindu leadership (Ryan 1972).4 In 1958, the DLP victory in the short-lived West Indies Federal Election posed a major threat to Williams and the PNM. Angered by the opposition of some Indians to the formation of the West Indies Federation and their support for the DLP, Williams branded Indian dissenters as “a hostile and recalcitrant minority” (Palmer 2006: 266), in an infamous speech that “has served to condition the ethnic dimension of Trinidad political evolution ever since” (Allahar 2005b: 240). The 1961 election, on the very eve of Independence, was the crucial moment when the ethnic divide in the political life of Trinidad and Tobago became more evident and set the scene for many of the subsequent elections (Figueira 2009). The campaign was characterized by “the worst outbreak of racial animosity” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 56) between Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians. Earlier that year William’s PNM introduced the Representation of the People Bill, designed to modernize the electoral system by instituting the permanent registration of voters, identification cards, voting machines and revised electoral boundaries. The DLP viewed this as an attempt to disenfranchise illiterate, rural East Indian voters, less educated and more likely to be intimidated by the process (MacDonald 1986). For the DLP, the reforms attempted to “rig elections through manipulation of the voting machines, to allow non-national Afro-West Indians to vote in Trinidad and Tobago, and to gerrymander constituencies to ensure a PNM majority” (Meighoo 2003: 55). The 1961 election gave the PNM a two-thirds majority (20 out of 30 seats) that allowed the party to draft the constitution of the independent country without much input from the DLP, which was relegated to the opposition. The PNM 4. The DLP was formed in 1957 through the merger of three opposition parties in the Legislative Council: the People’s Democratic Party, the Trinidad Labour Party (born in the 1920s as the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association led by the French Creole Arthur Andrew Cipriani) and the Party of Political Progress Groups (originally led by the Portuguese unionist Albert Gomes) (see MacDonald 1986).



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 31

had prevailed and “vanquished the old politicians; established a Cabinet system of government, a bicameral legislature, and a liberal, non-racial constitution […] negotiated independence with the British government and with the parliamentary opposition and secured an unprecedented two-thirds majority in parliament” (Meighoo 2003: 60). Full independence from the British colonial yoke arrived the year after, on August 31st, 1962. 2.1.2 Politics and Afro-Indian relations in the post-independence era Winner of the prestigious Island Scholarship to Oxford University, Eric Williams is the man who led the country to independence and substantially shaped postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago. Williams became Prime Minister at independence in 1962 and remained in that position until his death in 1981. An excellent communicator, he was internationally recognized as a major scholar in History: his path-breaking Capitalism and Slavery (Williams 1944), was among the first works analysing British Imperialism, the African slave trade, the effects of slavery and the cause of its abolition from the perspective of a Caribbean historian. His scholarly activity “signified his commitment to redress the colonial condition” (Munasinghe 2001: 209), a commitment that soon overflowed in the political arena. An “intellectually brilliant, culturally urbane, charismatic” (Allahar 2003: 32) man, Eric Williams is widely acknowledged as the Father of the Nation in Trinidad and Tobago: [Williams] had verve and flair; he had that all-important quality identified by Vidia Naipaul as the personal trait which Trinidadians most highly value: style. With his dignified bearing, sharp tongue, his ever-present trinity of props – hearing aid, dark glasses and cigarette drooping from his lips – ‘The Doc’ was a sharply-etched, unique public personality. (Oxaal 1968: 112f)

The achievements of the PNM in its first years of activity were made out of “a combination of political shrewdness, determination, toughness, aggression, luck, and circumstance, sometimes at the cost of antagonism and bitterness particularly in terms of African-Indian relations” (Meighoo 2003: 60f). The PNM regime was maintained through forms of patronage directed at the economy sectors traditionally dominated by the Afro-Trinidadians, such as the oil and gas industry, and by focusing on the needs of the elite classes rather than those of the working class (Hintzen 1989). Since the PNM controlled “immense patronage and privileges” (Premdas 2007: 46), it was able to consolidate its electoral majority from the mixed ethnicity group, as well as the Chinese and White minorities, and a small but significant slice of the East Indian middle class. Thanks to this broad support, the PNM was able to rule the country for six consecutive parliamentary terms.

32

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

With the rise to power of the People’s National Movement, assimilation was favoured instead of cultural pluralism: the party tried to glue together all the disparate cultures of the two islands as part of its postcolonial nation-building efforts. “There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors came from India…There can be no Mother Africa for those of African origin […]. The only Mother we can recognise is Mother Trinidad and Tobago”, Eric Williams (1962: 279) said, although speaking of a society composed only of people with gene pools originating elsewhere in the world, as even the few survivors of the indigenous Taíno tribes were actually immigrants from the Greater Antilles. When Trinidad and Tobago became independent, East Indians were still largely confined to the primary sector of the economy, with a number of religious, linguistic and cultural differences underscoring their alienation and symbolically positioning them outside of the nation of Trinidad, while Afro-Creole culture became even more predominant under the PNM administration (Munasinghe 2001). In his famous Woodford Square speech Massa Day Done (1961), Eric Williams had blamed the colonial ideology for creating and consolidating racial divisiveness in the West Indies and advocated the refusal of any form of racialism in the PNM. However, the heritage of British colonial policies and its plantation society structure kept influencing every aspect of socio-political life on the island, and persisted in marking and reproducing the Us vs. Them division between the two major ethnic groups. The descendants of liberated African slaves and former East Indian indentured labourers on the sugar plantations of the islands had come to share the sociopolitical scenario of the country along the lines of a classic colonial divide et impera. Throughout the independent history of Trinidad and Tobago, competition occurring over scarce resources, paired with ethnic divisiveness, has made public life often seen as a place for conflict rather than cohesion. It is hard not to interpret the persistent prejudice and xenophobia between Africans and East Indians as a continuation of the same patterns of social exclusion and inequality suffered in colonial times. This has also prompted a thorny question on whether the Trinidadian nation has actually been able to engage in a challenge of the content (rather than the form) of the colonial order in its post-independence years (see Allahar 2003). Eventually, economic and political developments in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s created the right climate for the contestation of the PNM’s domination of Trinidad and Tobago. In particular, “the Black Power movement, the oil boom and the subsequent slump, the decline in the national pre-eminence of sugar, demographic changes, and the rise and fall of the One Love party – the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR)” (Munasinghe 2001: 228) created the humus for a challenge to the cultural and political hegemony of Afro-Trinidadians. Between 1968 and 1970, the Black Power movement gained strength in Trinidad and Tobago,



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 33

with a major uprising during the 1970 Carnival. The movement posed a major challenge to the PNM, contesting its economic and political agendas from a stronger anti-imperialistic stance and derisively referring to the PNM élite as Afro-Saxons (Oxaal 1971). The Black Power movement of Trinidad and Tobago, namely the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), developed at the St. Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies. Led by Geddes Granger (who took the name of Makandal Daaga), the NJAC joined up with trade unionists led by George Weekes of the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union and Basdeo Panday, then a young East Indian trade-union lawyer and activist. During the 1970s and the 1980s, the sugar industry of Trinidad and Tobago (a sector largely associated with East Indian labour) declined, and Basdeo Panday rose to national stature for his struggles on behalf of the sugar workers. By the mid-1980s, the dramatic fall in international oil prices resulted in economic recession for Trinidad and Tobago’s oil-based economy. The loss of economic well-being and the death of the charismatic PM Williams in 1981 contributed to the electorate drifting away from the PNM, which won only three seats in the 1986 election. A new, multi-racial party, the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) led by Afro-Tobagonian A. N. R. Robinson, took the remaining 33 seats and 66% of the votes. The NAR was a coalition that brought together anti-PNM forces, such as the Tobago autonomist Democratic Action Congress (DAC) and the United Labour Front (ULF) led by Basdeo Panday, which was successful among East Indian voters (Ryan 1996). The NAR “promised to forge an alliance among labour, business, and government and to promote ethnic harmony” (Munasinghe 2001: 239). However, the so-called Rainbow Party, that had brought together politicians supported by an electorate of multiple ethnicities, did not last long: the economic situation confronting the NAR was appalling and, in an ethnically divided context like Trinidad and Tobago, the issues of resource allocation and income distribution revived ethnic factionalism in the coalition. In particular, Panday’s ULF was accused of pushing to readdress “the composition of the boards of state enterprises, the public utilities and other statutory bodies” more in favour of East Indians (Munasinghe 2001: 243). As a consequence, the National Alliance for Reconstruction suffered a rapid split in 1988, with all the members of the former ULF being expelled by the party. Basdeo Panday, the most prominent East Indian leader in the coalition, launched in October 1988 the United National Congress (UNC), a party aimed to attract the consensus of the East Indians. NAR electoral support declined mainly because of the austerity programme and the neo-liberal economic policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund. On top of that, in 1990 an attempted coup by the Muslim organization Jamaat al Muslimeen tried to capitalize on the dissatisfaction. Over the course of six days, Prime Minister A. N. R. Robinson and other government officials were held hostages at the Red House and at the headquarters of Trinidad and Tobago

34

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Television. Widespread arson and looting took place in the capital of Port-of-Spain, causing twenty-four deaths and millions in property damage (Pantin 2007). In 1991, the nation returned to the polls in what was again a divisive Afro-Indo arena, with the PNM getting a majority over the UNC, and with Patrick Manning being appointed Prime Minister for the first time. For Premdas (2007), the significance of the 1991 election lies in the fact that, after the 1986 victory of the cross-communal NAR coalition, the country went back to the predominant pattern of the old ethnic politics, represented by the Afro-Trinidadian PNM and the Indo-Trinidadian UNC. While in the 1991 election Manning’s PNM victory derived from the vote being split between Panday’s UNC and Robinson’s NAR in a number of critical constituencies (Premdas 2007), the latter two parties were able to give rise to a completely different scenario during the following election. In 1995, a 17–17 tie in the seats obtained by the PNM and the UNC imposed the demand for a coalition government, the first in Trinidad and Tobago’s history. As the UNC was able to form a coalition with the two-seat National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR), Basdeo Panday became the first East Indian and trade unionist Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. This was a traumatic event for the African community, which resulted in the PNM mounting a massive electoral campaign to gain power back. Between 2000 and 2002, Trinidad and Tobago experienced one election every year: the UNC won the 2000 election, but lost its majority in 2001, following four defections. A new election was called in December 2001, but resulted in an unprecedented tie in the reformed 36-member House of Representatives. As prescribed by Trinidad and Tobago’s constitution, it was up to the President, A. N. R. Robinson, to select one of the two party leaders to form a government, and Patrick Manning (PNM) was favoured over Basdeo Panday (UNC). In Premdas’ view (2007), the 2001 election represented an authentic lost opportunity for a scenario of PNM/ UNC power sharing and inter-ethnic partisan accommodation in the history of Trinidad and Tobago. With a 18–18 split in Parliament, it was only a matter of time before a new election would be called. In October 2002, a stronger PNM won again against the UNC, with Manning being appointed as Prime Minister for the second time. The PNM secured its government for five years, winning 20 seats out of 36 with 50.7% of the votes, while the UNC took 16 with 46.5%. In November 2007, the PNM won again against the official opposition United National Congress-Alliance (a coalition of the UNC and six smaller parties) as well as the Congress of the People (a UNC splinter group led by Winston Dookeran). On a platform that highlighted its strong economic management and proposed introduction of an executive presidency, the ruling PNM gained 45.9% of the votes and 26 seats in the reformed 41-member House of Representatives, and Manning was appointed as PM for the third time. The main opposition UNC took 15 seats and 29.7% of the votes and the newly



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 35

established Congress of the People gained 22.6% of the votes but no seats. However, during his third mandate, Manning advised President George Maxwell Richards to dissolve Parliament on April 8th 2010, resulting in a General Election to be held 2 years sooner than was constitutionally mandated. On May 24th, 2010, Manning’s PNM lost the election to the People’s Partnership, whose political advent is the main focus of this study. 2.1.3 The 2010 election: Kamla Persad-Bissessar and The People’s Partnership An independent parliamentary democracy since August 31st, 1962, Trinidad and Tobago became a Republic in 1976, although remaining in the Commonwealth of Nations. The Parliament of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has two chambers. The country elects on a national level a House of Representatives, composed of 41 members, for a maximum five-year term in single-seat constituencies. The Prime Minister is chosen from among the elected representatives on the basis of their command of the support of the majority of legislators. The Senate has 31 members: 16 Government Senators appointed on the advice of the Prime Minister, six Opposition Senators appointed on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition and nine so-called Independent Senators appointed by the President to represent other sectors of civil society. The non-executive President is elected for a five-year term by an electoral college consisting of the members of both Houses of Parliament. Other elected bodies include the Local Government bodies in Trinidad (2 cities, 3 boroughs, 9 Regional Corporations) and the Tobago House of Assembly, which is composed of 12 elected members and is entrenched in the Constitution. Reinstated in 1980, the Tobago House of Assembly handles local government in the island of Tobago. While constitutional amendments have granted Tobago greater control over urban and rural development, health, education and housing, its Assembly has no legislative powers (CLGF 2017). Like the overwhelming majority of English-speaking Caribbean countries, Trinidad and Tobago has sustained a democratic form of government since independence, withstanding widespread economic crises, ethnic conflict, corruption, issues of distributive justice and inequality (Duncan and Woods 2007). Accusations of corruption were among the main reasons for the deepening unpopularity and rising tide of criticism over Manning’s third mandate as Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. The so-called UDeCOTT scandal earned the country a spot on the Global Integrity’s 2009 watch list (Kirton et al. 2010). Patrick Manning and Calder Hart, the Executive Chairman of UDeCOTT (Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago), faced numerous corruption charges stemming from the biased granting of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts and from the alleged acceptance of bribes. Among the most widely publicized aspects of the UDeCOTT scandal was the alleged involvement of state funding in the construction of the

36

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Heights of Guanapo Church, which also entailed the award of the church building contract to a Chinese company and the importation and exploitation of a large number of Chinese immigrant workers on the construction site (ibid.). Among the other projects promoted by Manning that were targeted by allegations of corruption, the Two Million Dollar Flag became a long-running saga in the local press: a company alleged to have close links to the PNM was paid two million Trinidadian Dollars (approximately three hundred thousand Euros) to erect a national flag at the National Stadium in Port of Spain. Following the threat of a vote of no confidence, Manning dissolved the Parliament on April 9th, 2010, and a General Election was announced to take place on May 24th, 2010. Consequently, Patrick Manning and the leader of the Opposition Kamla Persad-Bissessar had only six weeks to rally the country for votes. As the leader of the United National Congress, Persad-Bissessar immediately engaged with the other opposition parties and trade unionists of the country to mount a joint campaign and present a single platform against the PNM at the forthcoming election. The accord between the political forces in the People’s Partnership coalition was made public on April 21st, 2010, when the five leaders gathered at the Charlie King Junction in Fyzabad to sign their Declaration of Political Unity. Four main political forces joined to form the People’s Partnership alongside the United National Congress led by Persad-Bissessar, whose 41 candidates were presented at a massive rally at the Mid-Center Mall in Chaguanas on May 2nd, 2010. The first to join Persad-Bissessar was the Congress of the People (COP), formed in 2006 by Winston Dookeran and his supporters. At the time, Dookeran was the political leader of the UNC and had been engaged in internal party feuding with the Panday-loyalist UNC executive. The party soon came to represent a third way between the UNC and the PNM. The other member was the Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP) led by Ashworth Jack, a Tobagonian autonomist political party formed in 2008 from a split from the Democratic Action Congress. The National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), founded in 1969 by the leader of the Trinidadian Black Power movement Makandal Daaga, joined the coalition to contest under the COP sign. Similarly, the labour-dominated Movement for Social Justice (MSJ), led by the trade unionist Errol McLeod, joined the coalition to contest under the UNC sign. The coalition was very broad and inter-ethnic: “the UNC brought in the lower class Indian, the COP the middle class in the ethnic group, NJAC […] would provide an image of Afro-Indian solidarity, the leader of the Movement for Social Justice, a former leader of the powerful OWTU (Oilfields Movement for Social Justice) would have provided appeal to the lower class Afro-Creoles” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 158). Far from being a newcomer, Kamla Persad-Bissessar had become a Member of Parliament in 1995 for the Siparia constituency on the United National Congress



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 37

ticket, and served as Attorney-General and Minister of Legal Affairs, and Minister of Education between 1995 and 2001. She had actually pursued a career in education after graduation, teaching at schools and universities in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, before becoming an attorney-at-law. She served as leader of the Opposition from April 2006 to November 2007. Excluded from a leadership position in the UNC on the eve of the 2007 election, she became the leader of the party in January 2010, following an internal UNC election. She served as leader of the Opposition again from February 25th, 2010 to May 26th, 2010, when she took office as Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. The People’s Partnership coalition won the 2010 election, holding 29 seats out of 41 in the House of Representatives. The results are summarized in Table 1, which takes into account the national summary of votes and seats for the general election over the 2000–2010 decade. The coalition clearly compacted the opposition vote: the UNC would probably have won fewer seats and the three main coalition parties would have won fewer seats overall, with the PNM quite possibly retaining considerably more than 12. Indeed, in 2007 the COP contested 41 seats and won none of them. In 2010, the party contested 14 seats and won six, even though its share of the votes was considerably smaller. It is also notable that the UNC, only contesting 25 seats to the PNM’s 41, still won a greater share of the votes, with 42.9% to the latter’s 39.5%. Furthermore, Table 1 does not show that the People’s Partnership landslide could easily have been even more dramatic: in four of the 12 seats that the PNM held, it did so by a margin of less than 5% of the votes. By contrast, the UNC won many of its 21 seats by margins of 40% or more (Bishop 2011). Integral to the coalition’s electoral success was the decision to run just one UNC, COP or TOP candidate in each constituency, something that prevented a split by negotiating who would contest which seats in advance. This consequently led to a landslide victory that unseated many incumbent PNM MPs in what were formerly considered safe seats. In the 2007 and the 2010 electoral maps (Figures 2 and 3), the changes in the political colour of the constituencies are clearly visible. Table 1.  Share of votes and seats in general elections in Trinidad and Tobago (2000–2010) (Psephos Election Archive) Year

PNM

UNC

COP

TOP

2000 2001 2002 2007 2010

  46.4% (16)   46.5% (18) 50.7 (20)   45.9% (26)   39.5% (12)

  51.7% (19) 49.9 (18)   46.6% (26)   29.7% (15)   42.9% (21)

– – – 22.6% (0) 15.1% (6)

– – – – 2.1% (2)

38

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Figure 2.  Electoral map – 2007 Election Trinidad and Tobago (Psephos Election Archive)

Figure 3.  Electoral Map – 2010 Election Trinidad and Tobago (Psephos Election Archive)



2.2

Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 39

Ethnicity, identity and nationalism

2.2.1 “The African and the Asian will not mix”?: Between plurality and creolization Since its inception in the 1950s, Caribbean sociology has devoted a considerable amount of attention to the themes of social stratification, ethnicity and pluralism in the Archipelago. Many studies have historicized the current social stratification and established a causal relationship between the past colonial/plantation society and the social structures of the contemporary national states, highlighting the role played by race and ethnicity in the social differentiation and pluralism found in the area (Barrow and Reddock 2001). In particular, two major attitudes can be traced in the way Caribbean national societies are depicted in contemporary academic discourse, the first one being a narrative of the continuation of ancestral diversities between the diverse ethnic groups, the other one focusing on homogenization through mixture. Nevertheless, this section exemplifies how the complexity of Trinidad and Tobago can be regarded as a challenging limit point for both currents. The first theory portrays the Caribbean society as colonially structured and inherently plural. Multi-ethnicity and postcoloniality are two closely linked factors in the portrayal of a deeply divided society, with ethnic groups constituting quite separate and independent cultural sections within the same country and often characterized by tense mutual relations. Caribbean nations are therefore conceptualized as political units where different sections of the total population engage in different and separate forms of social institutions, encompassing “marriage, family, property, religion, economic institutions, language and folklore” (M. G. Smith 1965: 14f). Very influential and popular in the 1960s, the plural society model is commonly attributed to the Jamaican social anthropologist and poet M. G. Smith. In turn, M. G. Smith had been influenced by the work of J. S. Furnivall (1944; 1948), a colonial officer in Southeast Asia. According to Furnivall (1948: 304), any colonial society can be considered as “a medley”, for the population “mix but do not combine” and different sections of the community live “side by side, but separately within the same unit”. It is the portrait of a conflictual society with “no common will” (Furnivall 1944: 447), made up of different cultural sections that tend to reside separately and where interaction is economic and instrumental, rather that authentically social. This social structure also affects the local economy, which tends to be stratified into a number of specialized sectors, each almost entirely dominated by a single cultural group. Furnivall’s thought was deeply influenced by British colonial interests and was underpinned by the continuing need to justify white dominance. He argued that a white European minority, working as “a benevolent but impartial umpire”

40 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

(1948: 65), was needed in order to rule and maintain stability, as without an “elaborate western superstructure over native life” (1948: 280), society would collapse. In some of his later works, M. G. Smith (1991) revised some key tenets of Furnivall’s thought, theorizing a more nuanced form of pluralism in which the monopoly of power (driven either by an external source or by a dominant internal sector) was no longer a necessary and essential precondition for the maintenance of a plural society. Still, his focus was largely on the presence of distinct ethnic groups with different values and beliefs, painting an overall picture of social disunity and instability in most postcolonial nations. But are the atavistic differences between Africans and East Indians enough to allow us to label Trinidadian society as plural? The first American anthropologists arriving in Trinidad encountered cultural communities living in isolated villages in a country with no roads, and where distinct groups were holding on to different ancestral languages, religions and traditions (Herskovits 1947; Klass 1961). However, a steady urbanization has been playing a major role in the corrosion of such everyday traditional social practices over the past six decades. In particular, East Indians living in urban areas have been less able and less likely to hold on to ways of living rooted in their Indian imaginary homeland, with patterns of social change documented as early as the 1980s. An example of this are the ethnographic works by Joseph Nevadomsky (1980a; 1980b; 1982; 1983; 2001), illustrating change across East Indian family and marriage patterns, occupational patterns and economic organisation, among others. Contemporary Trinidad and Tobago is far from being an ethnically conservative society: while in 1888 the historian J. A. Froude famously postulated that “the African and the Asiatic will not mix”, the proportion of “mixed” people in the Census has been rising constantly over the past forty years and now accounts for 22.8% of the population. Among this percentage, almost 8% declare themselves as dougla, a Hindi-derived word used to indicate the offspring of an Indo-Afro union (Regis 2011). In a more recent contribution, Kirk Meighoo convincingly argued that Trinidad and Tobago does not have the legal and political structure of an actual plural society: “there is no internal ethnic authority comparable to the Great Council of Chiefs in Fiji; no absolute religious differentiation (with different applicable civil laws) as in Malaysia; and no differential economic organisation such as occurs in Fiji”, where land is collectively owned by Fijian descent groups who rent it to East Indian farmers (Meighoo 2008: 106f). At the same time, other well-researched works, such as Premdas (2007); Wilson (2012) and Bissessar and La Guerre (2013), still frame Trinidad and Tobago in a narrative of essential plurality, giving equally convincing evidence of the contentious politics in the country, with particular reference to the



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 41

persistence of ethnic strife in the electoral process, struggles over distribution of employment in both public and private sectors, as well as contestations over the primacy of cultural symbols such as festivals, music and dance. In contrast to the plural society model of social segmentation and division, the Caribbean is alternatively portrayed as the cradle of a creole society, by-product of many and diverse colonial encounters and interaction of cultures. The Barbadian scholar Kamau Brathwaite developed his creolization theory partly drawing on the work of the historian Elsa Goveia (1952) on the slave society of the Leeward Islands. The term “creole” was first used in Jose de Costa’s Historia Natural in 1590 to describe “those born of Spanish parents in the Indies” (Mintz 1996: 301). Tracing the etymology of the word creole to the Spanish words criar (to create) and colon (colonist), Brathwaite conceptualizes a criollo as “a committed settler, one identified with the area of settlement, one native to the settlement though not ancestral indigenous to it” (1974: 10). In The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, Brathwaite advanced the key concept that black Africans and white Europeans in Caribbean colonial societies were not to be considered as “separate nuclear units” but rather as “contributory parts of a whole” (1971: 307). For Brathwaite (1974: 11), the process of creolization that occurred in Caribbean societies always entailed two levels: ac-culturation, which is the “yoking (by force and example, deriving from power/prestige) of one culture to another (in this case the enslaved/African to the European)” and inter/culturation, which is an “unplanned, unstructured but osmotic relationship proceeding from this yoke”. These ideas have been widely used to conceptualize the emergence of new Caribbean cultures and societies, conceived as having arisen over time as a result of the colonial encounter, through “imitation, native creation or indigenization, language, sex and amorous influences” (Brathwaite 1974: 19). The great merit of Brathwaite’s approach is that it finally addressed the fixed superiority/inferiority power relations between White and Black/Coloured populations in the Caribbean. However, while the attention paid to the unequal terms of interculturation is one of the most helpful and contemporary features of Brathwaite’s analysis, this also implied paying less attention to the relations between non-White, subordinate ethnic groups in a situation of multiple-ethnic contact, such as the Afro/Indo relations in Trinidad and Tobago. As a result, the Creole-society framework has been embraced in most of the northern Caribbean, including the Hispanic areas, but its application to the Southern Caribbean has proven more problematic (Reddock 1998). This does not imply that Trinidad and Tobago has been immune to processes of biological and cultural amalgamation, nor that the East Indian and African communities in Trinidad and Tobago should be regarded as two perfectly preserved

42

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

monoliths. As a matter of fact, both the flows of African slaves and indentured labourers from India were highly differentiated in terms of geographical origin, language and religion upon their very arrival. Subsequently, as they came to represent the new inhabitants of Trinidad and Tobago, they underwent both processes of internal cultural restructuration and Afro/Indo interculturation, especially among the lower classes (Reddock 1998). While often inaccurately framed as a prime example of cultural retention, the East Indian community in the Caribbean has undergone many changes and blending of traditions compared to their original communities in India, encompassing the creation of a common language among the East Indian labourers, the attenuation of the caste system, the modification of marriage and joint family structure and changes in the routinization of the Hindu faith (see cited works by Nevadomsky as well as Vertovec 2001). The festival of Muharram (the Islamic new near, also known as Hosay in the Caribbean) has come to represent an arena for interethnic and interreligious participation and there are studies showing the incorporation of Hindu elements, such as Kali-Mai in the Shango/Orisha cult of Trinidad (Vertovec 1998). Most importantly, we have seen how census data has come to represent the most striking evidence of an ongoing process of creolization, with “Mixed” population (as they are labelled in the census itself) being steadily on the rise in the past decades. At the same time, it would be impossible not to acknowledge that the Caribbean people of East Indian ancestry, making up the 20% of the population in the Archipelago, have been commonly considered one of the main limit points of the Creole society framework. Brathwaite’s 1971 study on The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 was framed in a time when African slavery was still active, and East Indians were not present yet in the West Indies. Brathwaite addressed the East Indian presence in the Caribbean in his later work Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (1974). However, it has been pointed out, both by Puri (1999: 20) and Munasinghe (2006: 555), that this theoretical integration significantly changed the trajectory of Brathwaite’s creole society into a substantially plural one, since East Indians were seen by Brathwaite (1974: 11) as compelled to “adjust themselves to the existing creole synthesis and the new landscape”, without actually becoming creoles. But what does being creole in Trinidad and Tobago really imply? And why does it matter that much? Self-categorization by the means of very precise labels shapes the “racialized consciousness” (Allahar 1999: 248) and the divisiveness between Trinidadians of African and East Indian ancestry. Naming has a profound implication in Trinidad and Tobago, as ethnicity is intrinsically connected to nation building and linked to the notions of inclusion or exclusion from the country’s leading roles. The label creole has come to have three main usages in Trinidad and Tobago. It is used:



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 43

(1) to refer to an amalgam of descendants of Europeans who still dominate the local economy, known locally as French Creoles”; (2) “primarily by Indians to refer to persons of African descent, also referred to by a Hindu derivative kirwal” and (3) to refer to the cultural artifacts of the dominant culture such as ‘Creole food’, ‘Creole bacchanal’ and so on. (Reddock 1998: 65)

Aisha Khan (2001: 285) identified a fourth, additional and complementary usage of the term creole “by Afro-Trinidadians, in speaking about the Creole part of society as distinct from ‘Indo’”. In fact, creole (or Afro-Creole, with the prefix narrowing down the other potential meanings of the word) is the most widely used term for self-reference by people of African ancestry in Trinidad and Tobago.5 On the contrary, East Indians in the country are not considered and do not consider themselves as Creole. Quite the opposite, East Indian and Creole are considered as “mutually exclusive categories” (Munasinghe 2001: 6). Representations of ethnicity with their rhetoric of labels built amid colonial inheritance, paired with perceived cultural differences and crystallized stereotypes, are deeply involved in the explicit and implicit discussion over “which group contributed more into the building of the nation, and was therefore more deserving of political and economic ascendancy” (Geer 2007: 121). A creole person, in the foundational definition of Brathwaite, is considered as possessing not only local culture but also local biology: it is the result of a local miscegenation, traditionally associated with the local mix of people of European and African descent. The underlying implication of Brathwaite’s framework is that creole has come to imply a native status in Trinidad and Tobago and in the broader Caribbean scenario. The Creolization model emerged during a highly ideologically charged historical moment and has to be historicized in the political context of the post-1960s, when the British Caribbean was at the forefront of the cause of national independence. Brathwaite’s creolization, similarly to Ortiz’s transculturation and Glissant’s transversality, were meant to be “powerful tools for intellectual critique of western colonialism and imperialism, tools appropriate to a specific context and grounded in Caribbean realities” (Sheller 2003: 188). Like elsewhere in the Caribbean, in Trinidad and Tobago “decolonization went hand in hand with the positive re-evaluation of formerly despised Afro-Creole lower-class cultural forms” (Munasinghe 2006: 557). The theory of creolization served an overtly anti-colonialist nationalist project, by celebrating the active role of people of African ancestry in the Caribbean and elevating the Afro-Creole segment of the Trinidadian society to the role of culture creators in the newly independent nation. However, fuelled by the prevalence of a 5. Local academics or politically conscious people also use “Black” and “African”, as well as “Afro-Trinidadian” (Munasinghe 2001).

44 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

(slightly) numerically larger, more united, more urbanized Black population, and under the influence of emerging cultural enterprises celebrating creolization as well as Black pride (such as the Martinican Négritude of the 1930s and the Afrocentrism of the 1960s), Trinidadian independence came to be conceptualized as the moment for Black self-rule, at the expenses of the other half of the country’s population (see Trotman 1991). Forty years after its publication, Kamau Brathwaite’s creole society model is still a leading interpretation of Caribbean society, and the original absence of East Indians in the framework has been having a significant impact on the way Trinidadian cultural and national identity is conceptualized. As much as “African-ness and Indian-ness are generally politically invented or imagined and largely mythical” (Allahar 1999: 247, see also Williams 1962) in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, it is undeniable that the division of these two groups along ethnic lines has been crucial in determining “political actions, economic opportunities, social standing even cultural legitimacy or authenticity” (Allahar 1999: 248). The designation of the chosen, legitimated ethnic group to take the leadership of the independent Trinidad and Tobago, in fact, has been traditionally configured in a dialectical relationship with the definition of what it actually means to be truly Trinidadian, and, in turn, this has inherently been contributing to a slippery definition of contemporary national identity. If nation-building is “the basic Third World ideology and project” (A. D. Smith 1983: 232), the premises for any nationalist discourse in Trinidad and Tobago lie in the blurred space caught in between the Plural and the Creole model. To be precise, they discursively emerge from the dialectic interplay between these competing narratives of divisiveness and amalgamation, to be further explored in the next section. 2.2.2 Callaloo or pelau?: The discursive construction of the postcolonial nation The complex nature of the relations between the different ethnic groups in Trinidad and Tobago, both tense and divisive as well as interactive and syncretic, epitomizes the “formidable task of understanding the limits and meaning of terms like ‘the Caribbean people’ or ‘the Trinidadian nation’” (Harney 1996: 7). In particular, we have seen how the presence of the East Indian diaspora in Trinidad and Tobago has added a further level of complexity to the national imaginary compared to the wider Archipelago, which, “for a specific constellation of historical forces” (Munasinghe 2002: 668), is generally imagined as a Black, African derived space. The impulse to create homogeneity out of heterogeneity has been regarded as the common ground for the European nationalisms of the late 18th and 19th centuries and is still transversal to most nation-building projects in the world. However, while



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 45

in Europe the most recent concerns about heterogeneity have been linked to the increasing migration flows, the same question in Trinidad is still largely informed “by the power struggles among discrepant diasporas” debating “issues of national representation and equality in relation to participation in decision-making and the sharing of material wealth in the country” (Guilbault 2011: 5). In the Trinidadian national context, multiculturalism is “not about how a ‘monoculture’ addresses the so-called disruptive presence of migrants”, but rather seems to be focused on how, “out of diversity, unity can be created” (Guilbault 2011: 6). As a result, the diasporic origins of both the East Indian and African communities, with their inability to claim pure autochthony, has produced a national narrative that necessarily takes on board, and sometimes even foregrounds, a condition of Caribbean heterogeneity, either conceptualized as plurality or mixture. In fact, in the contemporary Trinidad and Tobago these two main national narratives are still in tension, and they seem to largely fall in the opposition between a vision of the country as a plural nation or a creolized one. Two food metaphors are frequently used in Trinidadian lay discourse as well as in the academic and political ones as “mixing metaphors”, that is, “practices, discourses or events where the foundational theme of mixing is communicated through analogy, metonym, images, motifs as well as in literary terms” (Khan 2001: 4). Their contested use epitomizes the tension between national ethno-cultural unity and diversity that has been pervading most aspects of Trinidadian socio-political life and is majorly at stake in the discursive construction of national identity in Trinidad and Tobago (see Esposito 2019). On the one hand, the callaloo stew is a powerfully symbolic dish, often acknowledged as the national one of Trinidad and Tobago and regarded as the “mixing metaphor” (Khan 2001) par excellence of Trinidadian nationalism. Created in the Caribbean by African slaves mixing both African (okra) and indigenous (taro or dasheen leaves) plants, callaloo requires a swizzle stick to simmer down all the ingredients. For this reason, it is often associated with an idea of a Caribbean “Melting Pot” (Laubeová 2005), created through the analogous principles of creolization, as a result of a “mixture or blending of various ingredients that originated in the Old World” (Bolland 1992: 50). Moreover, callaloo draws its origins from the greens-based stews of West African cuisine, and, given its strong African cultural matrix, it does not seem to be able to represent equally both the African and East Indian ethnic groups of Trinidad and Tobago. For this reason, the mixing metaphor of pelau, a one-pot dish of rice and chicken cooked with coconut milk and aromatic herbs, has been emerging as an alternative to callaloo. Pelau (or pilau) is often associated with the idea of a more plural “Ethnic Stew” (Laubeová 2005), because the different ingredients still keep their solid structure and their flavours in the final dish. Moreover, with its rice and sugar caramelized chicken, pelau has the potential to represent both East Indian

46 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

and African ingredients, preparation techniques and traditions. The pelau metaphor is closer to a conceptualization of Trinidad and Tobago as a “cosmopolitan plural” (Munasinghe 2001: 40) nation, where the plurality of the various immigrant groups in the country is seen as continuing up until the present. Analysing these two competing metaphors only scrapes the surface of the extremely complex issue that is the nation-building project in the Caribbean and, by extension, the postcolonial world. A detailed historical and socio-political explanation of the topic is largely beyond the scope of this book: many, in fact, are the paradoxes of Caribbean nationalism, where the intertwining of the categories of ethnic and national identities in a colonially-shaped context has set the scene for a drama of epic proportions.6 When investigating contemporary Caribbean nations and nationalisms, Fredric Jameson’s commandment to “always historicize!” (1981: 1) seems almost inescapable. Lest we forget, the contemporary Caribbean is the result of a Western imperial project where bonded labourers were transplanted from the four corners of the Earth to be employed in the mono-crop plantation production of commodities for the markets in the metropolis, such as sugar, coffee or cocoa. Decolonization has seen these very bonded labourers, ethnically diverse and kept under a divide et impera colonial system, coming to share common territories that eventually became independent national units. These nations have been highly influenced by European “modular” (Anderson 1991) national imaginaries, have inherited colonially-derived political and governmental structures (of which a Westminster parliament in a multi-ethnic context is only the most tragic example) and have been constantly prey to crippling neocolonial political and economic interferences. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the question of Caribbean nationalism remains one of thorniest and most debated across the Social Sciences. Given the specific configuration of historical events in the Archipelago, a primordialist understanding of national identity and belonging is a perspective bound to suffer from a short-blanket syndrome in the postcolonial Caribbean nation. Especially if we stick to a “hard” version of primordialism, identity and group attachment are difficult to interpret as natural or biological in the Caribbean. And yet, ironically enough, a “soft”, cultural interpretation has been very successful in keeping the Indo- and Afro-Trinidadian communities apart on the basis of their primordial cultural differences (see Allahar 1996). Albeit distant in space and time, more or less imagined memories of the cultural and institutional practices of one’s Indian or African ancestors in “some past golden age” (A. D. Smith 1984: 89) would 6. For more complete overview of the main cultural and postcolonial debates on Caribbean nationalism, see Munasinghe (2002) and Puri (2004); for a history of state and nationalism in the Caribbean, see Knight (2011).



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 47

still represent the main source of self-identification and the main point of reference to impart meaning to one’s lived-experience in Trinidad and Tobago. Referred to by Selwyn Ryan (1999: 24) as “ethnic ghosts”, these are the “memories of economic, religious and cultural practices, values and ways of doing things which were learnt in their homelands and embedded in their subconscious”, and which the African and Indian communities brought with them to the Caribbean. Eventually fuelling the proliferation of centrifugal socio-political forces like Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) and Afrocentrism in the country (Allahar 2004), this “consciousness of a kind” (Geertz 1973: 307) so grounded in distant ethnic memories has actually worked against the development of those feelings of unity and cohesiveness that would be expected of a nation-building project. Postcolonial studies have investigated the broader tension between the heterogeneous people and the homogenizing nation, and have questioned the nation as an “autonomous or sovereign form of political rationality” (Bhabha 1990: 293). The modernity of nationalism, in fact, would fail to actually represent a “universal ideal” and the true “image of the Enlightenment” without relying on the presence of a colonized Other (Chatterjee 1986: 17). In turn, theorizations of hybridity have been opposed to the nation-state as a stable unitary subject and by-product of Enlightenment epistemology. “Border-crossing, nomadism, travel, homelessness, and nationlessness” (Puri 2004: 19) have emerged as important counter-tropes of cultural hybridity and post-nationalism, together with an interest in units of analysis alternative to the nation-state, of which Paul Gilroy’s conceptualization of the Black Atlantic (1993) and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/Frontera (1987) represent two of the most renowned examples. Other conceptualizations have been better received by postcolonial theorists, maybe because they evoke a process of nation building grounded in myth and fiction that is all too familiar in the postcolonial world. An example is the “ethnosymbolic” approach to nationalism, according to which “the civic concept of a modern nation” would be formed, constructed and sustained by means of the basic, unifying “myths, symbols and memories of pre-modern ethnie” (A. D. Smith 1988: 11, see also A. D. Smith 1984). Another example is the conceptualization of “traditions” as something that can be “invented” (Hobsbawn 1983) in order to build national identity, promote national unity or legitimise certain institutions or cultural practices. Benedict Anderson’s (1991) conceptualization of nation as “imagined community” has been particularly successful, as he persuasively argued that European nation-states emerged in part as the consequence of a work of imagination, and were to be regarded as deep, horizontal communities existing as mental constructs in the minds of the nationalized subjects. However, postcolonial interpretations of Anderson’s work seem to differ in a fundamental aspect: the nature of the imagination itself. On the one hand, Anderson’s conceptualization of nation as a framework

48 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

for political activity and a structure of feeling has been associated with “a potentially infinite variety of ways of imagining the nation” and to a conceptualization of postcolonial nations as “sites where cultural energies, desires, and longings are and can be mobilized (Puri 2004: 20)”. On the other hand, Anderson’s work has been linked to a conceptualization of nation-state still regarded as a universal template, whose essence is the same everywhere although the ways of achieving it might differ and there may be variations in the actual construction or architecture, which do nothing but lend it “an agreeable, but artificial, local flavour” (Chabal 2008: 41). From a critical discursive perspective, however, the question is preposterous. The “cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation” (Bhabha 1990: 292) is worth exploring regardless of the nature of the imagination, or better yet, exactly with the purpose of shedding light on how the nation is discursively constructed with different premises and in different context with “specific histories and particular meanings within different political languages” (ibid). Investigating the ways in which such processes take place in the Caribbean nation not only enables the investigation of Trinidadian national identity as being primarily locally constructed through discourse, but also allows the in-depth exploration of the discursive negotiation of concepts like nation, ethnicity and hybridity in political discourse and other postcolonial hegemonic narratives. Largely based on the works of Anderson (1991); Bourdieu (1994); Hall (1992, 1996); Kolakowski (1995); Martin (1995) and Ricoeur (1992), the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies has extensively explored the discursive construction of national identity, albeit mostly in European contexts (see de Cillia et al. 1999; Wodak et al. 2009; Wodak 2018). According to the DHA, “national identities are discursively (through language and other semiotic systems) produced, reproduced, transformed and destructed” (de Cillia et al. 1999: 153). Hence, the idea of nation is “constructed and conveyed in discourse, predominantly in narratives of national culture” (Wodak et al. 2009: 22) and becomes operative “in the realm of convictions and beliefs through reifying, figurative discourses continuously launched by politicians, intellectuals and media people” (de Cillia et al. 1999: 153). The DHA is characterized by an awareness of the prime role of politicians in the discursive construction of national identity. In this, Trinidad and Tobago marks no exception: with ethnicity representing a clear political issue in the country, political rhetoric is required to bridge ethnic diversities in a more or less homogenizing narrative of a Trinidadian nationality. Also, drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, a nation can be regarded as “a complex of common ideas, concepts or perception schemes (a) of related emotional attitudes intersubjectively shared within a specific group of persons; (b) as well of similar behavioural dispositions; (c) all of which are internalized through ‘national’ socialization” (ibid.). The state “shapes those forms of perception, of



Chapter 2.  Ethnicity, nationalism and the political process in Trinidad and Tobago 49

categorization, of interpretation, and of memory” that serve as the basis for a discursive construction of a “national character” or “national common sense” as habi­ tus (Wodak et al. 2009: 29). We will see how these ideas and schemata relate to the idea of a Trinidadian essence that encompasses elements such as a common national history, common national icons and a specific national territory (see Chapter 6). At the same time, the discursive construction of nations and national identities is conceptualized as running hand in hand with “the construction of difference/distinctiveness and uniqueness” (ibid.). Discursive constructs of nations and national identities often tend to “emphasise national uniqueness and intra-national uniformity but largely ignore intra-national differences” (Wodak et al. 2009: 4). However, we will see how the Trinidadian case is an excellent example of the complex tension between the construction of sameness and the acknowledgement of difference at the imaginary collective level, between narratives that highlight pluralistic multiplicity and attempts at group-internal homogenization. The DHA also starts from the assumption that “there is no such thing as the one and only national identity” (ibid.), which is not fixed in an essentialized sense. There will always be “competing conceptions, histories, stereotypes etc.” (Billig 2009: 348) and these different identities are discursively constructed according to the context, that is according to the audiences to which narratives or speeches or written genres are addressed, the situational setting of the discursive act and the topic being discussed (de Cillia et al. 1999: 153). In this respect, the analysis of political discourse sheds light on the way in which members of the Trinidadian nation are enculturated in many heterogeneous we-identities, being regional, supraregional, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious, sexual, or political (Wodak et al. 2009: 4). One of the most distinctive aspects of the DHA is the importance given to history and an awareness of the construction of national identity as building “on the emphasis on a common history” that has always to do with “remembrance and memory” (de Cillia et al. 1999: 154, see also Halbwachs’ (1992) concept of “collective memory”). The relationship of the Caribbean with history is traditionally vexed and the matter has long fascinated and absorbed the most prominent Caribbean intellectuals.7 In particular, traditional notions of history, what Glissant (1981: 62) calls Histoire avec un grand H (History with a capital H), have been largely grounded in a Eurocentric and Hegelian hierarchical frame that consolidated grandiose ideals about Western civilization and constituted Africa (and, through the Middle Passage, the Caribbean) as the place of the “ahistorical”. Conceptualized as such, history appears as something Caribbean people cannot make or have, a “nonhistory” associated either with the painful heritage of colonization, genocide and 7. A full coverage of such a major and complex topic in Caribbean Studies is beyond the scope of this study. See Higman (1999) for a fairly comprehensive essay on the matter.

50

Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

slavery or a sense of “historylessness”, a sense of amnesia and erosion of identity (ibid.). Unsurprisingly, the famously trenchant V. S. Naipaul believed that “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (1962: 29). Even C. L. R. James (1962: 391) in his appendix to The Black Jacobins, stated that Caribbean history “consists of a series of unco-ordinated periods of drift, punctured by spurts, leaps, and catastrophes”. Nevertheless, from a DHA perspective national history is to be regarded as a post-hoc, meaning endowed narrative, always constituted by a construction and fictionalization that revolves not only around “founding myths and myths of origin, mythical figures, political successes, times of prosperity and stability”, but also attempts at making sense of “defeats and crises” (Wodak et al. 2009: 31). Through the framing power of discourse, both victories and defeats “become carriers of consensual values and ideals, and which therefore have value as objects in collective memory” (Wodak and Heer 2008: 1). The awareness of the historical depth of discursive practices and the emphasis on ethnographic context-situatedness so characteristic of the DHA constitute two of its most valuable features when it comes to researching the framing power of political discourse in the Trinidadian national context. The next chapter further discusses the role of the DHA as a prime theory and method for the analysis of political discourse. It also illustrates how the approach can be further complemented with insights from Social Semiotics in order to account for the mediatized multimodality of the contemporary political message. The potential of such a critical multimodal approach in political discourse is further demonstrated in the analytical chapters that follow (Chapters 4, 5 and 6). It can be seen how this approach allowed for the emergence of a vast number of discursive strategies of self- and other-presentation and legitimation employed by Kamla Persad-Bissessar, encompassing legitimizing her role as the first woman PM candidate, validating her coalition bid to political tribalism, as well as fostering a wider national sense of unity and belonging across the ethnically fragmented country. In an exploration of the broader implications of meanings and messages beyond the electoral moment, the following chapters explore to what extent political communication is able to make sense of the past and present national complexity in Trinidad and Tobago, marked by the continuous transgression of any neat sociological dichotomy.

Chapter 3

Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse

3.1

Contemporary political discourse: A case for visuality and critique

The study of political discourse can be traced back to the origins of politics itself. Ever since the Greek polis, and later in the Roman Empire, the art of verbal persuasion was regarded as an authentic form of political science: a great emphasis was placed on the training of leaders’ oratory skills in a formulaic tradition, made up of a great number of speech patterns and set pieces to be largely learned by heart. Although it dates back to the 4th century BC, Aristotle’s Rhetoric is still considered the classic original point of reference in the study of the subject, to the point that his distinction between three different main forms of oratory (namely deliberative, judicial and epideictic) is commonly found in many contemporary works on political discourse (e.g. Charteris-Black 2014; Johnstone and Eisenheart 2008; Reisigl 2008). This millennia-long, uninterrupted human attention to political communication has created an authentic apparatus for the exploration of the connection between language and power, which has kept evolving with politics itself and can be traced up to present times. Linguists, communication scholars and political scientists alike would largely agree that politics and language are intimately intertwined. Political interaction, in fact, requires language structure in order to exist, “for every political action is prepared, accompanied, influenced and played by language” (Schäffner 1996: 201). Not only scholars, but political actors themselves are extremely aware of the power of language and the major effects it can have on their political success. At the same time, while the recognition of the role of language as an essential instrument of politics is as ancient as Aristotle, there is no straightforward and unanimous definition of what political discourse is. A reason for this might be that there are “as many definitions of ‘politics’ as there are political scientists” (van Dijk 2003: 212), and this encompasses the very general definitions of concepts like politics and power, as well as the more specific classification of the activities politicians engage in. What is political is therefore a matter of interpretation and almost a political statement itself (Chilton and Schäffner 1997), as narrowing down the field implies answering thorny questions like what is political?, what is not?, and why?.

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If we were to start from the Foucauldian assumption that linguistic behaviour unavoidably involves structures of domination and legitimation, all language use might be considered political. In this vein, political differences can be seen as mainly differences in language, and political struggles, at least partly, as struggles over which forms and uses of language should dominate (Fairclough 2000). At the same time, if all discourse is political, then defining political discourse as a field of study can be a challenging task, which requires a deeper reflection on its genres and relative social domains. The most sensible way to reach a definition is to see political discourse as an umbrella term for a vast variety of text types across the social domain of politics. These are historically and culturally determined and fulfil different functions related to different political activities. In the same vein, their themes and topics are primarily related to political activities, political ideas and political relations (Schäffner 1997). Within this broader perspective, professional politicians are not regarded as the only participants in the domain of politics, which also involves “people as citizens and voter, people as members of pressure and issue groups, demonstrators and dissidents, and so on” (van Dijk 1997: 13). While language has been considered closely related to politics throughout history, in the late twentieth century the evolving relationship between politics, government and mass and digital media has radically transformed political discourse as well as its study. Political leaders now ascend to power in profoundly mediated contexts where politics is being “mediatized”, “spectacularized” and “personalized” (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999) at unprecedented levels. Such media-driven influence in the political environment has affected all aspects of politics, including the processes as well as the political institutions, organizations and actors. In parallel, also the forms, types and functions of political discourse have profoundly changed. One of the most important consequences of the mediatization of contemporary politics is a stronger primacy of the visual component in political communication. This is far from being a recent tenet in the field: evidence from a variety of classical sources shows how the deep connection between “knowing and believing” and “seeing and the visualised” (Gronbeck 2008: xxii) has been clear to rhetoricians since the very birth of the discipline. For example, in his Institutio Oratoria (I AD), Quintilian describes gesture as a powerful, crucial part of the technique used by public orators to “sway the feelings of the crowd” (Kendon 2004: 17). In contemporary political communication, visual elements are commonly being used to perform the most crucial political actions, such as to “catch and maintain the attention […], establish trustworthiness for the promoted political player, seek consistency with other campaign initiatives, and be relatively resistant to negative reactions from opponents and/or commentaries” (Horsbøl 2006: 153). They are also increasingly used to communicate complex ideas and attitudes: videos or images “strongly address emotions and cause affective responses (as does pathos-oriented rhetoric in general)”, for example trying to “evoke positive or negative responses by



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 53

applying simplistic ‘we-discourses’ or seductive metaphors as unifying elements” (Richardson and Wodak 2009a: 52). In particular, visuals are highly salient in political campaigns, to the point that “the balance of power in the ad wars appears to lean toward those who produce the 30-second political spots rather than those who attempt to counter them in pursuit of a vigorous and informed campaign conversation” (Richardson 2002). Related to the mediatization of politics is the renewed need for political leaders to hire professionals to help them tackle these complex communication tasks. Often regarded as the “professionalization” (Negrine et al. 2007; Negrine 2008) of political communication, it is characterized by a deeper and more extensive involvement in political message-making of publicity advisers, public relations experts, campaign management consultants, social media managers and the like. It is shared knowledge that politicians and their teams work hard on sound bites, those brief, complete and striking statements that are easily incorporated into media accounts as précis of their views and objectives. It is not surprising, then, to realize that the same amount of teamwork goes into constructing effective image bites and video bites, portraits and brief visual shots or video clips where candidates advertise themselves and their parties (Schill 2012). The contribution of communication experts in modern, professionalized political culture only strengthens the foundational tenet that political communication is to be approached as a highly designed type of discourse, that is to say, planned by professional politicians and communication experts with the strategic intention to influence public opinion and the electorate. Reflecting on these processes of mediatization and professionalization and their impact on contemporary political discourse calls for an investigation that goes beyond the more formal and verbal aspects traditionally covered by oratory and rhetoric, to account for both for the forms of texts and their political functions and implications. On the one hand, we are called to systematically account for the political and social implications of the visual in political discourse. Paradoxically, the study of political argument has been often “coloured by the assumption that the claims and the reasons [of argumentation] must be linguistically serialised” (Willard 1979: 212) and there has been an established tendency amongst critical discourse scholars to analyse text, focusing mostly on speeches by politicians, parliamentary debates and media reports, editorials and interviews. But scholars are also becoming increasingly aware that “a concentration on words alone is not enough” (Hodge and Kress 1988: vii), largely driven by the enormous impact of the Web 2.0 in shaping new and diverse forms of political participation and communication which rely heavily on visuality. Especially when examining a political campaign, given the relevance of multimodal resources in the field of “political advertising” (Reisigl 2008), adopting a logocentric stance will only ever provide an inadequate account of how politicians’ standpoints are advanced. This awareness makes it essential to

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assemble large corpora of multimodal data, and to adopt a transdisciplinary, critical social semiotic approach when analysing political discourse today. On the other hand, both the mediatization and professionalization of political discourse only strengthen the case (if it was further needed) for a study of political discourse aimed at its implied meaning and able to account for the reproduction (and abuse) of political power by its means. This does not mean automatically “collapsing political discourse analysis into critical discourse analysis” (van Dijk 1997: 11), but it entails starting from the assumption that the analysis of political discourse yields most relevant results if it manages to be both about discourse and also entail a “critical enterprise” (ibid.). A critical approach to political discourse should be characterized by a focus on the linguistic and discursive dimensions of political text and talk, with abundant authentic data as empirical evidence of “the ways in which language choice is manipulated for a specific political effect” (Wilson 2001: 410). This emphasis on engaged and in-depth linguistic analysis is essential, as it is one of the main features distinguishing the critical analysis of political discourse from political research as found in political science (Chilton and Schäffner 2002). At the same time, it is vital to maintain an openly critical stance on the political nature of discursive practices. While the analysis should not “lose linguistic rigor for the sake of sociopolitical claims” (Wilson 2001: 411), it must also be characterized by an awareness of political communication as “the defence of the indefensible” (Orwell 1969: 225) and aimed at a more critical analysis of its underlying ideologies. Given the role of political discourse in the enactment, reproduction, and legitimization of power and domination (van Dijk 2015: 466), it is unsurprising that many CDS studies have dealt with political text and talk. However, since the different approaches to CDS vary according to theoretical assumptions and research methods, the following section addresses more specifically the approach employed in this study, namely the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA).1 3.2

The discourse-historical approach

Originating in the so-called Vienna School of Discourse Analysis and situating itself within the broader network of Critical Discourse Studies, the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) has been employed for the analysis of historical, organizational and political topics and texts ever since the early 1990s.2 In particular, the DHA was first developed to analyse the discursive construction of anti-Semitism in the 1986 Austrian Presidential election campaign (Wodak 1990), and has been characterized 1. For a complete overview of the different CDS approaches see Hart and Cap 2014; Flowerdew and Richardson 2018. 2. For an overview on the historical evolution of DHA, see Reisigl 2018.



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 55

by a strong focal point in the field of politics and by an aim at developing “conceptual frameworks for political discourse” (Meyer 2001: 22).3 Partly due to their distinctive interest in politics and society, DHA scholars adopt a precise definition of social critique as a constitutive part of their research practice, largely elaborated under the socio-philosophical influence of critical theory (see Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 32–35). More specifically, the DHA defines itself as critical by drawing on the difference between scientific theory and critical theory as conceptualized by the Frankfurt School. Compared to scientific theories, critical theory aims at making “agents” aware of hidden coercion in order to free them from it, it is “reflective” and not “objectifying” in that it is always itself a part of the object-domain (see Horkheimer 1992). Oriented towards this reflective and critical aim, the DHA follows a complex concept of social critique that embraces at least three interconnected aspects. Two are primarily related to the dimension of cognition: the “text or discourse immanent critique” (aiming at discovering text or discourse internal inconsistencies, self-contradictions, paradoxes and dilemmas) and the “socio-diagnostic critique” (an exposure of the manifest or latent possibly persuasive or manipulative aspect of discursive practices, through the use of contextual knowledge). Conversely, the third is related to the field of action: the “prognostic critique” is seen as a possible contribution to the transformation and improvement of communication, such as reducing sexist discourse or language barriers within public and media reporting institutions (Reisigl 2018: 50–51, see also Benhabib 1992: 77–110). While being intimately related to the critical theory agenda, this latter aspect seems to play a lesser part compared with linguistic and historical analysis in the majority of DHA studies. While being heavily indebted to critical theory and the Frankfurt School, the DHA situates itself at an extremely complex crossroads of schools and sub-disciplines, representing, to various extents, rich theoretical and/or methodological influences for the scholars of the Vienna School. These numerous influences include: – the socio philosophical Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (e.g. Habermas 1984; 1987; 1996; 1998; Horkheimer 1992; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1944]; Marcuse 1980), and in particular Jürgen Habermas’ Philosophy of Language; – German ‘politicolinguistics’ (e.g. Burkhardt 1996; Dieckmann 1964; 1975; 1981; Jarren et al. 1998; Jung et al. 1997; Sarcinelli 1998); 3. In the last two decades, the DHA has been further elaborated in a vast number of studies in the domain of politics. The approach has been used to investigate the right wing populist rhetoric in European countries (Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009; Pelinka and Wodak 2002; Richardson and Wodak 2009a; 2009b), the discursive construction of national identity in Austria (Wodak et al. 2009), EU discourses and European identities (Krzyżanowski and Busch 2006; Wodak and Weiss 2005), the discourse of immigration, discrimination and racism in Austria (Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Wodak 2018).

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– the Dispositive Analysis of Siegfried and Margret Jäger and the Duisburg group (Kalpaka et al. 1986; Link 1990; 1992; M. Jäger 1996; S. Jäger 1992; 1993; S. Jäger and Januschek 1992; S. Jäger and Link 1993; S. Jäger and M. Jäger 1992); – classical and new Rhetoric as well as Argumentation Theory (e.g. Kienpointner 1992; 1996; Kindt 1992; Kopperschmidt 1980; Perelman 1976; 1980; 1994; Toulmin 1996; van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004; Wengeler 1997); – British discourse analysis in the tradition of Hallidayan SFL (e.g. Fairclough 1989; 1992; Fowler 1996; Hodge and Kress 1988; van Leeuwen 1995; 1996); – Van Dijk’s (1990; 1991; 1993; 1998) Sociocognitive discourse-analytical approach DHA scholars advocate a pragmatic approach to theory, avoiding getting exhausted in the theoretical labyrinths of social research or aiming at the operationalization of unoperationalizable grand theories as is often the case in social research (see Moutzelis 1995), by aiming rather at developing problem-oriented conceptual tools relevant to specific social problems and given contexts (Wodak 2008: 11). It is an important principle of the DHA that the selection of theories and data should not be driven “by the abstract, academic need to find data to support certain theories” nor by the need for “theories to explain certain data” (Unger 2013a: 29). Wodak (2008: 11) systematizes three different levels of theory to take into account, namely grand theory, middle-range theory and discourse theory, as shown in Figure 4: Grand theory

Middle range theory Mesotheory1

Mesotheory4

Mesotheory2

Mesotheory3

Discourse theory Linguistic analyses Perspectivation

Argumentation strategies

Strategies of self representation

Figure 4.  Different levels of theory in DHA (In Wodak 2008)

Strategy4



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 57

Meyer (2001: 19f) summarizes the main features of these three levels of theory and analysis: – General social theories, often called ‘grand theories’, try to conceptualize relations between social structure and social action and thus link micro- and macro-socio­ logical phenomena. Within this level one can distinguish between the more structuralist and the more individualist approaches. To put it very simply, the former provide top-down explanations (structure → action), whereas the latter prefer bottom-up explanations (action → structure). Many modern theories try to reconcile these positions and imply some kind of circularity between social action and social structure. – Middle-range theories focus either upon specific social phenomena (such as conflict, cognition, social networks), or on specific subsystems of society (for example, economy, politics, religion). – Discourse theories aim at the conceptualization of discourse as a social phenomenon and try to explain its genesis and its structure. Albeit not present in the visual scheme, a level of Linguistic Theory represents one of the authentic cores of Wodak’s theoretical framework (see also Unger 2013a: 27). Linguistic theories (of argumentation, of grammar, of rhetoric, among others) are employed in the DHA to describe and explain “the patterns specific to language systems and verbal communication” (Meyer 2001: 20). Ruth Wodak can be regarded as “the most linguistically orientated of the CDS scholars” (Meyer 2001: 21), explicitly trying to establish a theory of discourse that revolves around the core concepts of “macro-topic relatedness”, “pluri-perspectivity” and “argumentativity” (Reisigl and Wodak 2015). There is a distinctive attempt in the DHA to describe and model the discursive connection between fields of actions as places of social forms of practice (Bourdieu 1993; 1995) or “segments of social reality which constitute a (partial) frame of a discourse” (Reisigl and Wodak 2015: 28), and related genres and texts. As a result, discourse is conceptualized as “a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic, oral or written tokens, very often as ‘texts’, that belong to specific semiotic types, i.e. genres” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 66). Not only linguistic, but also historical analysis plays a major role in the DHA. This attention to the historical dimension of discursive acts always entails an attempt at integrating as much available information as possible about “historical sources and the background of the social and political fields in which discursive events are embedded” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 35), with an interest in diachronic change. The interconnectedness of discursive practices and extra-linguistic social structures is explored employing the principle of “triangulation” (Cicourel 1964).

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As discursive phenomena are approached from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives taken from various disciplines, the DHA’s triangulation aims at transcending the purely linguistic dimension, while including more or less systematically the historical, political, sociological and/or psychological dimensions in the analysis and interpretation of a specific discursive event. This process is also aimed at minimizing the risk of critical bias (Weiss and Wodak 2003). Given this complexity of influences and backgrounds, one of the most salient features of the DHA is certainly the effort to work “interdisciplinarily, multimethodically and on the basis of a variety of empirical data as well as background information” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 35). However, the trademark interdisciplinarity and the necessity to draw on multiple theoretical approaches can also be regarded as stemming from the ethnographic attitude that is typical of the DHA, aiming at analysing given contexts and relating these to a number of texts in the investigation of complex social problems. In fact, context represents one of the major macro-units of analysis, as one cannot reach a complete understanding of the phenomena under examination without analysing the multi-level context of the texts produced on the events selected. Not merely seen as background information, the notion of context is mainly understood historically and conceptualized in four different heuristic levels of analysis (Reisigl 2018: 53): 1. The immediate, language or text internal co-text; 2. The intertextual and interdiscursive relationship between utterances, texts, genres and discourses; 3. Social factors and institutional frames of a specific ‘context of situation’; 4. The broader socio-political and historical contexts, which the discursive practices are embedded in and related to. The context-oriented, discourse-historical approach is particularly fruitful for the analysis of political discourse since any political text can be regarded as a highly culture-bound text, referring to a “wide range of cultural patterns of the society in question, including aspects of its economic, political and legal life” (Trosborg 1997: 145). Especially during election campaigns, political communication “must hook into the background culture, symbols, narratives and myths, topoi and so on of the respective society in order to be successful” (Forchtner et al. 2013: 209). This attention for context is also highly related to the examination of the processes of intertextuality, interdiscursivity and recontextualisation, as three crucial notions in the DHA, especially when applied to political discourse. The notion of intertextuality has been widely adopted as a staple of CDS approaches, referring to how elements of another text (words, phrases or larger elements) are incorporated within the text in analysis. Originally based on the theories of dialogism developed by Bakhtin and Voloshinov and adapted by Kristeva (1986),



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 59

it perceives texts as always embedded in a context and synchronically and diachronically related to a set of other texts and voices, often multiple and complex and not always easy to identify. Such connections are established in different ways: “through explicit reference to a topic or main actor; through references to the same events, by allusions or evocations; by the transfer of main arguments from one text to the next and so on” (Reisigl and Wodak 2015: 28). Transferring an element from its context (that is, de-contextualizing it) and inserting it into a new context is defined as recontextualisation. After the two-phase process of decontextualization and recontextualisation, the given element may partly acquire new meanings (as meanings, following Wittgenstein, are meant to be formed in use). In political discourse, this can occur when a political speech is selectively quoted and reported in newspaper coverage and speech commentary, where they (partly) acquire new meanings. In this respect, the rearrangement of elements (such as the order of activities), the deletion of elements, the addition of elements (such as purposes or justifications) and the substitution of elements are recurrent patterns of transformation in the process (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999). As such, recontextualization often takes the textual form of a mix of both new recontextualized elements and old elements, creating tensions, contradictions and antinomies (expressed in the use of particular words, expressions, arguments, topoi, rhetorical devices among others) which can be identified and analysed as a dialectic of “colonization” and “appropriation” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999). As for interdiscursivity, it refers to the intertextual relation between different discourses, different genres and/or different styles within a text. It also takes into account how the particular combination of that text, with its particular deployment of discourses, genres and/or styles, links the text to other intertextually related texts on other topics or sub-topics (e.g. discourse on climate change often contains aspects of discourses on finance and health, see Reisigl and Wodak 2015). 3.3

Social semiotics as critique

We have seen how CDS is characterized by an interest in the role of language in social life and with its constitutive power for the discursive construction of reality, rather than with language as an object for philological studies. This distinctive focus on language as a social practice has naturally produced an interest in the multimodal nature of communication among CDS scholars, who are required to critically account for discursive phenomena constructed through many and diverse meaning-making resources. Ever since the late 1990s, the “multi-semiotic character of most texts in contemporary society” (Fairclough and Wodak 1997: 164) has pushed CDS scholars to

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explore ways of analysing visual images (from press photographs and television images to Renaissance art) and the relationship between language and visual images. More recently, the growing dissemination and social relevance of digital media has contributed to focusing even greater attention on the “interplay between different modes of signification such as language, image, and music” (Horsbøl 2006: 149). New (digital) media technologies have permanently moved communication away from monomodality to multimodality, and the different modes have become more integrated (Machin 2013), giving life to a range of human experience rarely accessible through the study of [linguistic] discourse alone (Foss 2004). In parallel, we have been witnessing an authentic visual turn in CDS studies and more recent work has expanded empirical and analytic foci from linguistic discourse to include more and more pictorial and visual materials (see for example Lassen et al. 2006; Mackay 2013; Richardson 2008; Richardson and Wodak 2009a). Multimodal studies have been largely informed by three main distinct traditions, encompassing social semiotics (e.g. Hodge and Kress 1988; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996; van Leeuwen 2004), interaction analysis (e.g. Norris 2004) and cognitive theory (e.g. Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009). While the work of multimodal scholars is not necessarily critical in the sense of CDS, social semiotics has represented a more “critical strand” within the field of multimodality (van Leeuwen 2014: 283) and has been applied more frequently in synergy with critical discursive approaches (see Djonov and Zhao 2014b; Machin and Mayr 2012; Machin and van Leeuwen 2016; Zhao et al. 2018), sometimes under the label Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) (Ledin and Machin 2018). The two approaches certainly have some important features in common. Both CDS and social semiotics are not regarded by their practitioners as “pure theory” nor as a “self-contained field”, but as a “form of enquiry” that “comes into its own when it is applied to specific instances and specific problems” (van Leeuwen 2005: 1). In fact, both are based on a conceptualization of human communication as a social enterprise, which “is defined by and construes, and over time can be transformed by and transform, its social context” (Djonov and Zhao 2014a: 1). In this respect, both CDS and social semiotics share the foundational Hallidayan concept that “semiotic resources develop in response to social and cultural needs” (van Leeuwen 2014: 282) and that semiotic practices cannot be understood without taking into account both their social, cultural and situational context. In fact, social semiotics grounds the notion of “mode” in its cultural and material uses, conceptualizing modes as organized sets of semiotic resources for making meaning, shaped by the daily social interaction of people in a specific context of time and place (Jewitt 2009). Central to social semiotics are three theoretical assumptions, in which both the centrality of SFL, and the related connections with CDS, appear evident. First,



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representation and communication always draw on a multiplicity of meaning-making resources (visual, spoken, written, gestural, to name a few) which people use in different contexts. Second, all these (multimodal) forms of communication (modes) have been shaped through their cultural, historical and social uses, and their meanings are located in specific social origins, motivations, interests and contexts. Third, meanings are produced in the interaction of different modes co-present and co-operating in the communicative event, and in the selection of one modal resource over another from a repertoire of alternative meaning potentials (see also Bezemer and Jewitt 2010: 183f). Kress and van Leeuwen’s book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996) was groundbreaking in attempting to build an integrated descriptive framework, which could facilitate the process of “reading” images.4 Starting from the initial aim of extending the concepts of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics (1978) to the visual realm, their idea of grammar of visual design goes “beyond formal rules of correctness” (Halliday 1985: 101) to represent a set of socially constructed resources for the construction of meaning. Drawing on Hallidayan metafunctions, Kress and van Leeuwen proposed a systematic way of analysing what is being communicated by means of visual designs with clear formal criteria, which provides a powerful statement of how the visual mode can be regarded as drawing upon the same semantic system as language does. According to the Representational (Ideational in SFL) function, there are two major processes for representing interactions and conceptual relations between people, places and things in visuals are Narrative and Conceptual processes. The two processes can be distinguished by establishing whether a vector is present (narrative) or absent (conceptual). Both these processes seem to draw inspiration from the conceptual meaning of the clause constituents in the Systemic-Functional Transitivity system, which “construes the world of experience into a set of manageable process types” (Halliday 1985: 106). The Interactional (Interpersonal in SFL) function focuses on the relationships between the represented participants (the people, places and things depicted in the images) and the viewer. Kress and van Leeuwen conceptualized four main ways in which these relations are interpreted: contact, social distance, attitude and modality. These visual dimensions should be considered as “simultaneous systems” in that “any image must either be a demand or an offer and select a certain size of frame and select a certain attitude” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 153). The Compositional (Textual in SFL) function transfers Halliday’s focus on language and text to the composition of the image. Visuals are to be treated as 4. In my quotations throughout this book, I refer to the second edition of Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, published in 2006.

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integrated and as the result of the “work of an overarching code whose rules and meanings provide the composite text with the logic of its integration” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 177). Kress and van Leeuwen systematized how visuals can be analysed in terms of their composition or structure, investigating the kinds of meanings conveyed by the various possible compositions, with a focus on information value, salience and framing. 3.4

Multimodal CDS in action

Election campaigns are the moment when “the struggle for power becomes theatrical” (Alexander 2010: 9). They can be seen as “situated at the intersection of the mediatization of politics, the performance of politicians (and their campaign teams), the promotion of political visions and imaginaries, and a range of sociopolitical and economic agendas” (Forchtner et al. 2013: 209). This is especially true for Trinidad and Tobago, where campaigning has always entailed high levels of “spectacle, provocation and performance” (ibid.). The design of political rallies in Trinidad and Tobago makes each of them into an authentic “work of art high tech entertainment intended to lure everyone to come for a social as well as a political treat” (Premdas 2004: 35), with dancing, fireworks and celebrations and a colourful display of party flags, buttons, and posters. Music is an integral and indispensable part of the campaign, and famous singers of calypso and other musical genres are usually invited onto the stage in the big, crucial rallies of the campaign (Fraser 2009). Set in a context that is more similar to a rock concert than a political meeting, the Trinidadian political leader and PM candidate is the central protagonist of a rally, often entering the stage to bring it to a climax and a close, similarly to the most important singer in a concert line-up. Apart from these big events, the local and daily presence of party identity has always been entrusted to canvassers and community leaders, who are the carriers of the party’s paraphernalia of buttons, T-shirts, posters, and messages in small villages and big cities. This links back to the traditional Trinidadian method of local grassroots campaigning at constituency level, through individual house-to-house canvassing and small household and neighbourhood gatherings (Premdas 2004). Some aspects of contemporary political communication in Trinidad and Tobago are very much in line with global trends, such as the growing mediatization of the political message. Parties have placed an ever-growing emphasis on their media program during elections, involving advertisements placed on radio, television, the printed media and, more recently, the internet and social media platforms such as Facebook. Mediatized forms of political communication have



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 63

not diminished or replaced the crucial importance of local canvassers, of the PM candidates’ walkabouts and of the mass rallies with Carnival-style sound-systems. On the contrary, new media affordances have integrated the traditional grassroots campaigning and the itinerant rallies: party hymns sung by popular calypso singers are now available on YouTube and posted on the candidates’ official Facebook pages, with pictures of the crowd at the rally and the speaking notes of the PM candidate made available almost in real-time (Fraser 2009). Some other aspects of political communication are absolutely unique to the context, such as the role of calypso music in offering commentary on social, political and economic issues and, in turn, the figure of the calypsonian as the Gramscian “organic intellectual” of the Trinidadian community (Ho 2000). As an oral-performative culture, calypso is often regarded as the poor man’s newspaper, a crucial source of understanding and knowledge of the prevailing situations within the country, in a language that is the localized, colloquial Trinidadian Creole (Harewood 2012). The calypsonian freely comments on the latest news and events as vox populi, exposing scandals and gossip usually involving powerful public figures of the country, with politicians being one of their favourite targets. At the same time, coexisting with a (more or less idealized) conceptualization of Calypso as free speech, many calypsonians engage in open forms of party endorsements, highly requested by politicians to quickly and pervasively popularize their message (see Allahar 1999; Regis 1999; Warner 1982). In the attempt to capture the polysemic nature of election campaigns in the specific context of Trinidad and Tobago, the call for a critical and multimodal approach to political discourse analysis becomes even more urgent, deriving from a concern with the linguistic character of social and cultural processes and structures which are inevitably broad and complex. This plurality is reflected both in the data selection as well in the integrated methodological approach adopted in this book. On the one hand, the selection of data was aimed at capturing the complexity of means and purposes of the 2010 People’s Partnership political campaign, to account both for verbal and visual communication as expressing meanings that belong to and are structured by the Trinidadian socio-political context. The corpus of data used for this book therefore includes both textual (as speaking notes of political speeches delivered by Persad-Bissessar) and visual data (as a number of multimodal resources of political advertising). On the other hand, given the simultaneous focus on both textual/visual analysis and on its contexts, the operationalization emphasized the multimodal and multi-methodological integrations to the critical approach. As such, it combined visual analysis with the different levels of analysis of text in context, such as its social and historical situatedness and the intertextual and interdiscursive dimensions.

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3.4.1 Textual and visual data Persad-Bissessar’s political speeches from the 2010 campaign were collected in the KPB 2010 corpus (88,493 words), composed of twenty-five speaking notes for speeches delivered in the 6-week time span encompassing her election campaign launch (April 12th, 2010) and the election day (May 24th, 2010) (see Table 2). Table 2.  Venue and date of Persad-Bissessar’s speeches in the 2010 election campaign   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Venue

Date

Gopaul Lands Car Park, Marabella, Pointe-à-Pierre (Election Launch) Hindu Women’s Organization of Trinidad and Tobago Emerald Plaza, St. Augustine St. Helena Junction, Piarco, Caroni East Cumuto Recreational Ground, Barrackpore, Naparima Felicity, Chaguanas West San Juan Croisee, Barataria/ San Juan La Horquetta, La Horquetta/ Talparo Mid-Center Mall, Chaguanas (Presentation of Candidates) Tobago Harris Promenade, San Fernando Couva Car Park, Couva Diego Martin Arouca, Arouca/Maloney Piccadilly on the Greens, East Dry River, Port of Spain Gasparillo, Tabaquite Princes Town Montrose Junction, Chaguanas Centre of Excellence, Macoya, Tunapuna (Manifesto Launch) Siparia, Penal/Siparia La Brea Mason Hall, Tobago Aranguez Savannah, San Juan (Final Rally) Election Eve Message (Online) Rienzi Complex, Couva (Victory Speech)

12 April 2010 16 April 2010 16 April 2010 19 April 2010 23 April 2010 26 April 2010 28 April 2010 30 April 2010 2 May 2010 4 May 2010 5 May 2010 6 May 2010 7 May 2010 8 May 2010 10 May 2010 11 May 2010 12 May 2010 13 May 2010 14 May 2010 14 May 2010 17 May 2010 21 May 2010 22 May 2010 23 May 2010 24 May 2010

Since I obtained speaking notes, and not actual transcriptions of the speeches, I am aware of the possible discrepancies between the version posted on PersadBissessar’s official Facebook page and the one delivered at the corresponding rally. However, in the videos of the 2010 campaign rallies that I was able to retrieve online on YouTube, Persad-Bissessar seems to read quite extensively from her speaking notes. I am also aware of the possible collaborations on the part of her team in the composition of her speaking notes. I regard this as unproblematic, since the speech is “performed” (Wodak 2009) by Persad-Bissessar on the stage,



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 65

the audience and the media will identify the speech with the speaker and her style (Corner and Pels 2003), without questioning whether the politician is the actual author (Goffman 1981). In line with the DHA outlined earlier in this chapter, this research has been conducted with the integration of large quantities of “available knowledge about the historical sources and the background of the social and political fields in which the discursive events are embedded” (Wodak 2001: 65). In this respect, the historical dimensions of Persad-Bissessar’s discourses have been explored also by integrating other political speeches and resources antecedent to the campaign. These integrations in the original KPB 2010 corpus, present in Chapters 4 and 6, are to be seen as typical of the diachronic approach, and have often been prompted by the content of the speech itself. For example, in her speech held in Chaguanas during her 2010 People’s Partnership campaign, Persad-Bissessar is referring to another antecedent event: Two and a half years ago I stood before you on these very grounds and spoke to you from my heart. Two and a half years ago, as you stood on these grounds in your thousands, I opened up my heart and soul to you when you my people showed me support, love and hope. Two and a half years ago, when you gave me the mandate to continue to serve you the people, I made a vow that there would be a day when I would stand before you again on these historic grounds and look at your faces smile with the hope and satisfaction that I have become the woman you wanted me to become. Today, that day has come. (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010, my emphasis)

Through the DHA-based integration and triangulation about historical sources and backgrounds, supported by my personal knowledge of the political history of the context of Trinidad and Tobago, I identified the event as the Drums of Unity rally of the United National Congress, held in October 2007. A comparative analysis between the two speeches by Persad-Bissessar highlighted constant strategies as well as changes in Persad-Bissessar’s discursive construction of leadership (see Chapter 4). Other integrations to the corpus were prompted by the very historical context of Trinidad and Tobago. It would have been impossible to address the discursive construction of national identity in Persad-Bissessar’s campaign without mentioning Eric Williams, the first PM of the country after Independence. Having served as Prime Minister from Independence until his death in 1981, Williams played a crucial role in shaping the country as we know it. In the context of this research, investigating the diachronic change between his conceptualization of the Trinidadian nation and that proposed by Persad-Bissessar sheds light on how the complex and enduring issues of diversity and integration have been addressed in the country through the succeeding decades (see Chapter 6). While the election speech is one of “the central subgenres employed in the field of political advertising” (Reisigl 2008), that alone was not sufficient for an

66 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

account of the discursive strategies of identity building and political persuasion in the 2010 People’s Partnership Campaign. Taking into consideration the role played by advertising in the discursive construction of political and national identities in the campaign, I included the audiovisual resources included in Table 3: Table 3.  Multimodal data from the People’s Partnership campaign Title

Media type

Notes

We Will Rise

Video Ads

1. 2. 3. 4.

The People’s Partnership – a United Force for Change

Video Ads

1. The People’s Partnership Leaders on Good Governance (01:03) 2. The People’s Partnership Leaders on Being United for Change (01:06) 3. The People’s Partnership Leaders on Crime (02:03) 4. The People’s Partnership Leaders on Corruption (02:05) 5. The People’s Partnership Leaders on Priorities (02:10)

Prosperity for All Manifesto 2010

Political Manifesto

 

Kamla 2010 – The People’s Photo Booklet Partnership: Postcards from a Journey To Victory

We Will Rise – One People (0:50) We Will Rise – System of Government (01:02) We Will Rise – Victory (01:05) We Will Rise – Vision (01:17)

 

The We Will Rise thematic ads for the People’s Partnership were among the most popular in the campaign. The video ads were retrieved from Persad-Bissessar’s Facebook page. During the campaign they were broadcast on TV and made available on YouTube. The We Will Rise campaign was conceptualized by the Ross Advertising company based in Trinidad and Tobago, in tandem with the A. S. G. K. Public Strategies, the new media and political team that organized Obama’s election campaign in 2008. The videos were released in four different versions, addressing various topics (see Chapter 6). The People’s Partnership – a United Force for Change video ads were retrieved from Persad-Bissessar’s Facebook page. The ads show the five members of the political coalition discussing different topics around a meeting table. The ads were released in five different versions of two different lengths (approximately 1 or 2 minutes), with different main topics under discussion (see Chapter 5).



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 67

The Prosperity for All Manifesto 2010 of the People’s Partnership is a 39-page booklet that was made available both on Facebook and on the People’s Partnership official page. In particular, the front cover of the manifesto and the portraits of the candidates for the 41 constituencies of Trinidad and Tobago were analysed when I investigated the party-internal construction of identity and positive self-presentation of the multi-ethnic coalition (see Chapter 5). As mentioned above, political discourse today cannot be studied without analysis of its multimodal expressions. This study aimed at integrating those very aspects of “spectacle, provocation and performance” (Forchtner et al. 2013: 209) typical of Trinidadian political campaigning in order to fully account for Persad-Bissessar’s multimodal campaign strategies. Taking into consideration the growing importance of the “politician as celebrity” (Corner and Pels 2003; Street 2004) in the Trinidadian context would have been impossible without providing an account of the People’s Partnership mass meetings in their actual live settings. However, when this research started in February 2012, the pictures from the Final Rally were the only official images still available on the official People’s Partnership website. Therefore, I included in my analysis the photo booklet Kamla 2010 – The People’s Partnership: Postcards from a Journey To Victory. The booklet, consisting of 24 postcards in a perforated binding, was published by Blue Mango only two months after election in July 2010. The pictures were taken by the photojournalist Sean Drakes, who followed Persad-Bissessar throughout her campaign until her oath taking ceremony. The reverse side of each postcard includes a caption with the date and location as well as highlights from the rally or quotations from Persad-Bissessar’s address. The captions were included in the analysis as their celebratory tone reinforces the positive self-presentation of Persad-Bissessar and her party. Although not exactly coeval with the campaign, the portraits represented a useful contribution to the analysis of the campaign for two main reasons. Firstly, the pictures were taken at the rallies and represent a precious source of contextualization, given the lack of official media resources from the campaign. Secondly, they can be seen as official portraits endorsed by Persad-Bissessar and therefore corresponding to the leading image she wanted to convey during the campaign of herself and her party (see Chapter 4 and 5). 3.4.2 Operationalizating concepts in multimodal analysis Following two main principles of CDS, the operationalization level of the move from discourse theory to more applied discourse in this project has been characterized by a fully abductive and iterative nature. This entailed moving recursively between theory and empirical data (Reisigl and Wodak 2015) as illustrated in Figure 5:

68 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Theory Examination of assumptions

Interpretation

Conceptualization: selection of theoretical concepts and relations, assumptions

Operationalization

Selection of information

Procedures and instruments

Discourse/text

Figure 5.  Recursivity in DHA (In Meyer 2001)

The various levels of theory inform the overall research design and relate to the research questions and research methodologies. The process is circular, iterative and relatively open-ended; it goes over the same procedural stages several times in order to test the various stages of the investigation and to delimit clearly the best way to understand the object of research. Guided by recursivity as an underlining principle, the analytical process proposed by the DHA is characterized by a set of analytical stages with three dimensions: (1) the identification and classification of the specific contents or topics of a specific discourse, (2) an investigation of the discursive strategies involved, and (3) the analysis and examination of linguistic means (as types) and specific, context-dependent linguistic realisations (Reisigl and Wodak 2015). Regarding the identification of contents and topics of the political speeches in exam, the starting point of orientation was to grasp the specific political functions with respect to the dimension of “politics” (as opposed to “polity” or “policy”). Although the differentiation between these political dimensions is clearly broad and idealized, it was expected that topics from a political campaign would “revolve around the formulation of political interests, the dissentious positioning against others, the conflict between political actors (be they single politicians or collective actors like parties, nations etc.), political advertising and fighting for followers and the acquisition of power” (Reisigl 2008: 244).



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 69

In order to further narrow down the content and topics, the “field of political action” was employed as a functional concept, drawing on Reisigl’s (2008: 247) classification of eight different fields of political actions as “functions or socially institutionalized purposes” of political discourse. These distinctions are not conceptualized by Reisigl as clear-cut: not only may a political speech have its starting point within one of the eight fields of action and proceed onwards through another one, but political discourse topics can spread to the different fields and cross between them. Along these lines, the main purpose of Persad-Bissessar’s election speeches was identified in the field of “political advertising”, but her discourse spreads to other fields and crosses between them. Her speeches also serve the “formation of public attitudes, opinion and will”, especially in terms of national identity, ethnic identity and their related political allegiances, and often move to the field of “inter-party formation of attitudes, opinions and will”, as a high level of importance is placed on the formation of the coalition and its internal agreements (see Chapter 5). Moreover, her attacks on Manning (and the political system of corruption and patronage he allegedly favoured during his terms as PM) fall in the field of “political control” that is usually performed by an opposition party (see Chapters 4 and 5). Subsequently, a number of macro-discourse topics, stemming from these fields of action, were identified in the KPB 2010 corpus. The topics, addressed more specifically in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, are related to the concurrent and overlapping discursive constructions of leader, party and national identities and can be summarized in the diagram included in Figure 6, which visually represents the complex topical intersections in Persad-Bissessar’s campaign. Once I had identified the specific contents or topics of a specific discourse, discursive strategies were investigated, with a specific focus on national identity as “discursively produced, reproduced, transformed and destructed” in the minds and memories of “the nationalized subjects” through language and other semiotic systems (de Cillia et al. 1999: 153). Within the DHA, strategies indicate systematic ways of using language, and they can be located at different levels of linguistic organization and complexity. Wodak et al. (2009: 36–42) distinguish between four types of macro-strategies employed in the discursive formation of national identity. “Constructive strategies” are “the most comprehensive discursive strategies: they attempt to construct and to establish a certain national identity by promoting unification, identification and solidarity, as well as differentiation” (Wodak et al. 2009: 33). As we will see in the following chapters, Persad-Bissessar made extensive use of these strategies in the attempt to unify both her multi-ethnic coalition and multi-ethnic nation under her leadership and she often emphasized commonality by stressing the common history of colonialism of the ethnic groups still present in the country (see Chapter 6).

70 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Political Advertising

Formation of public attitudes, opinions and will

Inter-party formation of attitudes, opinions and will

Political Control

Political (sub) genre: speaking notes for a public rally during an election campaign

Discourse Topic 1: National Identity Discourse Topic 2: Inter-ethnic relations in Trinidad and Tobago

Discourse Topic 5: National Body

Discourse Topic 3: Colonialism and Slavery Discourse Topic 8: National Icons

Discourse Topic 4: «Emperor Manning» Discourse Topic 6: Corruption and Patronage

Discourse Topic 12: Trinbagonian Diversity

Discourse Topic 11: Poverty and Crime

Discourse Topic 13: Coalition-internal Multi-Ethnicity

Discourse Topic 7: The Coalition Party in a Westminster System

Discourse Topic 9: Change / Rising

Discourse Topic 10: «Motherly» Leadership

Figure 6.  Selected discourse-topics in Persad-Bissessar’s speeches (after Reisigl and Wodak 2015)

“Dismantling or destructive strategies”, on the other hand, “aim at dismantling or disparaging parts of an existing national identity construct, but usually cannot provide any new model to replace the old one.” (ibid.). We will see how Persad-Bissessar used them to delegitimize her opponent Patrick Manning and the system he represented as PM and leader of the People’s National Movement, also drawing on picong as a traditional art of verbal rivalry widespread in the Eastern Caribbean.



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 71

As the opposition leader against the incumbent PNM, Persad-Bissessar presented the 2010 general election as the most favourable time for a political change and used a number of “transformation strategies”, which “aim to transform a relatively well-established national identity and its components into another identity the contours of which the speaker has already conceptualized. This is often effected by applying subtle rhetorical persuasion” (Wodak et al. 2009: 33). This analysis encountered only three of the four strategies identified by Wodak et al. (2009), as it could not find evidence for “perpetuation and justification strategies”. These strategies “are employed primarily in relation to problematical actions or events in the past which are important in the narrative creation of national history”, that is they “restore, maintain and defend a common ‘national self-perception’ which has been ‘tainted’ in one way or another” (ibid.). Perpetuation and justification strategies, given their main goal of maintaining or reproducing already established groups and preserving the status quo, were clearly not employed by an opposition leader aiming at being elected as PM. Moreover, these strategies have been primarily associated with the Austrian historical past and the traumatic events of WWII and may reflect that particular historical and socio-political context. While these macro-strategies have been associated in the existing literature with the discursive construction of national identity, the DHA also encompasses a set of strategies more related to the wider dichotomy of “positive self-presentation” and “negative other-presentation” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 46, after van Dijk 1984). Originally conceptualized as the core of racist discourse, these represent the two key strategies in the discursive construction and maintenance of any “in-group vs. out-group” differentiation and polarization. Given that “identification [is] inherently relational” (Bucholtz and Hall 2004: 294), it is not surprising that the concepts of “in-group” and “out-group” have been largely and directly applied to processes of party identification. Concepts like the construction of identity, group membership and choices in ways of talking about the self and others, as well as the creation of polarized categories of “us” and “them”, are particularly meaningful in the political arena, as people develop social identification with political groups as part of their self-identities (Weisberg and Greene 2003: 89). Strategies marking a distinction between “us” and “them” become crucial especially when electors are called upon to undertake an authentic process of identification through the means of voting. Needless to say, “us” or “we” are associated with positive elements and “them” or “they” with negative elements, as the core message of any election campaign can be reduced to “vote for us and you’ll get more good; vote for them and you’ll get more bad” (see Hahn 2003). The overall strategy of ideological discourse as the “enhancement of our good things and their bad things”, and the parallel “mitigation of our bad things and their good things”,

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at all levels of discourse structure has been referred to as the “Ideological Square” in van Dijk (1998). When investigating these overarching strategies, DHA scholars heuristically orientate themselves towards five questions: 1. How are persons, objects, phenomena/events, processes and actions named and referred to linguistically? 2. What characteristics, qualities and features (more or less positive or negative) are attributed to social actors, objects, phenomena/events and processes? 3. What arguments (justification and questioning of claims of truth and normative rightness) are employed in the discourse in question? 4. From what perspective are these nominations, attributions and arguments expressed? 5. Are the respective utterances articulated overtly? Are they intensified or mitigated in their illocutionary force and thus their epistemic or deontic status? In relation to these five questions, Reisigl and Wodak (2015) elaborate five types of discursive strategies, namely “nomination”, “predication”, “argumentation”, “perspectivation” and “intensifying/mitigation” strategies. Within the DHA, a strategy means a “more or less intentional plan of practices (including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a particular social, political, psychological or linguistic aim” (ibid.). Strategies, therefore, indicate systematic ways of using language, and can be realized through a vast number of linguistic devices (see Table 4). The strategy-related linguistic devices that Reisigl and Wodak propose are to be regarded as selected examples: they are not an exhaustive list to follow to the letter, but can and should be modified, adapted and newly developed for each research object. As expected, some strategies and devices were more recurring and relevant than others in the KPB 2010 corpus, and as a result they will be discussed more at length in the analysis. Table 4.  Discursive strategies and devices in DHA (in Reisigl and Wodak 2015) Question

Strategy

Devices

How are persons, objects, phenomena/ events, processes and actions named and referred to linguistically?

NOMINATION

– membership categorization devices, deictics, anthroponyms, etc. – tropes such as metaphors, metonymies and synecdoches (pars pro toto, totum pro parte) – verbs and nouns used to denote processes and actions, etc.



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 73

Table 4.  (continued) Question

Strategy

Devices

What characteristics, qualities and features (more or less positive or negative) are attributed to social actors, objects, phenomena/events and processes?

PREDICATION

– stereotypical, evaluative attributions of negative or positive traits (e.g. in the form of adjectives, appositions, prepositional phrases, relative clauses and participial clauses or groups) – explicit predicates or predicative nouns/ adjectives/pronouns – collocations – explicit comparisons, similes, metaphors and other rhetorical figures (including metonymies, hyperboles, litotes, euphemisms) – allusions, evocations, presuppositions/ implicatures, etc.

What arguments ARGUMENTATION (justification and questioning of claims of truth and normative rightness) are employed in the discourse in question?

– topoi (formal or more content-related) – fallacies

From what perspective are these nominations, attributions and arguments expressed?

– deictics – direct, indirect or free indirect speech – quotation marks, discourse markers/ particles – metaphors – animating prosody, etc.

PERSPECTIVIZATION FRAMING OR DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION

Are the respective INTENSIFICATION, utterances articulated MITIGATION overtly? Are they intensified or mitigated in their illocutionary force and thus their epistemic or deontic status?

– diminutives or augmentatives – (modal) particles, tag questions, – subjunctives, hesitations, vague expressions, etc. – hyperboles, litotes – indirect speech acts (e.g. question instead of assertion) – verbs of saying, feeling, thinking, etc.

The salience of strategies and linguistic devices in the corpus reflects the genre of political discourse as well as its aims and topics, which are often “political actors – politicians, elites, public figures and social institutions and organizations” (van Dijk 1997: 28). Persad-Bissessar made a wide use of “nomination” and “predication” strategies to refer positively to herself and her People’s Partnership and negatively

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Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

to Manning and the PNM. In the same vein, the use of “argumentation strategies” is commonly investigated in the field of political discourse analysis (Pelinka and Wodak 2002; Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Wodak and Van Dijk 2000) and was also relevant in this analysis. For example, Persad-Bissessar made a vast use of “topoi” (or loci communes), widely used for their role as argumentative “shortcuts”, because they allow “speakers to get from a premise to a conclusion without explaining the warrant underlying the argument” (Unger 2013a: 57, see also Reisigl 2014). In the same vein, the detection of “fallacies”, as “inconsistencies of logic, argumentation, form and content” (Heer and Wodak 2008: 11), served the identification of underlying attitudes, beliefs, opinions and ideologies in Persad-Bissessar’s political discourse. A critical analysis of conceptual metaphors in Persad-Bissessar’s political discourse was also essential, as metaphors serve a variety of purposes in political discourse, encompassing persuasion, legitimation and the enhancement of group-solidarity (see Chilton 1996). Other strategies, such as “intensification” or “mitigation”, were not particularly salient in the analysis. An election speech is usually “the most dissent-oriented, and, thus, the most crude and emotionalizing in tone. It attacks the political ‘enemy’ more fiercely than other speeches, as the assertion against the opponent and the acquisition of power are its main purpose” (Reisigl 2008: 253). As Persad-Bissessar’s speeches are thus characterized by a higher prevalence of intensification in both her “positive self-presentation” and “negative-other presentation”, focusing on this aspect of analysis would not have yielded interesting results. Similarly, the analysis of “perspectivization”, focusing on the identification of perspective or point of view expressed by the speaker, was less relevant in the context of this analysis. Popular in the critical analysis of news discourse, perspectivization strategies are employed to express the speaker’s involvement through specific means of reporting, description, narration or the quotation of events and utterances). In the textual data under examination, the perspective expressed by Persad-Bissessar openly belongs to herself, her party, and by a rhetorical extension, to the nation: the actual goal of the election campaign was to communicate her point of view on the main political issues of the country and express a high level of involvement. Drawing on a variety of empirical and theoretical approaches employed in order to understand and interpret differing discourses and public spheres, this synopsis of the multi-methodological Discourse-Historical Approach is necessarily eclectic. To conclude, the relationships between the different levels of textual analysis described so far can be summarized in Figure 7. As far as the analysis of visual data is concerned, it drew on Kress and van Leeuwen’s “Visual Grammar” with a particular interest for the following four aspects of analysis: the structure of representation, interactive meanings (position of the viewers and modality) and the meaning of composition.

Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 75



Persad-Bissessar’s Speaking Notes Fields of Political Action Political Advertising

Formation of public attitudes, opinions and will

Inter-party formation of attitudes, opinions and will

Level 1 Contents/Topics Level 2 Discursive macro-strategies typical of discourse on nation and national identities

Political Control

(See Figure 6)

•

Constructive Strategies

•

Dismantling Strategies

•

Transformation Strategies

1. Nomination Strategies Level 3 Strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation Level 4 Linguistic Devices and Forms of Realizations

2. Predication Strategies 3. Argumentation Strategies 4. Perspectivization Framing Or Discourse Representation Strategies 5. Intensifying and Mitigation Strategies

Main linguistic devices embedded in the strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation (See Table 4)

Figure 7.  Dimensions of analysis applied to Persad-Bissessar’s speaking notes

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Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

The analysis of the structure of representation focused on which participants are represented and which types of processes they engage in. Visuals were therefore interpreted as “narrative”, presenting “unfolding actions and events, processes of change, transitory spatial arrangements” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 59) or “conceptual”, representing participants in terms of their “generalized and more or less stable and timeless essence” and in terms of “class, or structure, or meaning” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 79). Table 5 summarizes the sub-classifications of both narrative and conceptual processes in representational structures. Table 5.  Taxonomy of representational structures (in Royce 1999) Processes

– – – – –

Circumstances

– Setting – Means – Accompaniment

Classificational Processes

– Covert – Overt (Single or Multi-levelled)

Analytical Processes

– Unstructured – Structured 1. Temporal 2. Exhaustive and Inclusive 3. Conjoined & Compounded exhaustive 4. Topographical and Topological processes 5. Dimensional and Quantitative Topography 6. Spatio-temporal

Symbolic Processes

– Attributive – Suggestive

Narrative Representations Representational Structures (Ideational)

Conceptual Representations

Action (Actor + Goal) Reactional (reactor + Phenomena) Speech & Mental Conversion Geometrical Symbolism

Regarding the position of the viewer, the analysis focused on how social relations and attitudes were created between the represented participants and viewers in visuals from the People’s Partnership campaign. Three main aspects are particularly relevant for the analysis. The first is whether contact is established, when the represented participants connect with the viewers through vectors such as eyelines and gestures in such a way that images can be seen as either “offering” information or “demanding” the attention of the viewer. The second is social distance between the interactive participants, determined through the different ranges of shots (that is, the size of the image frame), where distance in the shot can suggest a different



Chapter 3.  Theory and methods for a multimodal critique of political discourse 77

relation between the represented participants and the viewer. The third is attitude or point of view, realized by the selection of a particular angle, in order to express a subjective or objective attitude towards represented participants, human or otherwise. The analysis of modality entailed focusing on how images reflect reality in a more or less truthful or factual way. It meant taking into account certain modality markers or means of visual expression that, when or increased or decreased, correspond to an increase or decrease in the degree to which an image, diagram or photograph is to be taken as being real. Table 6 summarizes both elements for the analysis of position of the viewer and modality in interactive meanings. Table 6.  Taxonomy of interactive meanings (in Royce 1999)

Contact

Social Distance

Image Act

– Offer (Information) – Demand (Goods/Services)

Gaze

– Direct (degrees of Engagement) – Indirect (degrees of Disengagement)

Size of Frame

– Close (Intimate/Personal) – Medium (Social) – Long (Impersonal)

Subjective Image

– Horizontal Angle (degrees of Involvement and Detachment) – Vertical Angle (degrees of Power to the viewer, to the Represented Participants, or a relation of Equality)

Objective Image

– Action Orientation (Frontal angle) – Knowledge Orientation (Top-down angle)

Colour

– Colour Saturation – Colour Differentiation – Colour Modulation

Attitude Interactive Meanings (Interpersonal)

Contextualization – Absence of Background – Full Detail Representation

– Maximum Abstraction – Maximum Representation

Depth

– Absence of Depth – Maximally Deep Perspective

Illumination

– Full Representation of Light and Shade – Absence of Light and Shade

Brightness

– Maximum Brightness – Black and White or Shades of Grey

Coding orientation

– – – –

Modality

Technological Sensory Abstract Naturalistic

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Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Finally, the analysis of the meaning of composition followed the identification of three major elements (see Table 7). The first is information value, which refers to how the placement of elements endows them with the specific informational values attached to the various areas of the image and is comprised of three axes or dimensions of visual space. The second one is salience, which results from different variables that interact in complex ways to create a hierarchy of elements (participants, and representational and interactive syntagms) attracting the viewer’s attention to some elements of the composition more than others. According to Kress and van Leeuwen readers are “intuitively able” (2006: 202) to assess the weight of individual elements in a visual composition and thus, in turn, their salience. Although they mention that salience “is not objectively measurable” (ibid.), they point to a range of parameters or properties that help determine the salience of elements. The third one is framing, which refers to how elements are perceived as being disconnected or connected, belonging or not belonging together by viewers when looking at the image. As such, elements can be “strongly or weakly framed” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 203) or anywhere in between. While a full list of means is not provided, these commonly include frame lines, white spaces between elements and colour continuity or discontinuity. Table 7.  Taxonomy of compositional meanings (adapted from Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) Information Value

– Left / Right (Given / New) – Top / Bottom (Ideal / Real) – Centre / Margin

Salience

– – – – – – –

Framing

– Frame Lines – White Spaces – Colour Continuity / Discontinuity

Compositional Meanings (Textual)

Size Sharpness Tonal Contrast Colour Contrast Placement of Position Layering Cultural Factors

As shown in this section, Kress and van Leeuwen’s work is characterized by a highly developed taxonomy and it is beyond the scope of this book to give an exhaustive account of their framework. More details will be given on those aspects of Kress and van Leeuwen’s work that are relevant to the analysis in the following chapters, when analysing the multimodal data from People’s Partnership in Chapter 4, 5 and 6.

Chapter 4

The leader

Throughout the 2010 Election Campaign, Kamla Persad-Bissessar discursively constructed her claim to leadership through the consistent and extensive use of strategies of “positive self-presentation” and “negative other-presentation”, a basic discursive binary opposition which is highly “functional and effective in the political process”, especially “in the competition for votes, support, and the struggle for political survival and legitimation” (van Dijk 1997: 28). The PM candidate employed these two overarching strategies to project and emphasize a positive image of herself and her party (the “in-group”), and to project and emphasize a negative image of her opponent and his party (the “out-group”), again a popular dichotomy in ideological and political discourse, ascribable to a wider “Ideological or Political Square” based on the “Emphasis/De-Emphasis of Our/Their Good/Bad Actions” (van Dijk 1995). The first section of this chapter focuses on Persad-Bissessar’s “positive selfpresentation”. It illustrates how Kamla Persad-Bissessar discursively created a winning image of female leader and PM candidate for herself, suggesting that her policies and political decisions would invariably benefit the country and all citizens, whereas Manning’s would not. By drawing a parallel between two rally speeches both held at the Mid-Centre Mall in Chaguanas in 2007 and 2010, I attempt to trace her political and personal coming of age in the evolution of her discourse of leadership. Like in any election campaign, Persad-Bissessar devoted a substantial amount of energy to building her image of leadership and her network of supporters, and a parallel amount of energy to discrediting her opponent, Patrick Manning. The second section of the chapter illustrates Persad-Bissessar’s strategies of “negative other-presentation” and “demontage or dismantling” (Wodak et al. 2009: 42) of her opponent in the campaign, some of which, like the art of verbal rivalry commonly referred to as picong, represent a real tradition in the Trinidadian political context.

80 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

4.1

Strategies of positive self-presentation

4.1.1 The mother rhetoric in the 2007 campaign The UNC-Alliance campaign for the 2007 General Election can be regarded as a “useful laboratory for later developments” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 155) that eventually would culminate in Persad-Bissessar’s victory in 2010. Persad-Bissessar’s political momentum started to build in 2006, when she was appointed Leader of the Opposition after the conviction of the UNC founding leader Basdeo Panday on corruption charges. However, when Panday was reinstated as political leader of the UNC in January 2007, Persad-Bissessar did not receive the co-leading role she was expecting: the Afro-Trinidadian Jack Warner was elected as the UNC-Alliance chairman and co-leader, in view of the 2007 General Election. Persad-Bissessar’s exclusion from a leadership position in the UNC-Alliance came as a surprise to many and received massive coverage in the Trinidadian media. In particular, many interpreted the political preference for Warner as a gendered one and as a wider reflection of persisting gender inequality issues in Trinidad and Tobago and in the Caribbean at large. On October 7th, 2007, at the UNC-Alliance Drums of Unity rally in Chaguanas, Kamla Persad-Bissessar communicated her decision to stay within the UNC notwithstanding the internal decisions of the party. She entered the stage to the famous Bob Marley song No Woman No Cry, hinting at her recent party-internal defeat but introducing the resilient attitude she will keep throughout her address. In her speech, a thorny party-internal issue is turned into an emotionally compelling narrative of her personal and professional life as a woman in politics in Trinidad and Tobago. Throughout her address, Persad-Bissessar seems to draw extensively on the rhetorical artistic proof of pathos in order to heighten the emotional impact of her speech and evoke an equally emotional, empathetic response and, maybe, convincing herself of the rightness of her propositions (Charteris-Black 2014: 108). Drawing on pathos as an established feature of political communication seems to be further reinforced by the role of Persad-Bissessar as one of the first female politicians in the history of Trinidad and Tobago. In fact, she presents herself in Chaguanas as fully entitled to express her emotions regarding her exclusion from a leading role in the political arena. In doing so, she claims to depart from that “tradition of politics” that only allows showing “your brave face”, and where showing less positive emotions can be regarded as a form of weakness:

(1) I cannot stand here before you today and smile the way I have done in the past, telling you all is well when you know and I know that all is not well in our nation. I used to think that, in the tradition of the politics we have been

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accustomed to, it was weak to show hurt, pain, anger or disappointment. I used to think that when you come on a platform, the only thing you should reveal to people was your desire to fight for them, and your brave face. I no longer think that way. (Chaguanas, UNC-A Rally, 07/10/2007, my emphasis)

With that reference to the “tradition of politics”, Persad-Bissessar seems to hint to hegemonic masculinity (and its set of supposedly masculine values, such as strength, courage, independence, and assertiveness) operating as a de facto norm structuring politics (Franceschet et al. 2019; Krook and Childs 2010; Waylen et al. 2013). The world of politics has been widely acknowledged as a traditionally maleoriented and male-dominated public space. As a result of long-standing processes of gender socialization that have been traditionally relegating women to the private sphere, the exercise of power and authority has often been seen as “a man’s prerogative” (Campus 2013: 10). Throughout history “leadership has been closely associated with masculinity”, with “the king, the father, the boss and the lord” being the widespread, stereotypical images of ruling power (Keohane 2010: 121). Men politicians are therefore seen as “core members” of the political public space, and “are placed as the political norm that female politicians ought to adapt to” (Lilja 2008: 89). In this male-oriented world of politics, gender-related expectations mark how a female politician should act and speak (Baxter 2006; Cameron 2006; Walsh 2001), so that “the rules of male discourse are not only seen as the better way to talk but as the only way” (Lakoff 1990: 210). As one of the most prominent female politicians in her country, Persad-Bissessar advocates a personal interpretation of the Trinidadian political public sphere. In contrast with other famous female politicians of the past, like the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher who “played upon a relation of contrast between the values that were socially expected of a woman and her own singularly aggressive masculine stance” (Charteris-Black 2005: 88), Persad-Bissessar portrays herself as a mother-politician. Consequently, the people of Trinidad and Tobago are portrayed as children, and her relationship with the country is founded on love: Table 8.  Persad-Bissessar’s self-presentation as mother-politician in the 2007 Chaguanas speech

tab8

Describing starting her political career as an Alderman in Siparia

“[…] it was the expression of everything that I was, a woman with a desire to serve her country, and her people, because I love you.”

Describing her duty in Parliament as a female representative

“As one of the few female representatives of this country, it was my duty to assume the natural role of mother when it came to national issues. In that sea of men who argued and cursed each other, I knew I had to be the rare voice of fairness, nurturing, caring and love.”

(continued)

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Table 8.  (continued) Describing her decision-making process in Parliament

“My maternal instincts made me choose sometimes not by my head, but my heart, and as any true mother, those instincts were never wrong. And so, I cared for the people of my constituency, my party and the nation, as a mother.”

Describing her political “I had to defend my country’s democracy and ensure that our role in the opposition people were protected. Again, my maternal instincts kicked in. since 2001 They say no one is more dangerous than a mother who believes her children are in danger.” Describing the relationship with male colleagues in the political arena

“Like all mothers, I took a lot for the children of this nation, not just the young ones, but you the people. In the background I battled the whims, insecurities and yes, macho attitudes of several colleagues, both on my side and the other political divide.”

Persad-Bissessar explains her sense of inherent moral rightness and her social and political dedication by linking it all back to her very being a “mother”. Although she remarks on her expertise and long career as a lawyer and politician, her political decisions are seen as a result of her “maternal instinct”, rather than of her rationality and professional capabilities. In Lakoff ’s (1996) terms, we could say that Persad-Bissessar seems to phrase her activity as politician by adopting a “nurturant parent” model rather than a “strict father” one. But the examples in Table 8 actually exemplify how “motherliness” can (still) be regarded “a quality in itself ” for leading women, and can be employed “as a strategic method of organising relationships in many public areas” (Wodak 1997: 353). While she is eager to denounce the “macho attitudes” of her male colleagues, Persad-Bissessar’s self-presentation does not seem to propose an actual modernization of the way female politicians inhabit the public and institutional sphere in Trinidad and Tobago. On the one hand, we could easily infer that Persad-Bissessar completely internalized the system of traditional gender roles in Trinidadian society. Her stance seems to suggest a transfer of the most traditional and stereotypically female virtues and values (such as care, nurture, love and grace) to her activity in Parliament. Her very role as a facilitator among the majority of conflicting male politicians in Parliament, described as “a sea of men who argued and cursed each other” in the 2007 Chaguanas speech, seems to draw entirely on “the stereotypical expectations regarding appropriate behaviour for women in the workplace”, that see “cooperative, supportive, facilitative and relationally oriented discourse strongly associated with femininity” (Holmes and Marra 2011: 318). However, her stance could as well be interpreted as a strategic choice to negotiate her role as one of the first successful women in the Trinidadian political arena, as well as her personal interpretation of the “femininity/competence double bind”



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(Jamieson 1995). The “double-bind” represents one of the most long-standing dilemmas of women inhabiting the political and public sphere: while female leaders are required to appear strong to be taken seriously, an assertive behaviour is also likely to elicit negative and defensive reactions from the mass media and the public. Playing the role of the Mother of the Nation may be Persad-Bissessar’s chosen strategy in her attempt to transcend this very double bind. Traditionally, women have a definite role as mothers and caregivers within the institution of the family: within the mother’s role, the exercising of power by women is quite obviously legitimized (Wodak 1997). Consequently, women in leadership may draw on discourse strategies associated with acceptable feminine leadership roles, such as the role of mother: not only a caring and supportive figure who takes care of her family, the mother is also an authoritarian figure, who has the right to scold her husband and children (Holmes and Marra 2011). It has been observed in many Latin American and Caribbean countries that women can acceptably venture into the political sphere mostly by drawing on their cultural authority as mothers. This was theorized by Chaney (1979) as the trope of the “Supermadre”, which means that women’s motherhood role has the profoundest effect on the nature of their political activities and that women’s participation is higher in roles that are extensions of their roles as mothers (such as health, education or welfare) and largely on the lower levels of policy-making. While women’s participation in politics in Latin America and the Caribbean has grown steadily in the last fifteen years (Htun and Piscopo 2014), in a country like Trinidad and Tobago where gender binary ideology is still prevalent, the self-presentation as a loving and caring mother-politician is still a culturally approved model of female leadership that may have helped Persad-Bissessar to deal with the pressure and possible negative evaluation of women’s ways of performing their professional roles. The mother-politician would “keep people happy” (Marra et al. 2006: 256) and would represent an effective strategy to convince even the most traditionally patriarchal segments of the Trinidadian society. In the No Woman No Cry 2007 speech, Persad-Bissessar incorporates many aspects of her private life in the narration of her career in the political public sphere. While all the leading politicians publicize private information “to help construct a favourable impression of themselves” (Stanyer 2007: 81), for women in power this often means being “compelled to show themselves to be able to perform their duties without sacrificing their husband and children” (Campus 2013: 27). Persad-Bissessar’s inclusion of personal stories and emotions serves the classic wider strategy of positive self-presentation and celebration of her personal and professional achievements. At the same time, one of the private aspects that she puts to the fore is a recount of the difficulties women commonly experience in “finding a

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balance between having a career in a demanding environment and being a mother or finding time for personal relationships” (Wagner and Wodak 2006: 405). The personal narrative of the challenges she overcame being both a young mother and a career-oriented woman is characterized by a strong emotional involvement and sense of pride in her achievements:

(2) You may have read stories about me studying law very pregnant, being a teacher and then practicing the law, but going into politics over 21 years ago as an Alderman in Siparia. (Chaguanas, UNC-A Rally, 07/10/2007)



(3) There were days when as a mother, I wanted to stay home and tend to my family, instead of putting in the long, hard hours that representing the people requires.  (Chaguanas, UNC-A Rally, 07/10/2007)

(4) That is what I have stood out for in my political career, being the first woman to do several things. But creating history came with a personal price.  (Chaguanas, UNC-A Rally, 07/10/2007)

Breaking the men/women and public/private dichotomies, these examples contribute to a wider positive self-presentation of Kamla as a caring mother as well as a hard-working and strong-minded pioneer in the Trinidadian political public sphere, where she has been present for many years as a professional woman:

(5) I created history in this country as the woman who propelled the UNC government’s groundbreaking universal secondary education for all policy.  (Chaguanas, UNC-A Rally, 07/10/2007)

(6) As the first female Attorney General and then Legal Affairs Minister, I contributed to the legal framework of our nation.  (Chaguanas, UNC-A Rally, 07/10/2007)

(7) I have been in Parliament since 1994 and I have often been the lone woman’s voice in the sea of men. (Chaguanas, UNC-A Rally, 07/10/2007)

Since women leaders are often portrayed as “outsiders” that got access to the top positions by pure chance (Norris 1997), Persad-Bissessar here stresses her cursus honorum, the long path that brought her to leadership. These examples can be interpreted as Persad-Bissessar’s “self-presentation as main actor on the stage” (Wagner and Wodak 2006: 404): her narrative focuses on her consciousness of being in the spotlight as a successful leading woman inhabiting the political public space, as well as her consciousness “of the power of working hard, of impressing, of being different from others, and finally, of being publicly acknowledged” (ibid.). In this respect, Persad-Bissessar’s frequent use of the first pronoun singular “I” contributes to making her speech more subjective and engaging, but also endows it with a higher degree of authority, an awareness of her own role (Bramley 2001: 27).



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As shown in the examples from the No Woman No Cry speech, Persad-Bissessar frequently used the pronoun “I” with verbs in past tenses, often expressing material processes (e.g. “I battled”, “I climbed”, “I created”, “I contributed”, “I worked”) contributing to her discursive self-presentation as an experienced and active politician with a long career of tangible achievements. The intertextual references to the Afghan poem I’ll Never Return contribute to her empowering, self-celebratory narrative. The poem was written in 1981 by Meena Keshwar Kamal, founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, to narrate the resistance of Afghan women during war times. Some of the lines of the poem (in bold in the extract) are transferred from their original context, recontextualized and embedded in the No Woman No Cry speech as a war cry against Persad-Bissessar’s political enemies, both in the PNM and in her very own UNC. This recontextualization takes the textual form of a mix of both new recontextualized elements and old elements: (8) As the great poet said, I am the woman who has awoken. I have arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burnt people. My nation’s wrath has empowered me. When I see the ruin and destruction at the hands of the wicked PNM I am filled with vengeance and hatred against the enemy. I want everyone to know that I am the woman who has awoken. I’ve found my path and will never turn back. I want to tell all my political enemies, close to me and far away, that Kamla Persad-Bissessar is a woman who gets knocked down, but she gets up again, and they are never going to keep me down.  (Chaguanas, UNC-A Rally, 07/10/2007, my emphasis)

On the one hand, the lyrical prose and the self-reference in the third person (“Kamla Persad-Bissessar is”) reinforces the epic afflatus of the passage. On the other hand, Persad-Bissessar seems to move from the standard to the colloquial in the conclusion with yet another intertextual reference, quoting the chorus of the 1997 hit song Tubthumping by the British anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba, “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down”. Already present in nuce in 2007, the theme of rising will be further developed in the 2010 Campaign as a national and personal movement towards success and leadership. For example, the same poem by Meena Keshwar Kamal will also be embedded by Persad-Bissessar in the Presentation of Candidates speech during the 2010 Campaign, in the passage dedicated to the empowering narrative of national emancipation from slavery (see Chapter 6). But most importantly, as shown in the next section, Persad-Bissessar’s positive self-presentation as a symbol and an example of Trinidadian female empowerment is bound to be maximised in the 2010 We Will Rise Campaign.

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4.1.2 From “mother” to “woman” in the 2010 campaign Knowing that the female electorate could represent a winning factor, PersadBissessar’s 2010 Campaign put a further accent on women’s issues and female representation in politics as part of a wider strategy of positive self-presentation. The campaign saw the return of popular themes such as motherhood and children and put to the fore “issues that would strike responsive chords that would resonate with women, who make up over 50 percent of the population in Trinidad” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 152). On May 2nd, 2010, the PM candidate and leader of the People’s Partnership Persad-Bissessar presented her candidates in a massive rally at the Mid-Centre Mall of Chaguanas. Her introduction brought the audience back to another crucial moment of her political history, the No Woman No Cry speech of October 2007, which had been held in the same venue but in a completely different situation for her: (9) Two and a half years ago I stood before you on these very grounds and spoke to you from my heart. Two and a half years ago, as you stood on these grounds in your thousands, I opened up my heart and soul to you when you my people showed me support, love and hope. Two and a half years ago, when you gave me the mandate to continue to serve you the people, I made a vow that there would be a day when I would stand before you again on these historic grounds and look at your faces smile with the hope and satisfaction that I have become the woman you wanted me to become. Today, that day has come.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010, my emphasis)

Persad-Bissessar is referring to her No Woman No Cry 2007 speech as the moment when she “opened up my heart and soul” and is reprising the same emotional appeal. She describes the last two and a half years as the period of time in which an authentic coming of age has occurred. She is now the PM Candidate, “the woman you wanted me to become”, probably referring to her high level of popularity in public opinion polls in 2007, such that made Basdeo Panday’s decision to appoint Jack Warner as Chairman and co-leader incomprehensible to many. After this introduction, Persad-Bissessar embeds in her speech the lyrics of I Am Woman, the tune she chose as a personal anthem and soundtrack for her entry on stage throughout the 2010 campaign.1 The song seems to fit Persad-Bissessar’s history of political achievements, as well as the parallel she wishes to draw between the Chaguanas rally in 2007 and the one in 2010. Parts of the song’s lyrics are em1. Released as a single by the Australian American Helen Reddy in May 1972, I Am Woman became the Billboard Hot 100 number one single, selling over one million copies. The song represents one of the biggest hits celebrating female empowerment in the 1970s. Released at the apex of the counterculture era, it became a feminist anthem for the women’s liberation movement (Perone 2004: 85).



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bedded in the speaking notes for the Presentation of Candidates speech of May 2nd, 2010, rearranged by Persad-Bissessar to fit the chronological narration of her path towards leadership and her positive self-presentation as an experienced politician and as a self-made woman: (10) Oh yes, I am wise But it’s wisdom born of pain Yes, I’ve paid the price You can bend but never break me ‘Cause it only serves to make me More determined to achieve my final goal And I come back even stronger Not a novice any longer ‘Cause you’ve deepened the conviction in my soul See me standing toe to toe As I spread my lovin’ arms across the land But I’m still an embryo With a long, long way to go Until I make my brother understand And I know too much to go back an’ pretend ‘Cause I’ve heard it all before And I’ve been down there on the floor No one’s ever gonna keep me down again No one is gonna keep you down again WE WILL RISE, WE WILL RISE, WE WILL RISE

(Chaguanas, 02/05/2010)

The song is appropriated by Perdas-Bissessar as a narration of her journey from “novice” to PM candidate. Looking back at her 2007 defeat, she now sees it as a source of empowerment, as “wisdom born of pain”. Now on the stage as a PM candidate, she is still an “embryo” and is still to be elected, but she is also willing to mark her change in status. Her coming of age could be easily linked to the wider theme of rising in the campaign (she was “down there on the floor” and now she is “standing toe to toe”), and she aptly concludes by repeating her campaign slogan “We Will Rise”. After the song, she reinforces her positive self-presentation with a “topos of experience”, supporting her image of a qualified leader (“25 years of public service”) and projecting attention onto the future mission of the 2010 General Election: (11) And as God is my witness, I am humbled and honoured by the vote of confidence you have given me in my over 25 years of public service to you. I am humbled and honoured that today you the people have chosen as a leader of this historic People’s Partnership which is on a mission, with you my people, to change our country’s destiny. (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010)

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The choice of a famous 1970s feminist song as a personal jingle exemplifies how far Persad-Bissessar has come since 2007, finally becoming leader of the People’s Partnership and PM candidate. Nonetheless, some discursive strategies employed in her 2010 General Election campaign seem to link back to the established theme of the mother-politician of the No Woman No Cry 2007 speech. Her family role as a mother and grandmother is still put to the fore in key moments of her campaign, as a further support to her positive self-presentation and legitimation as an impartial, strong and caring leader for Trinidad and Tobago. One of these crucial moments is her first public appearance as PM candidate on April 16th, 2010, as earlier that day Patrick Manning announced the date for the General Election: (12) Sisters and brothers, I stand here today as one of you, a woman, mother, grandmother, a wife, daughter, sister and friend. I am here too as a lawyer, public servant, and a Prime Ministerial candidate.  (Hindu Women’s Organization, 16/04/2010, my emphasis) (13) As a mother and grandmother, I am also deeply concerned about the extent to which our children are being introduced to human values.  (Hindu Women’s Organization, 16/04/2010, my emphasis)

During the speech at the Hindu Women’s Organization, Persad-Bissessar employs a careful positioning that highlights her family roles (“a woman, mother, grandmother, a wife, daughter, sister and friend”), together with her institutional ones (“lawyer, public servant, and a Prime Ministerial candidate”). Brought up in the rural town of Siparia in a traditional Indo-Trinidadian Hindu family, Persad-Bissessar tends not to identify openly as a Hindu woman in the speech, as part of a wider strategy of religious vagueness she adopted throughout the campaign (see Chapter 6). Presenting herself as a mother, she is still able to create a bond with the audience of Hindu women (“I stand here today as one of you”). She positions herself closer to their problems and needs as wives, daughters and sisters both in the closely-knit Hindu family and in the wider Trinidadian society. Another crucial moment in which Persad-Bissessar presents herself as a motherpolitician is her Victory Speech on May 24th, 2010. We have seen how being a mother can be regarded as the most acceptable traditional female leadership role and the one in which women are licensed to behave in authoritative ways. Since she has just been elected as the country’s Prime Minister, she may be deliberately choosing to associate her role as PM with her role as a mother as a legitimation strategy. When illustrating the key features of her future leadership, she adds “the nurturing nature of a mother and grandmother” as an extra value to her political and government experiences:



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(14) I bring to my leadership not just political experience and government experience but I also carry into the office of the Prime Ministership the nurturing nature of a mother and grandmother and I will look after each of you all as my own. (Victory Speech – Rienzi Complex, 24/05/2010, my emphasis)

Later in the speech, in thanking her family she reprises the difficulties experienced when trying to “juggle her roles” between wife, mother and politician, as described in the No Woman No Cry speech of 2007: (15) It is never easy on a family when your wife and mother juggles her roles with her political life and so tonight I pay tribute to them for the way they have endured these years with love and selflessness.  (Victory Speech – Rienzi Complex, 24/05/2010, my emphasis)

In this excerpt she also takes the occasion to thank her husband and children for having endured her dedication to her professional political career, somehow marking its exceptionality. Yet, it would be a mistake to think that the trope of the mother-politician is employed by Persad-Bissessar exclusively to legitimate her authority while catering for a more male (and patriarchal) electorate. The next section shows how it is employed as a bonding strategy with the female electorate as well. 4.1.3 Kamla and the women in partnership The Trinidadian female electorate had been supporting Persad-Bissessar from the beginning of her political career and the women’s vote represented an important winning factor also in the 2010 We Will Rise Campaign. Persad-Bissessar had always been regarded as close to women’s issues: her foundation of the Siparia Women’s Association, a non-governmental association born in the early nineties, gave life to that supportive “gender network” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 151f) that contributed to her election as the first female Prime Minister in the history of Trinidad and Tobago. For her 2010 campaign, Persad-Bissessar could count on the support of feminist activist Hazel Brown, founding member of the Network of NGOs of Trinidad and Tobago for the Advancement of Women. With Brown’s endorsement, Persad-Bissessar’s election campaign formed part of the Network of NGOs Put a Woman campaign, which used the famous feminist slogan “A Woman’s Place is in the House… of Parliament” to encourage Trinidadian electors to vote for female candidates and make financial contributions to their campaigns. During the 2010 We Will Rise Campaign, Persad-Bissessar hosted a rally in Diego Martin entitled Women in Partnership aiming to address women’s issues in

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Trinidad and Tobago in a conversation with other female delegates of the People’s Partnership. In the context of an all-female rally, Persad-Bissessar relied once more on a self-presentation that highlighted her family roles of mother and grandmother. Although Persad-Bissessar served as Minister of Education between 1999 and 2001, and contributed to facilitating universal secondary education in the country, her concern for Trinidadian children’s issues is discursively mediated and reinforced by her role as “mother and grandmother”: (16) My friends, tonight you are probably wondering why Kamla have a milk pan with her, I brought this milk pan from home, you know I have two little grand-babies and I know how hard it is to buy milk for them and how difficult it must be for many mothers who rake and scrape to ensure that they get the money to feed their children, this milk pan represents the hope of a better future for our children and our babies. It represents my commitment to you that I will put our children first and foremost on the list of priorities of government. You can trust me, you can trust me with your children, because I too am a mother and a parent. (Diego Martin, 07/05/2010, my emphasis)

In this populist argumentum ad misericordiam, an appeal for compassion and empathy to win the audience over to her side, lies the rhetorical connection between Kamla and her audience. By posing a (fairly unrealistic) scenario in which also Persad-Bissessar experienced difficulties in buying milk for her grand-babies (“I know how hard it is to buy milk for them”), the PM candidate aims at shortening the distance even from the most underprivileged part of the electorate. The milk pan becomes the symbol of her commitment to children, who are premodified with “your” as well as “our”, framed as children of the nation. The topos of trust, often employed by politicians during campaigns in their quest for votes, is here unpacked and explicated: trust has been earned by her longstanding role as “a mother and a parent”, rather than as a former Minister of Education. The Diego Martin rally was reprised by the local press, which largely highlighted its women-only nature as its most striking and newsworthy aspect. The Trinidad Express commented on the absence of men on the stage: “even the job of adjusting the microphone for each speaker was done by a woman” (Julien 2010). The two pictures from the Diego Martin rally (Figures 8 and 9), included in the Kamla 2010 photo booklet, exemplify the extent to which the female political component was highlighted and staged during the rally. The picture is accompanied by the following caption: May 7, 2010 Diamond Vale, Diego Martin. LEADING LADIES: Advancing social development and condemning violence on women among the topics of the three-hour meeting hosted by female delegates of the People’s Partnership. Before departing Kamla summons her ‘sisters’

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Figure 8.  “Leading Ladies” – picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet to join in song. The audience is witnessing a display of affection not commonly seen on a political platform. Pictured (from left) COP delegate Anna Maria Mora, UNC delegate Nela Khan, UNC delegate Annabelle Davis, UNC leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar, UNC delegate Verna St. Rose Greaves and COP delegate Carolyn Seeparsad Bachchan. Present but not pictured: COP delegate Nicole Dyer-Griffith and UNC delegate Stacy Roopnarine.

Politicians are among those subjects that are usually required to look out of the frame and directly engage with the viewer, as “looking at the viewer, or the right to do so, in itself suggests power” (Machin 2012: 111, my emphasis). While the female politicians in the picture do not directly engage the viewer with their gaze, and there is no symbolic contact or interaction between the viewer and the women depicted, the very nature of politicians on a rally stage does not seem to suggest their presence as merely objects of the viewer’s scrutiny, but rather as “performers”, fully aware of the mediatization of their public presence (Wodak 2009). The angle of interaction, slightly oblique to the left and vertical, contributes to giving the viewer the feeling of being somewhere in the audience attending the Diego Martin rally. The angle reinforces the high, powerful status of the women in the picture as politicians and role models: they are Leading Ladies, as the caption maintains. The absence of direct gaze is balanced by the distance of the shot: although the picture is actually a long shot, the angle cutting the stage gives a higher sense of closeness and makes the viewer feel as if they were standing front-row at the feet of it, close to the energy of the moment, actually supporting the People’s Partnership. The social actors in the picture are represented en groupe, and the four women in the centre

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are collectivized and politically categorized through the use of the colour yellow as belonging to the same party. In particular, two main elements in the picture can be regarded as having a central symbolic value in the composition. The first element is the aforementioned colour yellow: starting from the assumption that “the meaning of colour rests on association” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2002: 354), the People’s Partnership yellow could be interpreted as a strong “colour act” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2002: 348) of political renewal.2 The colour yellow has both an interpersonal and a textual metafunction in the picture. Interpersonal, because yellow is used to act on the audience with a political end and with the final aim of representing the Party’s ideas and the values they stand for. Textual, because the repetition of the colour yellow creates cohesion and offers the semiotic possibility of recognizing a pattern among the women in the picture. In this respect, the function played by the colour is both putting them in relation with each other while, simultaneously, associating them with the People’s Partnership. The picture is aptly cropped to leave the white shirts of the Congress of the People’s delegates to the sides and give salience to the African-inspired kaftan dress in yellow (picturing yet another woman in a turban on the front) worn by Verna St. Rose Greaves, whose presence symbolizes the ethnic inclusivity of the coalition and inter-ethnic solidarity between Trinidadian women. The second element is the focus on the process of holding hands: the leader Kamla is not perfectly at the center of the picture, which is occupied by her hand holding that of UNC delegate Annabelle Davis to her right. The picture may aim at representing a feminine approach to leadership, departing from the rigid hierarchy typical of the traditional notion of power. As the caption says, “Kamla summons her sisters to join in song”, and singing together in choir while holding hands can be seen as a symbolic act that levels any trace of hierarchy, being closer to an horizontal dimension of power. The image of solidarity and strong bonding in the picture is further reinforced by the caption, maintaining that “The audience is witnessing a display of affection not commonly seen on a political platform”. The caption positively highlights the exceptionality and inclusive nature of the coalition, but also seems to link back to the stereotype of women being more willing to display their emotions as Persad-Bissessar showed in her 2007 No Woman No

2. Yellow was introduced in 2010 in the political arena of Trinidad and Tobago. Yellow became the new UNC color and also came to symbolize the wider People’s Partnership coalition, in opposition to the traditional red of the People’s National Movement. The new color marked a departure from the orange of the United National Congress under Basdeo Panday. The choice could be interpreted as a possible way of reprising the rising sun in the UNC symbol, transmitting the positive, warm and energizing vibe of a new dawn for Trinidad and Tobago.

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Cry speech. But rather than being “the lone woman’s voice in the sea of men” as she was in 2007, Persad-Bissessar is now portrayed as the leader of a coalition that gives political visibility to women and sees in her “gender network” a crucial share of her electorate. This idea of a strong network of women is reinforced by the second picture from the Diego Martin rally of May 7th, 2010 (Figure 8), found on the following page in the Kamla 2010 booklet:

Figure 9.  “We Will Rise” – picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet

The caption of the picture reads as following: May 7, 2010 Diamond Vale, Diego Martin. WE WILL RISE: Lisa Maraj of Diego Martin Northeast hoists a UNC pin and casts hopeful eyes at the female delegation of the People’s Partnership as they host a meeting with a “Ladies Night” theme near Wendy Fitzwilliam Boulevard. “I’m not walking in fear”, announced delegate Verna St. Rose Greaves who denounced violence and name-calling in campaigning. “We must be the change we want”, declared Greaves.

The picture portrays Lisa Maraj, a Diego Martin North East Councilor for the UNC, attending the Ladies Night rally and showing her UNC pin. The composition, juxtaposing her face (as “Carrier”) with the UNC symbol (the “Symbolic Attribute”), is a symbolic process epitomizing her role as councillor. In the Trinidadian system, she is the front-line face that represents the government at the local level, maintaining the everyday relationship between the party and the electoral district, being

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available for direct contact with the citizens. Her arm, working as vector, connects the UNC pin (situated at the “ideal”, emotive level of promise in a “given” position, representing the party ideals that the elector can trust) and Maraj herself (situated at the “real”, practical level of product, representing the person available to represent the party at the local level). Maraj is not alone in the audience, but we can see two other women of different ages with her in the picture and glimpse two men in the background, all working as “non-transactional reacters”, casting their gaze towards something or someone undepicted in the image. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 67f) have been highlighting how in the absence of a “phenomenon” (that is, the object of the glance of one or more of the represented reacters) included in the image, the pictures of non-transactional reacters can become a source of representational manipulation. This happens frequently in the cropping of pictures in the news, portraying somebody’s reaction to something or someone we cannot see. In this case, being on page 14 of the booklet, this portrait is in dialogue with the picture of the Leading Ladies on the stage on page 13, almost constituting a diptych. Maraj is portrayed casting “hopeful eyes at the female delegation of the People’s Partnership”, that is to say, she is looking at the same image we were looking at in the previous picture, from her perspective at the foot of the stage. To further reinforce the connection between the two pictures, the caption reports the words of Verna St. Rose Greaves, depicted in the Leading Ladies picture, and her resolution to stop “violence and name-calling” against women in the country. Picturing Maraj in the booklet is a highly symbolic choice: she is part of that “gender network” that has been supporting Kamla since the 1990s, contributing to creating and reinforcing her network in small villages throughout the country and establishing relationships with community boards, NGOs and public and private organisations. 4.1.4 Kamla as the angel of Trinidad and Tobago The common psychology of leadership usually endorses the view of the great leader as a “Great Man”, who is “irredeemably masculine, heroic, individualist and normative in orientation and nature” (Grint 2010: 40). If this dominant model has given life to many Iron Ladies, women leaders very much in line with the Great Man stereotype, Persad-Bissessar seems to adopt a different strategy. In a context such as the 2010 General Election campaign in Trinidad and Tobago, those very characteristics generally considered to be “inappropriate in leaders” (Rosener 1990: 120) could have possibly constituted a “female advantage” for Persad-Bissessar (Hegelsen 1990). As a female PM candidate, she presented herself as “more participatory and



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interpersonally oriented” as well as “more likely to adopt empathetic, supportive, and collaborative approaches” (Kellerman et al. 2007: 16f). In this respect, her gender difference could have possibly been instrumental in signalling and promoting a political change, which would bring a new, more inclusive kind of administration to Trinidad and Tobago. This accent on her motherly and collaborative leadership is at the heart of the conclusions of her Diego Martin Women in Partnership speech. As we have seen, Persad-Bissessar engages in an appeal to solidarity, reprising the story of a single mother being arrested for stealing baby milk. Holding a milk pan in her hands, she asks the audience to fill it with money to be donated to the single mother and her baby: (17) Friends tonight I am asking each of you to make a contribution however small in the milk pan, it will be passed around at the end of the meeting. […] Let us give our children that chance to live, love and learn. Our nation’s finest minds start with that very milk pan and tonight I signal that our children will not have to suffer much longer, because when we take government they too will rise. Instead of Manning drinking wine from golden goblets, our babies will have milk in their bottles. (Diego Martin, 07/05/2010)

In her appeal, Persad-Bissessar starts from the very grassroots of collaboration and solidarity, asking for a “contribution however small”, almost as if passing an offering plate in a church. Rather than promoting an image of power based on authority, stereotypically associated with fathers (and especially “strict fathers” à la Lakoff), Persad-Bissessar stresses the aspects of motherly care and provision of goods. Her appeal serves to create a strong polarization between her positive self-presentation as Mother of the Nation, and the negative presentation of Manning as Emperor, “drinking wine from golden goblets” (see the following section in this chapter). As she was campaigning for power after a period of authoritarianism and corruption, Persad-Bissessar portrayed herself as an agent of change able to “clean up corruption in politics” (Norris 1997: 163), and as someone who was able to “heal the country and bring peace and reconciliation” (Campus 2013: 44). In the context of the wider theme of rising adopted in the campaign (see Chapter 6), Kamla put herself on a pedestal as the high priestess of her country, the only candidate that could make Trinidad and Tobago rise from the previous Manning administration. By the time of the final rally, held on May 22th at Aranguez Savannah, Persad-Bissessar was already the favourite in the run for the Prime Ministership and she entered the stage escorted by kids dressed as angels, to receive a serenade meaningfully entitled An Angel. The moment is captured in the Kamla 2010 photo booklet (see Figure 10):

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Figure 10.  “Silky Serenade” – picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet

Persad-Bissessar is clearly the protagonist of the picture: the arm of the young boy kneeling at her right works as a diagonal vector that directs the attention towards her. The slightly oblique angle puts her in a salient position, with her figure, dressed in her trademark yellow skirt suit, extending to the entire height of the image. The stretched arm of the young boy, together with his eyeline vector, connects him to Persad-Bissessar as he is singing to her. The caption, where the rally is described as an exotic “great pilgrimage to Mecca”, helps to contextualize the image better: May 22, 2010, 2010 Aranguez Savannah, Aranguez. SILKY SERENADE: The streets leading to the Aranguez Savannah resemble images of the great pilgrimage to Mecca. Election Day is two days away and this is the final rally. Dancers with wings like golden rays ignite the event, and unveil the enthusiastic delegates. Vibrant flags, yellow balloons and homemade banners prance overhead to the soundtrack of howls, screams cheers. Pranava Maharaj, 14, of Vistabella in San Fernando, performs an original ballad titled “An Angel” for Kamla, who was escorted on stage by young, angelic performers.

As we read from the caption, Persad-Bissessar entered the stage in her final rally at Aranguez Savannah escorted by young children dressed as angels. These are holding hands in circle on the right of the image, representing a minor process embedded in the major process of the serenade, important to contextualize and add meaning to the narrative structure of the picture. The young singer is dedicating his song, evocatively titled An Angel, while on his knees, almost worshipping her. Persad-Bissessar is the “goal” of the singer’s action, but she is not glancing back at the kneeled boy: she is smiling while looking at the crowd, which is not included in the picture. Her hands in the air suggest she is pleasantly and humbly surprised by



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the serenade. The setting also suggests a form of approval, with other delegates on the stage portrayed as cheering, smiling, applauding, or waving flags. Maharaj’s song is a cover of the song An Angel, popularized by the Kelly Family in the 1990s. The lyrics were recontextualized and adapted to reinforce the presentation of Kamla as Angel: From the pristine cosmic dance You have come to give a solid chance An Angel from that magic star Kamla Persad-Bissessar Sometimes I wish I were an Angel, sometimes I wish I were you With your Angel’s guiding hand To lead us to the Promised Land With beauty, passion, hope and care, A wind of change is in the air To save our island paradise Together We Will Rise Can you not hear the victory drums? Angel, your time has finally come! Together with you, our Angel Kamla Persad-Bissessar, We Will Rise!

The lyrics display an extensive use of religious intertextuality and interdiscursivity: her hand is the “Angel’s guiding hand”, the national body is celebrated as a Caribbean “paradise”, the future of her government is the “Promised Land”. In addition, the We Will Rise motto is embedded in the lyrics, as well as the accent on the “wind of change” that she will bring to the nation. The PM candidate is clearly presenting herself as the supernatural being that will save Trinidad and Tobago. This representation of Kamla as an angel seems to fall in with two well-rooted beliefs on women leaders. Firstly, the qualities that Persad-Bissessar will bring to her leadership (“beauty, passion, hope and care”) are a stereotypical positive representation of a Mother of the Nation leader. Placing Persad-Bissessar on such a supernatural pedestal in the campaign links back to “the well-rooted belief that women are more honest, and therefore less easily infected by power” (Campus 2013: 47). Secondly, as Kamla is portrayed as coming from a star and descending as a blessing on Trinidad and Tobago, she is presented as not involved in the causes of the contemporary national problems. This aspect links back to the stereotype of the woman leader as “outsider”, when “being extraneous becomes an asset”, especially on those occasions when “the disastrous state of things is produced by the male dominant elite” and “the situation is so serious that real change is needed” (ibid.).3 3. Many other female leaders have been elected in other non-Western contexts to “clean-up” politics, such as Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia and Violeta Chamorro of Nicaragua, to name a few (Campus 2013).

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In another moment from the Aranguez Savannah Final Rally, Persad-Bissessar almost seemed to answer this popular demand for a saviour with a reference to another song. The moment is portrayed in the Kamla 2010 photo booklet (see Figure 11): Persad-Bissessar is on the stage greeting the audience, again as the “reacter” of a “non-transactional reaction”: she is smiling and looking at the crowd, which is not depicted in the picture. The connection with the audience is reinforced by her arm, working as a vector pointing somewhere in the crowd. The picture can also be regarded as a “Speech Process” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 68), as it is aptly cropped to show the karaoke screen displaying the lyrics to the Jackson Five’s song I’ll be there. The song was chosen to epitomize her pledge on the eve of the election date and the lyrics are meaningfully positioned in the “Ideal” upper half of the image.

Figure 11.  “I’ll be there” – picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet

Her candidacy is presented as a popular demand, an answer to the country’s needs rather than a competition for political power: she is offering herself to the nation, her supernatural powers will heal Trinidad and Tobago, and peace in the “island paradise” will be finally restored.

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4.2

Strategies of negative other-presentation

4.2.1 “Manout” and the discursive construction of the out-group After having called a snap election during his second term as Prime Minister following alleged corruption in the building sector, Patrick Manning was not in the most favourable of positions in the run-up to the 2010 General Election. Beginning her campaign in the Pointe-à-Pierre Constituency on April 12th, 2010, Persad-Bissessar promptly introduced one of the main themes of the campaign in the discursive construction of an “out-group” for Manning and the PNM, made from a pun on his name, Manout: (18) Whatever might be the thinking behind his rash decision to prorogue Parliament to call a general election, the people of this country are relieved. Finally, we will all have an opportunity to express our disapproval of his managing the nation’s affairs by voting him out of office. Even Manning himself has admitted that he is on his way out. We all say after the election, it will not be Manning but Manout.  (Pointe-à-Pierre Constituency, 12/04/2010, my emphasis)

Here, Persad-Bissessar is quoting a famous slogan of the National Alliance for Reconstruction, the only other successful coalition in the history of the nation. The pun, changing the end of Manning’s surname from sounding like in to out, and the appeal to a “vote him out of office” seem to be both references to the Vote ‘em Out 1986 campaign by the NAR against the PNM. The call by the National Alliance for Reconstruction to “vote them out” was very innovative: it utilised all media, produced some memorable commercials and eventually succeeded in routing the PNM. (Joseph 2000). The NAR’s most famous campaign image was one of a child pleading: “Vote them out. Please”. The theme of excluding Manning from what can be considered as a wider national “in-group” is at the core of the Do So! campaign, one of the most popular ads of the People’s Partnership 2010 campaign. The campaign reprises the gesture of Percy Villafana, a 81-year-old former Co-operative Development Officer with the Ministry of Agriculture, which brought him fame on the Trinidadian public scene in March 2010. His gesture against Manning, which was dubbed “the Villafana”, was popularized during the People’s Partnership campaign.4 The 81-year-old pensioner 4. As the Prime Minister Patrick Manning was on a political walkabout in the San Juan area, Villafana denied him entry to his yard by standing with his arms crossed in front of him. The photo of Villafana blocking the PM was printed on the front of the daily newspapers and shown on the evening news. When interviewed by local television, Villafana reportedly said “That sign is to ward off evil”, contributing to the negative other-presentation of Manning in the media. Villafana’s gesture links back to the syncretic Afro-Christian belief in evil spirits and the traditional remedies against them.

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became an authentic political icon, he joined the Partnership in the rallies and was also portrayed in the Kamla 2010 photo booklet (see Figure 12):

Figure 12.  “The Villafana”- Picture from the Kamla 2010 booklet

Two pictures are juxtaposed on the page. On the left, a young People’s Partnership supporter raising the popular Do So! poster, a graphic design of crossed arms on a yellow background. On the right, Villafana himself, repeating his iconic crossed arms gesture and wearing a t-shirt with the Do So! slogan and depicting the same gesture. Even though the two are not actually part of the same picture, the composition gives the effect of an intra-diegetic gaze. Villafana is portrayed standing on the stage and the young supporter seems to be looking at him from the crowd. The fact that Villafana is a 81-year-old pensioner and former Ministry officer guarantees him respect and social authority in Trinidadian society: he is the voice of a wise old man and the young supporter is portrayed as following his example and imitating his gesture. The composition aims at representing the transversal power of the People’s Partnership, able to bring together different generations and to represent them all. The elliptical nature and the brevity of the Do So! slogan, paired with the iconographic symbolism of the gesture, are the two main aspects that made the ad so powerful. The young supporter in the picture is waving one of the Do So! posters that were printed on a yellow background by the major newspapers as a full-colour centrefold pull-out to be taken to People’s Partnership rallies. Actually, the Do So! ads found on thousands of electricity poles across the country were printed on a white background, making the slogan even more elliptical, because the viewer could not associate the People’s Partnership iconic yellow colour to it (see Figure 13).



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Figure 13.  The Do So ad from the People’s Partnership 2010 campaign

Advertising often employs language ellipsis as it helps deal with time and space constraints, “as long as what is omitted is easily recoverable by the intended audience” (Johnson 2008: 9f). In this respect, the Do So! slogan contributed to building an in-group of electors based on implicit shared knowledge, so that People’s Partnership supporters would all know what the so is that they have to do. Following in the steps of Basdeo Panday, Kamla also attracted popular Afro-Trinidadian calypso singers to sing political anthems against the PNM during the 2010 Campaign. The idea of Manout was also powerfully reprised in Patrick Manning Have to Go, a popular calypso hymn commissioned by the People’s Partnership from the calypsonian Edwin Crazy Ayoung: Patrick Manning have to go. After the Calder Hart fiasco And the hospital in Scarborough Yes Trinidad and Tobago Patrick Manning have to go Like Schlumberger and Texaco Gordon Grant, Bata and Esso Salvatori and Johnny O Patrick Manning have to go

The lyrics of the calypso song list two of the most controversial moments of Patrick Manning’s political history as PM. The first is “the Calder Hart fiasco”, the casus belli for the 2010 snap election that exposed the PNM to a number of allegations of corruption crystallized around Calder Hart, executive chairman of the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT), responsible for the construction of public infrastructure.

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The second is the “hospital in Scarborough” scandal, when Manning’s Housing Minister Keith Rowley was accused of using materials from the Scarborough Regional Hospital construction site for his private venture in 2004. In addition, the calypsonian also lists a number of major foreign multinational corporations (“Schlumberger, Texaco, Gordon Grant, Bata, Esso, Salvatori, Johnny O”) present in Trinidad and Tobago. The corporations are often at the centre of scandals, corruption allegations and controversies for a number of issues, including the working conditions and wages of the Trinidadians employed as well as the abuse of natural resources and ecological damage caused to the islands. The calypsonian associates Manning with the multinational corporations in his request to send them all away from the country. As the former PM is linked to issues of neocolonial power and exploitation, he is indirectly portrayed as out-group, not belonging to the country, not authentically Trinidadian, and he is invited to leave. 4.2.2 “The Emperor has no clothes” The UDeCOTT scandal is undoubtedly one of the main themes of Persad-Bissessar’s campaign, as it caused the snap election that would eventually bring the People’s Partnership to victory. Persad-Bissessar often condensed the possible comments on Manning’s leadership style, his alleged corruption and private interests into a vivid nomination, calling him Emperor Manning. Kamla makes a frequent use of Emperor Manning to refer to her opponent throughout the campaign. In the speech at the Harris Promenade in San Fernando she employs this nickname in a long intertextual reference to the short tale by Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In classical Aristotelian rhetoric, the narratio gives a more or less biased account of a problem under discussion. Similarly, Andersen’s tale is altered to serve Kamla’s personal version of the UDeCOTT scandal as “a story of vanity and arrogance”: (19) Tonight I want to tell you a story of vanity and arrogance. Once upon a time there lived an Emperor called Patrick – and he was a very arrogant man, who did not care about his people, he was a very vain man and not very bright. The Emperor liked to build monuments and wear fine clothes – all to show off to visitors from far away countries when they came for big waste of time meetings. One day, a Canadian smart man called Calder came to see Patrick and he told Patrick that he would make the finest clothes for him out of a special thread that only people worthy to be in the Cabinet would be able to see. Calder told the Emperor that the clothes would cost him $ 300M and to make up the cheque in the company name with his initials CH because no one would make the connection. So, Calder made the clothes and Patrick said he would wear it on 24th May, because that was an important day in the Country. And before the big day, the Emperor tried on the new clothes made of special thread and all



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the Cabinet ministers told him he lookin’ real good; except one called Keith and he was fired and accused of being a wajang. Once Calder got his money he disappeared with the money – fled the country. On the 24th of May, when Patrick came out in his new clothes made by Calder everyone in the country knew that the special thread was really a hoax and the Emperor had no clothes. The Emperor was so ashamed having been fooled because of his arrogance and vanity; he was never seen again…and everyone in the Country lived happily ever after. (Harris Promenade, San Fernando, 05/05/2010)

One of the reasons why Persad-Bissessar decided to employ storytelling to talk about the UDeCOTT scandal could be its intricacy and the intensive media coverage that derived from it. According to Charteris-Black (2014: 237), “the old stories and the familiar ways to tell them” prove effective especially when dealing with complex issues, as “the data may be too much to absorb or the arguments too complex to follow”. The extract can also be considered an example of the role of narrative in political speeches as “as a device that supports the fundamental persuasive intention of presenting an ideologically biased selection of past events” (Schubert 2010: 143). This form of satirical storytelling in Trinidadian political discourse also links back to the tradition of picong: “a local medium derived from an oral tradition of story-telling that was a combination of humour, hate, slander, sex and politics” (Premdas 2004: 36). Through the use of picong (a word whose etymology has been traced either to Spanish picón ‘cheeky, mocking’ or to the French Creole piquant ‘spicy’), politicians engage the crowd in street theatre, slurring the reputation of their adversaries and evoking laughter in the audience. Crowds, in fact, usually expect to be served up with some picong in exchange for the hours of listening to political propaganda. The narration serves Kamla’s negative other-presentation of Manning, who is described as “very arrogant”, “very vain”, and “not very bright”, just like Andersen’s Emperor. The characters in Andersen’s tale are replaced by the three main protagonists of the UDeCOTT scandal: Manning is the Emperor, Calder Hart is the swindler figure (of which there are actually two in the original tale), and Keith Rowley is the child in the crowd who blurts out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. The plot is extensively altered by Kamla, who includes real life events like Calder Hart fleeing the country after the scandal or Rowley being publicly called a wajang (a Trinidadian Creole term for someone behaving badly) by Manning. The Emperor’s procession with his new clothes is substituted by the Election Day, and while in Andersen’s tale the Emperor continues his procession, Manning will never be seen again in the country after May 24th, constituting the happy ending of the tale in Kamla’s view.

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The People’s Partnership positive self-presentation forged an image of solidarity and inter-ethnic collaboration, led by a caring mother-politician and democratic leader. Conversely, in constructing the PNM as the “out-group” led by Manning, Persad-Bissessar often employs specific referential strategies similar to those found in the discourse of racial discrimination and the discursive construction of immigrants as out-groups (Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Van Leeuwen 1996). Examples are the use of “genericization” and “collectivization”, generic references in the plural to social actors as group entities, but without quantifying them. PNM members are often qualified through “abstraction”, that is, the representation of social actors by means of a quality. In this case, the quality is implied in the negative connotation of the generic collective reference assigned to them: (20) VISION 2020 is proof that the government knows what the country needs. But Mr. Manning and his band do not care about that!  (St. Helena, 19/04/2010, my emphasis) (21) And so when Patrick Manning and his friends get desperate and start the lies and the dirty tricks, and that’ll be soon, believe me…it’s not going to work. This time it’s different. (St. Augustine, 16/04/2010, my emphasis) (22) We don’t have to go on as we are going and end up in disaster. We don’t have to go down with Patrick Manning and his cronies.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010, my emphasis) (23) The people are fed up of the incompetence, arrogance and the bankruptcy of the minds of the Manning and his minions who have the audacity to shut down your parliament and then come back to you to ask for your vote.  (Harris Promenade, San Fernando, 05/05/2010, my emphasis) (24) And a lady told Manning here last night he must wear white if he wants to win. Well, I tell you tonight Manning losing this election whether he wear white, black or red… he cyar win even if he wear YELLOW, because the people have decided that they have had enough on Manning and his clique!  (Harris Promenade, San Fernando, 05/05/2010, my emphasis) (25) An independent committee comprising UWI lecturers, private sector representatives and Ministry officials found that Manning and his cohorts pursued this project for blatant political mileage and ignored geo-technical reports that predicted failure. (Arouca, 08/05/2010, my emphasis) (26) We have been reporting all these matters to the Integrity Commission. And I promise you tonight that when your People’s Partnership government takes office on May 25 we will make sure that the Commission doesn’t drag its feet on these matters. And so I tell Manning and his pardners: WATCH OUT! If you do the crime, get ready to do the time!  (La Brea, 17/05/2010, my emphasis)



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(27) Each might seem like a massive problem on its own, but each one is an individual link in the chain of poverty…so when we attack poverty, we attack crime. Ent that is common sense? Well if you know that and I know that, how come Manning and them doh know that? (La Brea, 17/05/2010, my emphasis)

These reference strategies contribute to reinforcing the representation of Manning as Emperor. The members of the PNM are collectivized to resemble a feudal court rather than a modern party. They are portrayed as faithful servants (“minions, cohorts, pardners, cronies, clique”) ready to please their Prime Minister as subjects would do with their emperor. These nomination strategies have two major implications. Firstly, they imply Manning appointed his Ministers and collaborators to positions of authority, regardless of their qualifications. Secondly, they imply that the relationships inside the PNM are highly hierarchical and founded on mutual private interests of a dubious nature (“friends, band”) rather than on the common good of the nation. 4.2.3 Patrick Manning, Eric Williams and the “Inferiority complex” The PNM is the oldest party in the political history of the Nation, the first party to rule independent Trinidad and Tobago and also the one to have ruled it for the longest period of time. The party takes great pride in the fact that Eric Williams, regarded as the founding Father of the Nation, was also its founder. In the negative other-presentation of Manning and his PNM, Persad-Bissessar often employs narratives aimed at drawing a parallel and highlighting the differences between Patrick Manning and Eric Williams, whose historical importance is widely acknowledged in the country regardless of political preferences. More specifically, Persad-Bissessar accuses Manning of having an “an inferiority complex”, trying to live up to the important history of the party he is leading and trying to imitate Williams’ initiatives and style, obviously without succeeding. The extract from the speech in La Brea included in Table 9 is one of the various occasions on which she talks about Williams to discredit Manning, repeating almost the same passage in different rallies with little or no variation. In her parallelism between Manning and Williams, Persad-Bissessar seems to follow the semiformal, ritual exchange of satirical picong, the long-established genre of storytelling and caricaturing of the opponent in Trinidadian political discourse that injects a lighter note into the hours-long rallies of political propaganda. Widespread also among calypsonians, this practice is also referred to as fatigue, because it is aimed at tiring out the adversary with jokes and insults. Kamla describes Williams’ achievements, which are part of the commonly shared national

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Table 9.  Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s picong against Manning KPB on Eric Williams

KPB on Patrick Manning

“The late Dr. Eric Williams built the national stadium.”

“So Manning rushed to build the bigger and more expensive Tarouba Stadium.”

“Williams built the Point Lisas estate.”

“So Manning grade the site down the road to build an even bigger industrial estate, and then for good measure he trying to build another one in Pranz Gardens too!”

“Williams got a doctorate.”

“Well, Manning managed to get one of his Ministers’ family to give him a doctorate too!”

“Williams built the waterfront and the twin towers in Port of Spain.”

“Manning built the education towers and one set of other buildings taller than the Twin Towers!”

“Williams was called Father of the Nation.”

“You know Manning called HIMSELF Father of the Nation?”

“Williams used to wear dark glasses all the time.”

“You know Manning wearing shades even in the night too!”

“Williams used to wear a hearing aid.”

“Well, Manning not wearing a hearing aid yet but he certainly DEAF! So you see, Manning has an inferiority complex!”

knowledge, with short and simple SVO statements. To each of these Kamla then compares Manning’s work reprising the same topic she addressed talking about Williams. She uses longer utterances, with a much larger number of adjectives (“bigger”, “more expensive”, “even bigger”, “taller”) which link back to the overarching strategy of presenting Manning as Emperor, building public infrastructures that Kamla describes as exaggerated, useless or costing too much public money. Such dialogic structure also resembles the Afro-American form of verbal duelling commonly known as “playing the dozens” (Labov 1972), here employed to insult and ridicule her opponent. Kamla refers to another moment when Manning attracted a great deal of public criticism, when in a solemn address to the nation during his second mandate as PM in 1995 he stated: “Today, I speak to you as the Father of the Nation, and as the Leader that you have chosen”, appointing to himself the title that had hitherto been Williams’. Manning is portrayed as an inferior copy of Eric Williams also by drawing a parallel between Williams’s doctorate in History at the University of Oxford which was rated as first of his class in 1935, and Manning’s honorary doctorate, received from Medgar Evers College in New York in 2007. Williams was known for his trademark shades and hearing aid, and Kamla concludes the parallelism with a classic picong joke in Trinidadian Creole on the supposed blindness and deafness of Manning, unable to see and listen to the needs of the electorate. As seen in this example and further explored in the next section, code-switching to



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Trinidadian Creole is a discursive and political strategy that Kamla employs often in her speeches, with a very precise communicative goal: talking freely and in a derogatory way about her opponent. 4.2.4 Trinidadian Creole as a strategy of demontage and bonding The Trinidadian creolist Alleyne (1965) was among the first scholars to raise a key issue on the role of language in the political process of the early post-Independence era in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Trinidadian Standard English has always been the language of formal political life, in which administration and parliamentary debates are habitually conducted. In this respect, Alleyne denounced an alarming language gap between the educated elite who had inherited political power, and the Creole-speaking mass of the population on whose behalf power was supposedly being exercised. Since the 1960s, the literacy rate in the country has been steadily growing, reaching 98.7% in 2010.5 The status of Trinidadian Creole has also been constantly evolving, especially since 1975 when it was recognized as a language in its own right. However, any use that politicians might make of Creole in their speeches does not necessarily imply that the variety enjoys any kind of official status in the political system, rather its usage seems to link back to that use of Creole as the “language of solidarity”: Increased status for the Creole and an identification with it as the language of the territory have made for greater use of it in public contexts, such as parliament; motivation towards a pure Standard is disappearing since most people balance out their use of standard and creole in relation to the demands of each situation. If StE (Standard English) is the language of power, TrnC (Trinidadian Creole) is the language of solidarity, and appropriate language use necessarily entails balancing the two varieties. (Youssef and Winford 2004: 513)

The functions of Creole in a political speech in the Caribbean are limited, and include “sloganeering, telling jokes, abuse and as an emotional rhetoric device” (Devonish 1986: 100), while political content is mostly expressed in Standard English. Throughout the KPB 2010 Corpus, Persad-Bissessar code-switches to Trinidadian Creole exclusively when she is talking about her opponent Patrick Manning and the PNM. Kamla uses Creole for the very same reasons described by Devonish: as a populist rhetorical device to make people feel closer to her opinions and reinforce her “in-group” of electors. Hence, she code-switches into Creole when 5. Total of people over the age of 15 (male: 99.14% and female: 98.3%) who can read and write (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2013).

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sloganeering against him or other members of the PNM, when she is being ironic or mocking their work during their last mandate. The UDeCOTT scandal that brought Manning to call the snap election in 2010 is one of the PNM-related topics on which Kamla more frequently makes ironical comments in Trinidadian Creole: (28) When you told us Manning was protecting Calder Hart and called you a “wajang” when you spoke about the lack of cabinet oversight, we believed you. But when you flip flop and now tell us, leave Manning alone, we cyar believe yuh! When yuh tell us, stay on de ship no matter what state it in, we ayah believe yuh! Yuh could sing fuh yuh supper, but yuh would never get ah chance tuh eat it because Manning and the PNM will not be there after May 25th! Will you now help Manning defend this corrupt transaction that occurred under his nose and watch? Manning upstaged you on this. I want to tell you that this is a big, big leak, Keith. Yuh goh have tuh hire de Chineese tuh help yuh tuh plug it because the PNM ship is sinking! Keith, yuh say it eh have no court martial! Well, ah want tuh tell yuh dat there is a court martial! The date for de court martial is May 24th and the people will be the jury.  (Arouca, 08/05/2010)

In this excerpt, Kamla is addressing the PNM former Planning Minister Keith Rowley. Rowley was dismissed by Manning in 2008 because he had demanded Cabinet oversight over a multi-million project being undertaken by Calder Hart’s UDeCOTT, the same Corporation that caused the scandal and the snap election of 2010. Here Kamla is speaking in response to Rowley’s declaration of May 7th, 2010, when he used a ship metaphor to refer to the PNM party with Manning as the Captain: “There is a political ship called the MV PNM, and as a sailor, when your ship goes into battle, that is no time to throw the captain overboard”. To announce his lasting faithfulness to the PNM, Rowley used another cross-domain mapping, calling himself a sailor: “I am a sailor on the PNM ship and I know what my duty is. And it does not matter what shape the ship is in, don’t give up the ship” (Bagoo 2010). The “Nation-as-Ship” or the “Party-as-Ship” are conventional metaphors widely used in political discourse, suggesting “a large container holding many people”, “a society moving forward through space” as well as “the idea that political events are partially determined by the (metaphorical) weather” (Grady et al. 1999: 109f). The code-switch into Creole may support Persad-Bissessar’s attempt to ridicule Rowley’s declaration of faithfulness to the PNM and his use of metaphors to make his speech more elevated and inspiring. Choosing metaphors in the same domain to link back to Rowley’s declarations, Kamla defines the UDeCOTT scandal as a “big, big leak” and the result is that the “PNM ship is sinking”.



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While the metaphor of the sinking ship to refer to her opponent’s party could be seen as a classical, overused trope in political discourse, it could also be considered an evocative intertextual reference to a political calypso song popular in the 1986 Elections, The Sinking Ship, by the calypsonian Winston Gypsy Peters. The song referring to the PNM as a sinking ship became an authentic hit, to the point that it has been considered a key factor in the 1986 success of the NAR coalition over the PNM (Finden-Crofts 1998: 149f.), and therefore could represent a particularly meaningful quote for the PM candidate Persad-Bissessar.6 The reference to hiring the Chinese to “plug the leak” in the PNM ship is another metaphorical reference to the complexity of the UDeCOTT scandal, as well as a reference to the alleged exploitation of a vast number of Chinese immigrant workers on the construction site of the Heights of Guanapo Church in Trinidad and Tobago (see Chapter 2). Persad-Bissessar also codeswitches into Trinidadian Creole when addressing the internal tensions in the PNM during the 2010 Campaign. In particular, she addresses Manning’s rejection of the PNM Senator Penny Beckles as a candidate for the Constituency of Arima, where she had been MP since 2002: (29) Why don’t you talk about why you throw out Penny Beckles. Why don’t you tell the people that you ‘fraid she? She won the seat for Arima in 2007 Mr. Manning, she was deputy speaker of the House of Representatives… but you throw your penny out and now you bankrupt so you getting farse and minding we business. (Harris Promenade, San Fernando, 05/05/2010)

According to Kamla, Manning rejected Beckles’ candidature because he was “‘fraid she” (afraid of her), portraying Manning as a weak, sexist politician. As a female candidate with a strong network of female supporters and 11 female MP candidates (Kamla being the 12th as candidate for the constituency of Siparia) out of 41, Persad-Bissessar creates a sharp contrast between the modern and women-friendly People’s Partnership and the PNM. Another example of the use of code-switching to talk about party-internal tensions in the PNM is when Kamla describes the personalities of PNM ministers as weak or problematic and Manning as incapable of coordinating them, in the established custom of picong: 6. Not only a calypsonian but also a UNC politician, Winston Gypsy Peters served as Minister of Arts and Multiculturalism (2010–2012) and Minister of Community Development for Persad-Bissessar’s People’s Partnership government. The trope of the sinking ship will be further reprised in a 2012 song entitled Gypsy’s ship by the calypsonian Winston Scarborough, known with the sobriquet The Original De Fosto himself. De Fosto’s song was a parody song of Gypsy’s 1986 hit The Sinking Ship and characterized by a critical focus on Peters’ work as Minister.

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(30) The Ministry of National Security went from bad to worse! Man, SPONGEBOB coulda do ah better job than these fella! […] He re-shuffled his cabinet and pretended not to hear the cry from his own party to give Dr Keith Rowley the Ministry of National Security. Instead, he put Keith in the doghouse and end up firing him. And he doh want Keith tuh talk. Not at all. Having put him in the PNM doghouse, he now trying to muzzle him! Buh wait, all hell will break loose soon…yuh ever hear ah pot hound muzzle ah Rottweilier?!!  (Couva, 06/05/2010)

The Ministry of National Security (that passed from Howard Chin Lee to Martin Joseph after a reshuffle) is described as worse than Spongebob, the character of an eponymous animated television series. Using the metaphorical idiom “put somebody in the doghouse”, Kamla goes on to create another metaphorical reference in the same domain. Manning denied Rowley the Ministry of National Security in favour of Martin Joseph during the reshuffle (“he has been put in the doghouse”). Manning fired Rowley and is now trying to “muzzle” him, in order to keep him silent on the PNM’s internal issues. According to Kamla he will not succeed: Manning is only a “pot hound”, a name used to refer to the extremely hungry, mongrel street dogs typically found wandering the streets of the twin island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. As a result, he would be too weak to compete with Rowley, who is pictured as a “Rottweiler”, a stronger and more aggressive dog. Good public speakers “are skilled to listen to the familiar ways through which ordinary people adjust to the world” (Charteris-Black 2014: 237). Creole discursively creates a talking politics very similar to what you would hear on the streets and in the homes of Trinidad and Tobago. Code-switching proves a powerful communication strategy in Persad-Bissessar’s speeches for two main reasons: firstly, it allows her to talk freely about her opponents, using a stronger and more derogatory language. Secondly, and more importantly, Creole works as a political communication facilitator, similarly to Calypso music. Speaking in colloquial language that is familiar to the people allows Persad-Bissessar to create a strong, immediate connection with her audience. With vivid imagery and straightforward creole speaking, Persad-Bissessar reinforces her image as one of the people, in opposition to Manning’s Emperor image, as detached and deaf to the people’s needs. Persad-Bissessar’s self-presentation as the Mother and Angel leader for Trinidad and Tobago and the negative other-presentation of Manning as Emperor are both only strengthened by the presentation of Persad-Bissessar’s new political proposal. If Manning and his PNM are depicted as elitist, corrupted and affected by political hybris, Persad-Bissessar’s multi-ethnic coalition party is presented as able to keep all the diverse fragments of the nation together in harmony. The following chapter explores the political advertising of the People’s Partnership as Kamla’s guarantee for the demise of Emperor Manning and for the introduction of a more horizontal, inclusive and transparent system of administration in the country.

Chapter 5

The party

The People’s Partnership was a “masterpiece of political engineering” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 158), for the way it fitted together a number of political forces in a new unity arrangement. With the final goal of removing the PNM from power, the coalition incorporated a number of major strands of the Trinidadian electorate (see Chapter 2). From the point of view of discourse studies, Persad-Bissessar’s People’s Partnership can be also considered a masterpiece of political advertising, for the way its entrance into the Trinidadian political arena marked the origin of a far-reaching discursive enterprise, committed to the “positive self-presentation” of the new coalition. The People’s Partnership We Will Rise campaign aimed at discursively creating a distinctive party identity for the new coalition: in a time-span of six weeks, the coalition had to project and occupy a definite identity space, highly polarized in respect to its opponent, the longstanding People’s National Movement led by Patrick Manning. Persad-Bissessar’s campaign can be seen as an authentic operation of “political branding”, a brand being a product or a service “made distinctive by its positioning relative to the competition and by its personality, which comprises a unique combination of functional attributes and symbolic values” (Hankinson and Cowking 1993: 10). The People’s Partnership was in need of a “party label” of its own, “laden with historical and ideological significance” and providing “important mobilizing clues for sections in the electorate” (Krouwel 2012: 64). In this respect, nomination and predication strategies play a crucial role in Persad-Bissessar’s speeches, as they constitute the foundation of the discursive construction of the new party as a positively connoted social actor in the Trinidadian political arena. Multimodal party strategies of in-group building and the evaluative attribution of positive traits, often related to plurality and unity, represent one of the core strategies in Persad-Bissessar’s campaign speeches, and are to be interpreted in light of the time-honoured national debate on parliamentary reforms and political representation in a multi-ethnic country, as well as to issues of corruption and party patronage.

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5.1

Main strategies of nomination and predication

5.1.1 The coalition as a symbol of postcolonial modernity Since independence in 1962, the politics of Trinidad and Tobago has functioned within the framework of a unitary state, regulated by a parliamentary democracy modelled on that of Great Britain. The reliance on the Westminster model, traditionally geared to single-party government, has often been deemed as a divisive factor in the multi-ethnic country: the first-past-the-post, winner takes all system has also been considered inadequate to guarantee ample representativeness to all the segments of society in the Trinidadian context (see Chapter 2). Although coalitions remain somewhat exceptional in the context of a Westminster model, and particularly unsuccessful or short-lived in the history of Trinidad and Tobago, Persad-Bissessar presented the election of the People’s Partnership coalition party as the only possible solution for good governance in the country. In 2010, General Elections took place almost contemporarily in Trinidad and Tobago (May 24th) and in the UK (May 6th). According to Bishop (2011: 55), both the elections resulted in the “ejection of deeply unpopular incumbent governments to be replaced by coalitions”. More specifically, the British election resulted in a hung parliament and was followed by long days of negotiations with the aim of forming a full coalition government. Contradicting what has been defined as an “old axiom of British political life”, that is to say that “the British do not have coalitions, do not like them, and have an electoral system that prevents them” (Wright 2013: 105), the British Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition Agreement was signed on May 11th, 2010. This event became a strong argument for Persad-Bissessar’s positive self-presentation and legitimation of the People’s Partnership as a feasible political solution within a Westminster model. Persad-Bissessar commented on the publication of the British Agreement during a rally in Gasparillo: (31) The People’s Partnership is the new way. Look across the water to Britain. Britain is working now to establish their coalition government in their parliamentary democracy. We got the idea of parliamentary democracy from Britain. But ain’t it nice to know we got a head start on them on coalition – we have been building ours these past many weeks. And now they are trying to build their coalition just these past two days. Ain’t no one saying coalition is a threat to Britain – that the United Kingdom will fall because they are going to form a coalition government. Instead, they say the ability to form a coalition government is a tribute to the strength of the system of parliamentary democracy. And here, in Trinidad and Tobago, our People’s Partnership is not just a sign of the strength of our democracy, it is a sign of the strength of our people. A people willing and eager to reach their hands across to their brothers and sisters,



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to join forces, are a people who are confident, strong, and becoming stronger. A people who spread fear about joining hands with others are a people who are themselves weak and fearful. Right now, Britain is following our lead down the road of unity and coalition. Let us set forward down that road with confidence and strength. When we become able to govern from and for a broad base of our people, we find we have a future without limits. When we erase the boundaries between the people of Trinidad and Tobago, we find there are no boundaries to what Trinidad and Tobago can do.  (Gasparillo, 11/05/2010)

This excerpt is an example of one of Persad-Bissessar’s main arguments in favour of the coalition solution to the issue of representativeness in Trinidad and Tobago’s Westminster model parliament. In the first paragraph, the election of a coalition party is regarded as “a sign of the strength of our democracy”, a symbol of the nation’s healthy democratic process, while in the second paragraph, Persad-Bissessar presents the People’s Partnership as a further source for strength for the people, by drawing on a classic stronger together trope. This coalition is strength argument is clearly linked to the negative-other presentation of the PNM as a single-rule party. In fact, the single-rule party is described by Persad-Bissessar as the old way of doing politics in Trinidad, unrepresentative of and unaccountable to its electorate. In her view, only the “weak and fearful”, with a clear reference to Manning’s PNM, can distrust the coalition solution she is presenting. The fact that a coalition government is being adopted in a Western country with a long-standing Westminster-style parliamentary democracy reinforces this argument against Manning’s threats of coalition instability. However, that country is Britain, Trinidad’s former colonial master, and Persad-Bissessar cleverly avoids portraying the British example as an institution of power. Not an important presence in the Caribbean twin-islands of Trinidad and Tobago anymore, Britain is now presented as a far and foreign country: you have to “look across the water” in order to find it. Persad-Bissessar’s casual “We got the idea of parliamentary democracy from Britain”, strategically backgrounds the historical causes of the presence of the system in the Caribbean nation, swiftly passing over centuries of British colonial rule and slavery. In an authentic postcolonial reversal between what were considered the centre and the margins of a former Empire (and current Commonwealth of the Nation), the People’s Partnership is represented as the source of inspiration for the formation of a coalition government in Britain. Persad-Bissessar comments that “Britain is following our lead down the road of unity and coalition” and “ain’t it nice to know we got a head start on them on coalition”. This argument is reinforced four days later in the Siparia rally:

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(32) The People’s Partnership is only the beginning of the unity process. It’s a process that we will continue as a country and one people. And the fact is…the People’s Partnership is already ahead of what just happened in the UK. We’re ready to lead. We’re ready to start governing on Day 1. In the UK, they had to figure out things after the election…we’ve already done that. And that’s what has Manning and the PNM so worried. They know we have a stable, unwavering force for change – and that their days are numbered. Ten days and counting.  (Siparia, 14/05/2010)

In the excerpt, the People’s Partnership is portrayed as already “ahead of what just happened in the UK” because “they had to figure out things after the election”. Here Persad-Bissessar is referring to the nature of the British coalition agreement in Britain as a post-election ad hoc solution to a hung parliament, while the People’s Partnership agreement was signed before the election. For Persad-Bissessar, not only is Trinidad and Tobago adopting a coalition government, which is in itself considered by the PM candidate as a staple example of modern democracy, but it is also mastering the art of coalition. The coalition government, therefore, becomes a symbol of postcolonial progress in Persad-Bissessar’s positive self-presentation. Rather than relying on the British example as a source of legitimation, Persad-Bissessar stresses the role of her coalition in presenting an autochthonous solution to a colonially inherited political system, finally able to transcend its deficiencies. 5.1.2 The People’s Partnership as a “United Force for Change” Given the historical past of independent Trinidad and Tobago, characterized by the PNM’s long-lived single party rule, the possible election of a brand new coalition party represented a crucial moment of change, as well as a risky choice in terms of stability. With recent losses of parliament majorities and recurring elections in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007 as well as 2010 (see Chapter 2), Persad-Bissessar needed to present her new coalition as solid enough to lead the country for five years. By looking at the concurrent use of nomination and predication strategies by Kamla-Persad Bissessar to refer to her party in the KPB 2010 Corpus in Table 10, we can infer more about the characteristics, features and qualities the PM candidate attributes to her coalition. We can identify a number of predication devices linked to a “predication of union or unity” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 58), expressed by adjectives like “singular”, “united”, “unity”, “unified”. While unity is always presented as a value and a desirable condition in political discourse (the topos of unity being a good example), and any coalition programme is supposed to unite the voters, in the divisive

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Table 10.  Nomination and predication strategies in the KPB 2010 corpus Nomination strategies

Predication strategies

People’s Partnership

our, your, broad, historic, unique, united, unity, wider

Government

our, my, broad, clean, coalition, fully representative, new People’s, People’s Partnership, Partnership, responsible, responsive, united, user-friendly

Coalition

our, our broad, our unique

Force for Change

our, committed, singular, stable, strong, united, unified, unstoppable, unwavering

Trinidadian context this emphasis on unity seems to acquire a greater importance. In Persad-Bissessar’s speeches, the accent on party-internal unity is almost compulsory, as being a united coalition represents a crucial guarantee for long-awaited political stability. When describing the importance of unity as a fundamental value and a source of strength in her party as well as in the nation, Persad-Bissessar embeds a long narrative sequence in her Final Rally speech: (33) You remember going to school and being teased or bullied for the way you looked, or the way you dressed. It hurt, and left you feeling all alone, without a friend in the world. But at some point, we all grew up. And as we grew up, we realized we weren’t the only ones being bullied. We realized other people felt the way we did. And when we learned we weren’t alone, we felt a little stronger. And when we got a little older and a little smarter, we realized not just that there were others who felt as we did; we got together with those others and shared our problems and our experiences. By sharing our hopes and our wants and our dreams, we became stronger still. Suddenly the bully didn’t seem so tough anymore, because when we came together, each of us with others who felt as we did, we became stronger than the bully. We learned as children, that if we came together, united, as one, we could beat the bully. Let us remember that lesson now, as adults. If we come together now, united, as one, we can beat the bully. Teams, playing together, united as one, are better than any one player. Let us come together as a team, united, as ONE people, working to solve the problems of Trinidad and Tobago. Because the coalition presents a new way, a way of unity and strength instead of division, the coalition represents change in the way things are done in Trinidad and Tobago.  (Final Rally, San Juan/ Barataria, 22/05/2010)

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Persad-Bissessar seems to be aware of the power of narratio in political discourse (Charteris-Black 2014: 17f). By creating a shared story, she supports the solidarity and intimacy between herself as an orator and her audience. Almost an allegory, the short story is a classic coming-of-age narrative designed to tug at the heartstrings by evoking the commonly shared experience of childhood. In the allegory, the bullied children are the citizens and the bully is, expectedly, Patrick Manning. Like Aesop teaching moral lessons through his fables, Persad-Bissessar aims to illustrate the value of coming together, unpacking the topos of unity and giving her audience a moral exemplum in which they can see themselves as the main, successful protagonists. The second paragraph creates a connection between the past-oriented narrative and the present argumentation, so that the “together we are stronger” lesson learned in the past can be applied to the Trinidadian present, where the People’s Partnership is presented as “a new way of unity and strength” that will avoid snap elections for the next five years. Persad-Bissessar makes broad use of the argumentum novitatis based on the new = good equation, usually present in any election campaign by an opposition party aiming at being elected. At the same time, the coalition is always presented as a “change” that does not compromise stability. The novelty aspect is counterbalanced by the coalition being “strong”, an authentic “force” that is “unstoppable” and “unwavering”. In this respect, United Force for Change, the metaphorical nomination strategy that Persad-Bissessar employs in her speeches, can be considered a sort of summa condensing three main features of her coalition that the PM candidate frequently puts to the fore throughout the campaign: unity, strength and change: (34) I stand before you today with a strong united force for change at my side. The UNC and COP and NJAC and MSJ and TOP together, united, committed to one future for Trinidad. A singular, unstoppable, unwavering force for change. A united force for change committed to a new day and a new way forward.  (Siparia, 14/05/2010, my emphasis)

Here Persad-Bissessar presents herself as the candidate for the Siparia Constituency using the People’s Partnership slogan, A New Day, a New Way Forward, putting the accent on futurity which is typical of political advertising during election times (Reisigl 2008). For the future, Persad-Bissessar offers the alternative of an upcoming government which is “clean” (while the PNM is “corrupt”), “fully representative” (while the PNM is not). In a classic electoral polarization, opposed to Manning’s “single party rule” is a coalition whose main features are discursively constructed as “broad” and “wider”, as well as clearly divergent from the PNM (see Table 10). The discursive strategies aiming at representing the People’s Partnership as a stable and united coalition were not enough to shield Persad-Bissessar from



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criticism during the campaign. The PM candidate often had to reply to Manning’s attacks on the validity of a coalition party government in the Trinidadian context: (35) My friends, recently the Prime Minister, having no policy, spent the better part of an hour trying to convince the population that coalition governments do not work and that the UNC unity will collapse. […] To start with, this election is going to be contested by, not a coalition, but a partnership. That is the first mistake [Manning] has made about the unity we now have.  (St. Helena, 19/04/2010, my emphasis) (36) But attacking me and our unity. suggesting our Partnership can’t hold together or stay strong…that’s just not going to get it done for you. […] You have shown us what happens when too much power rests in the hands of too few. As much as you try to fight it, Patrick Manning, you are the reason that our Partnership is so strong. You are the very reason that this country has joined together as force for change. And you’re the reason, we’ll stay together, strong and unified.  (La Horquetta, 30/04/2010, my emphasis)

In the speech in St. Helena, Persad-Bissessar is answering back to Manning, who had defined a coalition government as a “recipe for disaster” in his PNM rally held on April 16th in Cunupia. Manning listed past unsuccessful examples of opposition party coalitions that had never made it to winning elections, such as in 1976 and 2007, as well as the short-lived experience of the National Alliance for Reconstruction (1986–1991). As it has never been used for a registered party in the political history of the country, the very use of the name Partnership can be seen as a form of “rebranding” that aims at representing a departure from the past (Koller 2008; Unger 2013b).1 Persad-Bissessar uses it as a counter-argument (“not a coalition, but a partnership”) against the historical frailty of coalition parties in the political history of the nation, as if partnership could hint at a higher level of unity and solidity than coalition, positing a brand new space of strength and political unity that can prove Manning wrong in the future.

1. National Alliance for Reconstruction was the name of the only other successful coalition party (1986 General Elections) in the history of Trinidad and Tobago. The name ‘alliance’ was also reprised by the opposition parties united in the UNC-Alliance in the 2007 Elections, who lost to Manning’s PNM.

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5.1.3 From party politics to coalition politics Although party could be seen as a neutral common name, almost a technical form of reference in the context of an election, it is infrequently used for self-reference in Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s speeches. In fact, party is more frequently associated by the PM candidate with her opponent’s party, the People’s National Movement, whose long life and crucial importance in the history of the independent nation made it the party par excellence in the Trinidadian context.2 Out of a total of 97 occurrences of “party” in the KPB 2010 corpus, only 10 are a direct reference to the People’s Partnership (10.3%), while 57 are direct references to her opponent’s party, the People’s National Movement (58.7%). As broad representativeness is one of the main discourse topics (and selling points) of Persad-Bissessar’s campaign, being just a party is often presented as too narrow as a definition for the People’s Partnership. Throughout her campaign, party politics is presented by Kamla Persad-Bissessar as an old-fashioned way of conceiving politics in Trinidad and Tobago, compared to the innovative coalition politics she is proposing. In the context of a snap election called by Patrick Manning following accusations of corruption involving the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT), the plural nature of the People’s Partnership coalition is presented as a guarantee of accountability, compared with the PNM’s “one party rule”: (37) That’s why it’s time for a unity partnership of the people. One party rule is unaccountable. A partnership government of the people holds politicians accountable. One party rule is corrupt. A partnership government of the people has checks and balances.  (La Horquetta, 30/04/2010, my emphasis)

Using a fallacious argument, specifically a hasty generalization, not only is Patrick Manning’s party depicted as unaccountable and corrupt, but any government constituted by one party is portrayed as such, implying that the only possible solution for good governance is a “partnership government of the people”. The other implication of this fallacious argument against the PNM’s “one party rule” is that the People’s Partnership will automatically be accountable only because it is a coalition. The populist reference to the “government of the people” reinforces the collective nature of the partnership and aims at making the Trinidadian people feel they are at the very heart of the democratic process. 2. The People’s National Movement is the country’s oldest political party, the only one retaining the same name, colours and symbols since 1956. The history of the PNM represents an exception in the ever-changing political arena of Trinidad and Tobago, characterized by a long list of short-lived minor parties and coalition attempts.



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In the same speech in La Horquetta, the equation between “single party rule” and “greed and corruption” is reinforced, while the plural nature of the People’s Partnership coalition is also presented as a guarantee for representativeness: (38) It’s that one party rule and too much power in the hands of a single person and a single party does not benefit the common good and more often than not leads to greed and corruption. That’s what we’ve seen the last eight and a half years. And the answer is not more of the same, not a continued concentration of power in the hands of the corrupt but rather a united partnership that reflects and brings all the people together. (La Horquetta, 30/04/2010, my emphasis)

In the context of a wider argumentum novitatis, (an appeal to novelty, based on the new = good equation), by being a place for unity that “brings all the people together”, the partnership is also able to “reflect” the country’s plurality in opposition to Manning’s “one party rule”. The accent on plurality and representativeness receives intertextual support in Persad-Bissessar’s speech in La Brea. Here the coalition is advertised with an ambitious reference to the promise of representativeness and equality expressed in the lyrics of the national anthem of Trinidad and Tobago: “This our native land/ here every creed and race / find an equal place / and may God bless our nation”. (39) In a People’s Partnership government, your voices, your concerns will always be heard, and they will guide us in making policy. We will make sure that we are true to our national anthem that promises an equal place for every creed and race. That is what our coalition represents.  (La Brea, 17/05/2010, my emphasis)

The twenty-three years of unbroken PNM rule in post-independence Trinidad have “institutionalized, justified and protected” (Hintzen 1989: 77) the practice of using state resources for party patronage. Party affiliation, particularly divisive in multi-ethnic countries like Trinidad and Tobago (Premdas 2007: 64), is often linked to the electoral promise of material benefits, like jobs or scholarships, followed by post-electoral redistributive programmes favouring the support base of a party in power (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 63). Among the occurrences of party in the KPB 2010 corpus, the clusters “party cards” (6 occ.), “party symbols” (2 occ.) and “party ties” (1 occ.), are to be considered as more indirect but equally negatively connoted references to the PNM party government and to the issues of corruption and party patronage in the country. One of the recurring arguments of her campaign is the unimportance of party cards, principally used when renewing the invitation to join her coalition:

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(40) We’re not checking party cards at the door to our ship. Everyone’s welcome. And for those who want to join the good news is our ship isn’t sinking.3  (Montrose Junction, Chaguanas 13/05/2010, my emphasis) (41) And those who want to help, those who join us in building our new future I say to you: “We’re not checking party cards”.  (La Brea, 17/05/2010, my emphasis) (42) And that’s why this final week, in these last few days, as I travel our country and talk to our nation, I’ve invited everyone whether you’re UNC, COP, TOP or PNM to join our effort to support the People’s Partnership. We don’t check party cards at our door. Join us.  (Tobago, 21/05/2010, my emphasis)

As in a system of government patronage party cards can be considered as actual credit cards for benefits, Persad-Bissessar reassures the audience that the People’s Partnership will not pay particular attention to party affiliation. At the same time, in a wider-strategy of negative other-presentation, she discredits the benefits of PNM patronage as “little hand-outs” that citizens are forced to “trade their dignity” for. An example is the unemployment benefit scheme she dismisses as “ten day work”:4 (43) We don’t want to be kept dependent on a party card for little hand-outs, we don’t want to trade our dignity for a little ten day work, we just need opportunity, we just need a government that will work with us and not against us.  (Final Rally, San Juan/ Barataria, 22/05/2010, my emphasis) (44) Poverty is when you trade your dignity for a party card and a ten day work.  (La Brea, 17/05/2010, my emphasis)

Another aspect of Persad-Bissessar’s crusade against current party politics in Trinidadian society is the abolition of party symbols and party ties. Here Persad-Bissessar hints at a common practice in the Parliament sessions of Trinidad and Tobago: members often wear pins and ties with party symbols as well as other garments, like scarves or shirts/blouses in the party colours (red for PNM, orange for UNC). Her strong stance against this practice is expressed from the very outset of the campaign, in the inaugural speech delivered in the Pointe-à-Pierre constituency:

3. Another intertextual reference to the anti-PNM political calypso song popular in the 1986 Elections, The Sinking Ship, by the calypsonian Winston Gypsy Peters (see Chapter 4). 4. Persad-Bissessar refers to the Unemployment Relief Programme (URP) from the Ministry of Local Government. The URP provides funding to a “community leader” for employing a group of community members for ten days on rotation basis. Often used as an electioneering instrument during campaigns, the URP funds have been often redirected to traditionally Afro or Indo-Trinidadian dominated electoral constituencies after a successful election, while the designation of “community leaders” has often been marked by nepotism (Figueira 2009: 30f).



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(45) Ours is a vision in which party symbols tacked on to the ties of government leaders in Parliament to display party partisanship rather than citizenship is unpatriotic, since government means being accountable to all of the people, not just those whom elected them.  (Marabella, 12/04/2010, my emphasis)

Persad-Bissessar here drapes herself in the flag in an appeal to patriotism, coming to the fallacious conclusion that the usage of party symbols would be necessarily unpatriotic, and therefore unworthy of a good government leader. This vision is reprised and becomes an actual promise of policy intervention on two other occasions during the campaign: (46) […] there will be no more party symbols worn on the ties and blouses of parliamentarians from the ruling party since we will serve all the people all of the time, regardless of which party you support.  (Croisee – San Juan, 28/04/2010, my emphasis)

What might sound as an elevated pledge for equality is actually a very precise political attack, targeted at the trademark Balisier Tie worn by the People’s National Movement members, made more explicit in the non-gender neutral reference to “party ties on the suits” in the Montrose Junction speech.5 (47) There will be no party ties on the suits of members of parliament with political symbols in the People’s Partnership government. We will represent the interests of all!  (Montrose Junction – Chaguanas, 13/05/2010, my emphasis)

As we have seen, representativeness and accountability are two pillars of the People’s Partnership’s strategy of positive self-presentation in the 2010 General Election campaign, aimed at discursively targeting two of the major issues of contemporary Trinidadian politics, one being democracy and constitutional reform and the other being corruption and party patronage. Compared to the PNM one party rule, the plurality of the People’s Partnership seeks to represent a possible solution for both problems. Firstly, in Persad-Bissessar’s words the presence of a multi-ethnic coalition party could put an end to the who watches the watchmen? paradox, that is to say, how power, and the actions of people in power, can be held to account in the Trinidadian context. Secondly, the People’s Partnership is portrayed as a guarantee of a higher level of representativeness by including both Afro and Indo-Trinidadian political forces as well as minor parties (such as the Movement for Social Justice and 5. The balisier tie was introduced in 1956 by the PNM founder Dr Eric Williams, and has always been a fixture among PNM members, who were required to wear it on all formal occasions. The balisier flower (Heliconia bihai) is the PNM official symbol, and the Party’s political headquarters in Port of Spain is known as Balisier House.

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the National Joint Action Committee) in the future government. As we will see in the next sections, the discursive construction of plurality and inclusivity represents a core strategy of the People’s Partnership campaign. 5.1.4 Showing the backstage: The “United Force for Change” ad campaign Drawing on Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical model, Wodak (2009) has conceptualized modern politics as composed of two separated yet connected spheres: professional politicians staging or performing politics on the “frontstage” (in the presence of an audience, e.g. a public speech, a press conference) and their everyday life of work “backstage” (e.g. in informal meetings, briefings). The fact that the general public does not normally have access to the “backstage” is regarded as an important factor in the growing disenchantment with politics. As such, the rising popularity of fictional genres focusing on the everyday activities of politicians and their staff backstage, such as The West Wing, is related by Wodak to the public interest in the “backstage” realm of politics. The “backstage” of politics recreated in fiction would satisfy “the urge to know more about how decisions are taken, how politicians live, and what their everyday life might consist of ” (Wodak 2009: 163). The United Force for Change video ads address this separation between “frontstage” and “backstage” in the wider context of the 2010 snap election in Trinidad and Tobago, characterized by a sense of disillusionment in the government after the latest corruption scandals under Manning’s administration. The ads deliberately blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional, portraying the five leaders of the different parties and movements in the coalition sitting around a table in a private meeting room and discussing the main issues of the country and the policy solutions proposed by the coalition. The ads were released in five different versions of two different lengths (approximately 1 and 2 minutes) which are excerpts from different moments of the same meeting (the setting is the same, and the five leaders are wearing the same clothes). The ads were published on Persad-Bissessar’s Facebook page with the following titles, which give an idea of the different main topics under discussion. The duration of the different ads is indicated in brackets: – – – – –

The People’s Partnership Leaders on Being United for Change (01:06) The People’s Partnership Leaders on Good Governance (01:03) The People’s Partnership Leaders on Crime (02:03) The People’s Partnership Leaders on Corruption (02:05) The People’s Partnership Leaders on Priorities (02:10)

As do many other pieces of visual fiction, the People’s Partnership video ads also open with a credit sequence. The presence and structure of the opening credits seem to endorse Street’s (2004: 441) belief that “[p]oliticians become stars, politics



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become a series of spectacles and the citizens become spectators”. All the ads open with the same intro, which presents the main characters of the coalition in the style of the opening credits of a TV series. The opening is very fast paced, presenting all the five leaders in only 10 seconds and 7 frames, including an introductory title frame stating The People’s Partnership – A United Force for Change against the background of an evocative dawn at the beach, and a final frame superimposing the same title on a group frame from the meeting (see Figure 14).

Figure 14.  Sequence of frames in the opening credits of the United Force for Change video ad

fig14

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In the opening credits, the portraits of the five leaders are characterized by a complex overlapping of different frames: the flag of Trinidad and Tobago is in the background, The People’s Partnership – A United Force for Change title is superimposed on the lower part of the image, while the portrait in the centre of the image and the corresponding party symbol are on the right hand side. As the portraits of the five different leaders are juxtaposed to the symbol of the party they were contesting under during the election, the aim of the composition seems to be the practical, election-related one of matching the face of the candidate to the party symbol.6 However, while in the opening credits of a TV series the real names of the actors (and sometimes the names of the characters played by the actors) are usually superimposed on the frames, there are no names in the opening sequence of the ad, probably because the five political leaders are regarded as public figures who are already widely known. Music usually plays an important part in the opening credits, and the People’s Partnership ad makes no exception: the opening theme is a musical crescendo of drums and a tribal choir. The music transitions to a soft soundtrack during the meeting: a harmony of hopeful-sounding violins with accents from more traditionally Trinidadian instruments, such as the steel drum. During the meeting, the five leaders are portrayed around an oval table with Persad-Bissessar in the middle. They all are dressed in power suits with jackets and ties, while Daaga is wearing his trademark dashiki, the traditional African garment he has been wearing in public since his affiliation to the Black Power movement in the 1970s. With notes, pens and books on the table, the politicians are filmed discussing the main issues of policy in Trinidad and Tobago. One of the five versions of the video is more clearly dedicated to advertising the internal unity in the coalition, and the importance of “being united for change”. The meta-discourse on political unity follows the same pattern of Persad-Bissessar’s speeches against one party rule and in support of a coalition government as a cure-all political solution for Trinidad and Tobago. Nevertheless, all five versions of the video ad are clearly aimed at staging the solidity of the coalition agreement even when discussing other policy issues. As they speak in turn, the members of the meeting listen and openly express their agreement both verbally and through proxemics, such as smiling and nodding. This representation of unity and agreement in the coalition is achieved also with the wide use of either angled shots filming a whole side of the table, or closer shots that portray other participants close to the speaker in the background, so as to include their positive reactions in the frame (see Figure 15):

6. Errol McLeod and Makandal Daaga, as leaders of two extra-parliamentary movements, contested the 2010 election under the UNC and COP symbols respectively.



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Figure 15.  Intradiegetic gaze in the United Force for Change video ad

In order to symbolize their agreement, the four allies shake hands with the leader Persad-Bissessar in turn (see Figure 16):

Figure 16.  Final handshake in the United Force for Change video ad

The ads can be seen as a form of “fictionalization of politics” (Wodak 2009: 160), staging the People’s Partnership “backstage” meeting and moving it to the “frontstage” for the sake of political advertising. “Showing the backstage” has two main consequences in the ad. Firstly, it simulates a higher degree of proximity “which allows identification with politics and politicians” (Wodak 2009: 163). In this respect, the ads can be regarded also as a visual reprise of the promise of increased transparency and accountability that Persad-Bissessar highlighted during the People’s Partnership campaign (see next section in this Chapter). Secondly, seeing the five politicians discussing issues such as crime and its relation with poverty and the

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education system or the shortage of beds in Trinidadian hospitals gives life to a “mythical reality” in the Barthesian sense, “a reality the audiences would like to believe in, precisely because complex problems find a solution, through seemingly wise politicians who adhere to values which are deemed positive by hegemonic elites as well as by the general audience” (Wodak 2009: 160). 5.2

Building the multi-ethnic coalition

5.2.1 Deixis and strategic vagueness The fascination of politicians with the “relational values” of pronouns (Fairclough 1989: 125), and particularly for the inclusive power of the first-person plural pronoun, has been widely scrutinized. One of the most interesting aspects of the pronoun we in political discourse is related to its referentially complex nature: many analyses capture an inherent semantic duality by drawing a distinction between “inclusive” and “exclusive” forms, as well as more “ambivalent” uses of the pronoun we (Mulderrig 2012). These distinctions are crucial in the context of political discourse, because the inclusion or exclusion of participants from the deictic centre helps to “conceptualise group identity, coalitions, parties, and the like, either as insiders or outsiders” (Chilton 2004: 56). At the same time, deixis supports the configuration of a “discourse space” in which the symbolic distance between a politician and its electorate can be narrowed accordingly, in a process that has been defined as “proximization” by some discourse analysts (Cap 2013; Kopytowska 2013). Bearers of expressions of social relations, pronouns belong to a class of deictic expressions whose meaning is not intrinsic, but depends on the very context of utterance. The context of Persad-Bissessar’s campaign speeches can be considered as a form of face-to-face interaction: all her rallies entailed her physical presence on a stage, giving a public speech in a specific place and time during her itinerant campaign for the Prime Ministership across the nation. Persad-Bissessar’s choices in terms of social deixis seem to posit a collective space where the single identities (Kamla’s I, but also the he referring to her opponent Manning) seem to play a lesser role. On the contrary, an important accent is placed on the plurality of we and you, and on the space of dialogue created between these two main collective social actors in the campaign. As we can infer from Table 11, Kamla Persad-Bissessar has a predilection for the pronoun we:7

7. The software used to carry out the frequency analysis is Antconc 3.4.1w (Anthony 2014).

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Table 11.  Frequency of personal pronouns in Persad-Bissessar’s campaign speeches Pronoun We You I He They

Number of occurrences

Freq. per 1000 words

1681  964  643  519  352

18.99 10.89  7.26  5.86  3.97

Persad-Bissessar is fully aware of the power of we and makes a strategic, political use of the pronoun in her campaign. Her wide use of the pronoun we in the KPB 2010 corpus can be ascribed to three main motives. Firstly, the wide use of the pronoun we can be considered a classic inclusive move aiming at drawing the people closer and fostering a process of identification in the potential voters. Being a collective, institutional identity, a party could be referred to in the third person, with the party name The People’s Partnership or with other forms of self-reference such as our party or this coalition. According to Wilson (1990: 62), “indicating self-reference by means other than I or we is said to represent a distancing strategy on the part of the speaker, because the choice of pronoun indicates how close-distant the speaker is to the topic under discussion, or the participants involved in the discussion”. Therefore, while any other choice marks a stronger separation from the audience/voters, the use of the first person plural we brings the party and the electors closer together, and could represent an instrument for promoting inclusiveness in the context of Persad-Bissessar’s campaign. Secondly, it could be a context-related choice. The 2010 General Election in Trinidad and Tobago was a snap election: the Parliament was dissolved on April 8th, and the date of the General Election was announced by Prime Minister Patrick Manning on April 16th. The unity accord between the political forces in the People’s Partnership coalition was only made public in April 21st, 2010 when the five leaders gathered at the Charlie King Junction in Fyzabad to sign what was labelled as a Declaration of Political Unity. This late formalization of the coalition may have influenced Persad-Bissessar’s language choices to the point that the party name “People’s Partnership” is not present in the speaking notes for all the rallies held before the Declaration of Political Unity. In the KPB 2010 corpus, we find the first occurrence of “People’s Partnership” only in the Felicity speech of April 26th, 2010. In the first five rallies of the Campaign, Persad-Bissessar will opt for the vaguer “we”. Thirdly, and more interestingly, Persad-Bissessar’s use of we can be seen in the context of a wider strategy of alternatively foregrounding and backgrounding markers of ethnic and political identity in the diverse context of Trinidad and Tobago. According to the constituency where the rally is held, nomination devices

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are chosen in order to appeal the ethnic and/or political identity of the majority of the voters in the audience. This might represent a plausible reason why Persad-Bissessar is not using the People’s Partnership party name in the Barrackpore rally of April 23rd, held the day after the official ceremony of Fyzabad, in a moment where the Declaration of Political Unity of the newly-formed coalition party was dominating the front pages of all the main newspapers of the nation. The town of Barrackpore, in the constituency of Naparima, is part of a rural area in the South-West of Trinidad where a high proportion of East Indians have been traditionally employed in the primary sector.8 In this constituency, Persad-Bissessar does not need to stress the multi-ethnic, inclusive side of the new coalition. On the contrary, she aims at reinforcing her role as the leader of the United National Congress and at underpinning the East Indian roots of her party. Therefore, in Persad-Bissessar’s Barrackpore speech, “the UNC” becomes the political social actor in the section dedicated to policy promises in the primary sector. The classic use of “will” in political discourse represents Persad-Bissessar’s commitment to the certainty of her propositions: (48) The UNC will end the corruption and nepotism associated with the importation and sale of agricultural equipment and inputs”  (Barrackpore, 23/04/2010, my emphasis) (49) The UNC will reverse the policy of using prime agricultural lands for housing and shopping malls. We will cease the misuse and abuse of agricultural lands.  (Barrackpore, 23/04/2010, my emphasis) (50) The UNC will provide increase state subsidy to farmers to purchase both used and second hand vehicles for use in food crop production and marketing.  (Barrackpore, 23/04/2010, my emphasis) (51) The UNC will pursue policies to secure guaranteed prices for agricultural produce supplied on a regular basis. (Barrackpore, 23/04/2010, my emphasis)

In the Barrackpore speech, “The UNC” alternates with a strategically vague exclusive “we” as the subject of more policy promises, while the People’s Partnership coalition is never mentioned: 8. When indentured labourers from India were offered a cash incentive to buy land in Trinidad and Tobago in lieu of a return passage to India, many purchased crown lands on the sugar-rich Naparimas, an Amerindian name historically used to refer to the south-western part of the island. The East Indian sugar workers came to represent the backbone of the Indo-Trinidadian opposition party after Independence and also Basdeo Panday started his political career as a sugar workers’ trade unionist. He became President of the All Trinidad Sugar and General Workers’ Trade Union (ATSGWTU) in 1973, founded the East Indian opposition party the United National Congress in 1989 and was elected as the first East Indian Prime Minister in 1995.



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(52) We will create local capacity and increase production and productivity to build up exports.  (Barrackpore, 23/04/2010, my emphasis) (53) We will introduce a wage support mechanism for farmers hiring labour in specific food production activities.  (Barrackpore, 23/04/2010, my emphasis) (54) We will relocate the Ministry of Agriculture from Port of Spain, to be called the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Production, to an area closer to the farming community.  (Barrackpore, 23/04/2010, my emphasis) (55) We will provide state support to the farming community in the area of research, extension services and exports marketing.  (Barrackpore, 23/04/2010, my emphasis)

Conversely, the nomination device “People’s Partnership” seems to be strategically used by Persad-Bissessar in those constituencies that are not as politically faithful to the UNC as Barrackpore. The People’s Partnership, in fact, had the power to work as a coalition brand-name, standing for unity and ethnic inclusivity, especially in those constituencies with a history of PNM support or a strong African majority. The latter is the case in Tobago, where Africans constitute 85% of the population and the inclusive rhetoric of the Rainbow Party was the only possible strategy for an East Indian PM candidate to stand a chance of being elected. The Tobago Organization of the People (TOP) joined the People’s Partnership coalition to contest the two constituencies of Tobago East and Tobago West and succeeded in winning them both over from their traditional PNM control. The inclusion of the TOP in her coalition was an important political move for Persad-Bissessar, as the inclusivity of the People’s Partnership represented an important counterbalance to Tobago’s historic claim to independence and feeling of distrust towards the central government of Trinidad. Persad-Bissessar dedicates a section of her address to policy promises targeting the special needs of Tobago. Here Persad-Bissessar seems to specify the referent of the exclusive “we” by mentioning “the People’s Partnership” at the beginning of her list of policy interventions: (56) Tonight, Tobago, let us talk about our plan. The People’s Partnership will revisit the provision of the Tobago House of Assembly Act, in particular the Fifth schedule, with a view to granting greater autonomy and responsibility to the people of Tobago. We will define the Housing and Land Settlements Programme while taking into account the cultural preferences of the people of Tobago. We will implement measures to regularize land titles in Tobago.  (Tobago 21/05/2010, my emphasis)

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A possible reason for this is that the pronoun we, paired with Persad-Bissessar’s affiliation to the United National Congress and her East Indian ethnicity, involved the danger of being interpreted as an exclusive UNC-we by the audience. In contrast, by specifying the referent of we as the People’s Partnership before starting her list of policy interventions, she implies the inclusion of the TOP in the coalition and hints at a higher degree of representativeness of Tobago in the future government. The issue of crime in Tobago is particularly heartfelt for the negative impact it has on the business of tourism. In the section of her Tobago speech dedicated to the fight against crime, she specifies that the policy measures she is presenting were envisioned by the People’s Partnership before listing them: (57) In other words, you end crime by having a plan. And the People’s Partnership has one. We will improve policing and establish clear measurable guidelines for crime reduction. We will make sure every Police vehicle has a Global Positioning System (GPS) to link vehicles to one another and to police stations across the country. We will invest heavily in police training and modernize physical infrastructure and amenities. We will get police out from behind desks and on the streets.  (Tobago 21/05/2010)

The inclusivity of the People’s Partnership represents a guarantee that PersadBissessar brings to the fore when most needed in her campaign. As illustrated in the following sections, ethnic inclusivity in the coalition was constantly constructed throughout the campaign in order to broaden its electorate, also by the means of the use of vivid metaphors and the visual representation of ethnic diversity. 5.2.2 The People’s Partnership as the big river The celebration of diversity and multi-ethnicity was strategically deployed by PersadBissessar to present her coalition as a new order of democratic governance that could avoid exclusivism and promote power sharing. The metaphor of coalition as a river is one of the best examples from the corpus of the positive self-presentation of the People’s Partnership as a new and inclusive political proposal. The coalition represented as a big river, into which all rivers can flow and merge, can be seen as a discursive strategy aiming at detaching ancestry and ethnicity from the political vote in a country where the apaan jhaat (Hindi for ‘to each his own’, meaning each ethnic group should vote for its own party) has always been a widespread tendency:



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(58) Brothers and Sisters when I look out into this massive audience, I’m convinced more than ever that the People’s Partnership is where the Ganges meets the Nile; but more than that, not just the Ganges and Nile; for those whose ancestors are from China – the Yangtze River joins here; for those whose ancestors are from France – the river Seine joins here; for those whose ancestors are from the UK – the River Thames joins here; for our brothers and sisters of Syrian/Lebanese heritage – the Euphrates joins here; for those with Portuguese ancestors – the Douro river joins here; no matter what your ancestry may be, I invite you to take my hand and join us; this is where we will all find a sense of place; a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010)

Generally speaking, metaphors serve to “create difference-levelling sameness and homogeneity” in linguistically constructing imagined communities (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 56). More specifically, river metaphors like the one employed by Persad-Bissessar have been popular ever since Heraclitus’ panta rhei and are commonly used to describe the stream of time as ever-flowing and unstoppable (Lakoff 1993: 242). River metaphors are also often used in therapy to help patients deal with change in their life (Loue 2008) as well as to describe transnational and diasporic identity in contemporary writing (Sell 2012). Where the Ganges meets the Nile is a line of a famous 1999 Trinidadian song by the iconic calypsonian David Rudder. In the song’s lyrics, the confluence of the two historic waterways represented the possibility for Indo-Trinidadians (Ganges) and Afro-Trinidadians (Nile) to co-exist without tensions “in a lovely nation under a groove”. Kamla Persad-Bissessar quotes Rudder’s metaphorical encounter between the two rivers, not restricting her discourse to the two larger ethnic groups, but taking into account even the smaller minorities on the island, such as Caucasian (0.59% of the population), Chinese (0.30%), Syrian/Lebanese (0.08%), Portuguese (0.06%). With this enlarged river metaphor, where many different rivers merge in the People’s Partnership, Persad-Bissessar aims at discursively creating a new political space, not based on the Afro/Indo two-party system, but presenting her new coalition as an ethnic inclusive party where Trinidadians and Tobagonians can find political representation, “no matter what your ancestry may be”. The constructive strategy employed is one of “inclusion” (Wodak et al. 2009), taking into account the diasporic origin of the different ethnic groups as rivers originating very far from the Caribbean island, but, more importantly, stressing the ethnic inclusiveness of her coalition as the only possible confluence for those different rivers. Inclusiveness is also achieved with an “inclusive we at the highest

132 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

scope” (Urban 1986), not simply hinting at the plurality of the coalition but aiming at including the whole nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Through the use of religious interdiscursivity (see Chapter 6), Kamla represents herself as a caring guide (“take my hand”), with an intertextual reference to the iconic gospel song Precious Lord, Take My Hand, often performed at Martin Luther King’s civil rights rallies to inspire the crowds and iconically reprised at the Pastor’s funeral by the singer Mahalia Jackson. The seminal “rule of three”, typical of political speeches and often indicating a transitional point where the audience has the option to applaud (Charteris-Black 2005: 6), is also used by Kamla Persad-Bissessar (“place”, “belonging”, “purpose”) to convincingly present her party as the only possible identity solution for the multi-ethnic Trinidadian population. With a mild invitation (“I invite you”) and an epistemic promise (“We will all find”), Persad-Bissessar relies entirely on the positive presentation of a Trinidadian multiculturalism that does not aim at erasing the diasporic origin of its citizens, but reflects a new image of cultural pluralism that discursively celebrates diasporic difference as naturally belonging to Trinidad and Tobago. Romancing hybridity through this image of water blending naturally into a single common waterway, Trinidadian multiculturalism is made to look effortless, and the People’s Partnership is presented as the only possible political space promoting such a degree of conciliation among the different ethnic groups in the country. 5.2.3 Visual strategies of ethnic inclusivity In the creation of her People’s Partnership, Persad-Bissessar seems to have learned the lesson of Basdeo Panday, the only other East Indian PM in the history of the country. Panday was among the first politicians to advocate the importance of attracting a number of prominent Afro-Creole personalities to his party: he maintained that it was absolutely vital to appeal to the wider Afro-Trinidadian community, especially at media level, in order to win elections (La Guerre 2000). This “psychological effect of unity” created by Persad-Bissessar in her People’s Partnership campaign “allowed voters to cross more easily into a new organizational tent, since they were not contesting against one another” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 159). Election manifestos have been the object of investigation by a number of political discourse analysts within the CDS framework (Dobson 2007; Kaal 2012), especially after the launch of the Manifesto Project Database (Lehmann et al. 2015). Yet, the available studies seem to have focused more on the discourse analysis of the textual content, overlooking the multimodal resources usually included in a manifesto. For example, the front cover of a party manifesto is a crucial conceptual



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representation of a party’s identity. Figure 17 shows how ethnic inclusivity in the party is visually staged on the front cover of the People’s Partnership Prosperity for All manifesto, simply by juxtaposing the portraits of the main five political leaders in the coalition.

Figure 17.  Front cover of the People’s Partnership manifesto 2010

The picture portrays from left to right: Ashworth Jack (leader of the Tobago Organisation of the People), Errol McLeod (leader of the Movement for Social Justice), Makandal Daaga (leader of the National Joint Action Committee), Winston Dookeran (leader of the Congress of the People), and Kamla Persad-Bissessar in her trademark yellow suit, as the leader of the United National Congress and leader of the People’s Partnership coalition. All the five protagonists have their party logos positioned like golden halos behind their heads. The Trinidad and Tobago flag and the symbols of the parties contesting in the election complete the composition at the top (“ideal”) and bottom (“real”) of the image. The decontextualized nature of the yellow background reinforces the viewer’s attention to the classificational process in the picture, that is, the relations among the

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participants portrayed in the image. Persad-Bissessar’s portrait is in the foreground and considerably larger in size, while her coalition allies are in the background on the left. In this respect, the composition can be regarded as a “single-levelled overt taxonomy” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 88), where a “superordinate participant” (the leader Persad-Bissessar) is on a higher level, but connected to the four “subordinates” that are placed together at a second lower level, in the same size and the same orientation. The role of the participants, and the way they relate to each other and with the viewer, is also enhanced by the zone they occupy in the image, and by the “informational value embedded in that specific area of the image” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 177). Here Persad-Bissessar is in the “New” position on the right, while the four men are in the “Given” position on the left, although backgrounded and smaller compared to the female leader. Although the four male leaders are all renowned politicians and activists in the country, Persad-Bissessar had also had a long political career before being elected as PM in 2010. This visual choice may be as well linked to the presentation of a female candidate to the Prime Ministership as the new political proposal for Trinidad and Tobago and a departure from the past of Manning’s administration (see Chapter 4). The picture can be regarded as a “demand” in Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006: 122ff) terms as the PM candidate and the four leaders in the background directly engage the viewer with her gaze. However, Persad-Bissessar’s demand is softened by her smiling eyes and her serene face expression. Also, the inclusion and position of Persad-Bissessar’s hands in in the medium-close shot, both lifted closer to her waist and her face, represents an extremely salient aspect of the portrait. Her left-hand finger pointing upwards as a vector can be regarded as a symbolic representation of the We Will Rise motto. The other hand, closed in a clenched fist, can be seen as a representation of power and control. Moreover, the position of her hands makes two pieces of jewellery visible, both with a high symbolic value. One is the wedding ring on her right hand, which links back to the strategies of positive self-presentation as Mother of the Nation that we have discussed in Chapter 4. The other is the Hindu sacred thread on her left wrist, a bracelet called mauli or kalava, usually tied by a priest to the wrist of believers that attend Hindu prayer ceremonies. As an Indo-Trinidadian PM candidate in a multi-faith country, Persad-Bissessar made no direct references to Hindu culture or religion throughout the campaign speeches (see Chapter 6). However, the inclusion of the bracelet in the picture is a symbolic representation of her Hindu roots. Rather than openly positioning herself as Hindu, Persad-Bissessar makes a semiotic reference which is intelligible to other Hindu believers, aware of the religious meaning of the sacred red and yellow thread.



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As the front cover of the manifesto, the picture can be regarded as a symbolic process expressing what the party means or is, as the five leaders pose for the viewer rather than being shown as involved in some action. A number of analytical processes are taking place in the image: the five leaders, in fact, can be seen as acting as “Carriers” in relation to a number of prototypical and essential “Possessive Attributes” (skin colour, hair colour and type, items of clothing such as Daaga’s traditional dashiki) which create visual concepts of their different ethnicities (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 108). The juxtaposition of the portraits and the relationship between them is the symbolic representation of the multi-ethnic value of the coalition. The lettering Prosperity for All, right at the bottom of the four portraits, reinforces the inclusivity of the message. More specifically, the presence of Jack, Daaga and McLeod acts as a visual counterpart for Kamla’s ethnicity. This is particularly true for McLeod and Daaga, whose inclusion was meant to speak primarily to the Afro-Trinidadian electorate and had a great symbolic value for the People’s Partnership coalition. Second from left, Errol McLeod had been President General of the renowned Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) for 21 years. The 1970s oil boom occurred under the PNM government and the oil industry has always been associated with the Afro-Trinidadians. McLeod was the UNC candidate in the Pointe-à-Pierre constituency, site of the country’s largest Petrotrin oil refinery, and succeeded in winning it for the People’s Partnership. Third from left, Makandal Daaga, was the leader of the 1970s Black Power Revolution in Trinidad and Tobago. Born Geddes Granger, he changed his name in homage to his ancestral roots in Africa. He founded the National Joint Action Committee as a student movement at the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine and challenged Eric Williams’ government (see Chapter 2). Contesting (but not winning) as a COP candidate in the Laventille West constituency, he aimed at representing the ideological alternative to the traditional affiliation to the PNM of the Afro-Trinidadian electorate. In particular, Daaga’s anti-imperialistic Black movement has been referring to the PNM elite as Afro-Saxons, challenging the PNM positions since the 1970. Daaga’s inclusion in the People’s Partnership, therefore, can be interpreted as related to Persad-Bissessar’s wider strategy of negative-other presentation of the PNM as a corrupted élite led by an Emperor. The same symbolic representation of the multi-ethnic value of the coalition is found on page 34 of the Manifesto, where the forty-one People’s Partnership candidates are portrayed. Kamla Persad-Bissessar is depicted on the left side, now in the “Given” position as the leader of the coalition, presenting her chosen candidates for the Election (see Figure 18):

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Figure 18.  Presentation of candidates in the People’s Partnership manifesto 2010

The candidates are portrayed in smiling close-ups that are consistently smaller than the picture of the PM candidate, with party logos positioned like halos behind their heads. The reader may easily recognize the first three candidates at the top centre of the page: not only because they are situated in a “salient” position (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 177) in order to attract the viewer’s attention, but also because they were already portrayed on the front page of the manifesto. Ethnic diversity is visually staged in the composition. Although their surnames would have been enough to reveal some of the candidates’ ethnic backgrounds, their half busts are shown in a two-page group picture in full colour. Juxtaposing the 41 portraits has the same value as on the front cover of the manifesto: the candidates are “Carriers” in relation to a number of essential “Possessive Attributes” which create visual concepts of their different ethnicities, expressing the multi-ethnic nature of the coalition. Not only does ethnic diversity represent a core aspect of the multimodal presentation of the People’s Partnership, but it is also a key issue for the discursive construction of the Trinidadian nation itself. It is far from a coincidence that on the occasion of the official presentation of her multi-ethnic People’s Partnership in the town of Changuanas, Persad-Bissessar gave a meaningful speech on diversity in coexistence in present Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on its roots in the colonial history of the country. The following chapter delves into the discursive construction of national identity in the Chaguanas speech as well as in other multimodal resources from the 2010 campaign, exploring how the PM candidate fostered in her electorate the sense of belonging to a common “in-group”, which transcended party allegiances and encompassed the whole nation of Trinidad and Tobago.

Chapter 6

The nation

This chapter focuses on the many attempts to imagine and construct a Trinidadian national identity within the discourses produced for, on and from the 2010 Election Campaign by the PM candidate Kamla Persad-Bissessar. The examples of analysis are mainly extracted from the speech delivered by Kamla Persad-Bissessar at the Mid-Centre Mall in Chaguanas on May 2nd, 2010.1 During the rally, PersadBissessar officially presented her 41 candidates standing for election. At the same time, the presentation of the multi-ethnic People’s Partnership became an occasion for Persad-Bissessar to engage in a number of considerations on both the history of the country and the issues of the present. Throughout the Chaguanas speech, the PM candidate fostered a sense of belonging to a common “in-group”, celebrating the country’s diversity and stressing its common history and achievements. Drawing on the framework developed by Wodak et al. (2009) and de Cillia et al. (1999), I selected four major semantic macro-areas related to the construction of national identity in Trinidad and Tobago to be analysed in this chapter: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the discursive celebration of Trinidadian diversity the narration and confabulation of a common political past the discursive construction of common Trinidadian national icons the discursive construction of a national body

Also, interdiscursivity and intertextuality support Persad-Bissessar’s discursive creation of national identity, with a wide use of rhetorical and persuasive strategies recontextualized from a diverse set of sources, encompassing Christianity and religious discourse in general, Martin Luther King’s seminal I Have a Dream speech, the National Anthem of Trinidad and Tobago as well as Obama’s successful Yes We Can campaign of 2008.

1. Memorialized in V. S. Naipaul’s novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Chaguanas has been an East Indian majority area ever since the beginning of British indentureship. Founded as a colonial market town traversed by the arterial Caroni Savannah Road, Chaguanas is now one of the largest and fastest growing town in the country. While it has historically been considered an IndoTrinidadian town dominated by the UNC, it has grown to become increasingly multi-racial and could have been chosen to incarnate the modern, multi-ethnic afflatus of the People’s Partnership.

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6.1

Building the national “in-group”: Evolving narratives

6.1.1 The 1960s: “One Mother” The History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (1962) can be regarded as one of the first attempts at the postcolonial creation of a homogeneous national “in-group” in the country. Written by Eric Williams, the Afro-Trinidadian leader of the People’s National Movement and the first PM of the nation, the book was meaningfully published on August 31st, 1962, the Independence Day of Trinidad and Tobago. Apparently, Williams felt compelled to write the whole book in the time-span of a single month in the summer of 1962, because Independence Day was getting closer and the country needed a dedicated history book. As he explains in the preface: “This book originated in a personal conviction that it would be an unfortunate handicap in the field of international relations and a great mistake in respect of affairs and domestic relations, if Trinidad and Tobago were to enter on its career of Independence without a history of its own” (Williams 1962: ix). The History is a full description of the arrival and settlement of the different ethnic groups living in the country, from the Amerindian ancestors to the East Indian coolies, narrated in a rigid chronological order. While the book’s title (not simply History of Trinidad and Tobago but History of the People) can be read one way as promoting “the people” as the principal author of the revised national history, Williams’ account actually frames “the people” more as the passive recipient of a full bundle of national products (including the flag, the coat of arms, a national flower and bird, as well as the book), rather than having a real active role. As he points out in the preface: The aim was to provide the people of Trinidad and Tobago on their Independence Day with a National History, as they have already been provided with a National Anthem, a National Coat of Arms, National Birds, a National Flower and a National Flag. (Williams 1962: ix, my emphasis)

Williams considered his book as an authentic tool for sovereignty and national identity, assimilable to that “mass-produced invented tradition” (Hobsbawn 1983: 11) created by bureaucratic élites to hail the masses as citizens of a newly-born independent nation and to foster their sense of belonging and unity. William’s prescriptive stance on Trinidadian unity is made clearer in the book’s conclusion, where the African, Indian, Chinese, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, as well as the descendants of the White owners of plantations, are integrated into a single family, under the guardianship of a sole “Mother”:



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There can be no Mother India for those whose ancestors came from India […]. There can be no Mother Africa for those of African origin […]. There can be no Mother England and no dual loyalties […]. There can be no Mother China […] and there can be no Mother Syria or no Mother Lebanon. A nation, like an individual, can have only one Mother. The only Mother we recognise is Mother Trinidad and Tobago, and Mother cannot discriminate between her children. All must be equal in her eyes. (Williams 1962: 279, my emphasis)

Political rhetoric often employs family metaphors to create a sense of unity and togetherness, to “personify” and give meaning to the phenomena of the world in a humanized, anthropomorphized form (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 34). These metaphors allow to “metaphorize relations within the nation as relationships of kinship, of family, thus further forging a sense of ‘imagined community’ among its members” (Chouliaraki 1999: 49) and are also used to imply “intra-national sameness and equality” (Wodak et al. 2009: 44). In particular, the use of a metaphor of the nation as a Mother, who nurtures her citizens as children, allows the reader “to reason about the nation on the basis of what we know about the family” (Lakoff 1996: 155) and serves to “emotionalize the issue”, linking state affairs to “the much-emotion loaded ground of familial-domestic affairs” (Tekin 2010: 199). The 1960s Trinidadian nation state had necessarily to be discursively created with a constructive strategy emphasizing a unifying common feature: being loyal to the Mother. Firstly, this metaphor represents Williams’ effort to create the Trinidadian “in-group” and glue together all the disparate cultures of the two islands in order to incorporate the country’s many ethnic communities into a single, governable whole. In this respect, Williams’ dominant nationalist discourse had to be in sharp contrast to the then-current theories of Caribbean society, which described the Archipelago as home to a “plural society” (M. G. Smith 1965). Because of the presumed incommensurable differences among ethnic groups, external domination (rather than independence) was often deemed as a structural condition for any multi-ethnic, “plural” society. On the contrary, William’s narrative for the independent nation gave prominence to the potential for a full creolization (Brathwaite 1971), without taking into account the many limits of the application of Brathwaite’s concept to the special case of Trinidad and Tobago (see Chapter 2). Secondly, Williams’ usage of a family-related lexical item triggers the conceptual image of “the family as a self-contained group of loving and mutually supportive members united against the outside world” (Bloor and Bloor 2007: 77). Through his narrative of a shared Trinidadian past, Williams discursively built a national “in-group” as opposed to the British colonial “out-group”, a polarization created by presenting throughout the book “counter-information concerning either

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more elevated aspects of the colonized or degraded features of the colonizers” (Tsuji 2008: 1155). “Massa day done”, the days of the colonial master are over, Williams stated in a famous Public Lecture at the Port of Spain Speakers’ Corner of Woodford Square in 1961. By marking a new separation from “Mother England”, the family metaphor reinforces solidarity and unity in the pristine independent nation and distances Trinidad and Tobago from the recent colonial experience. 6.1.2 The 2010s: “Diversity is Strength” In the 1960s, the creation of a Trinidadian “in-group” was instrumental to Eric Williams’ postcolonial nation building. His unity against the “Massa” served the formal exclusion of any remnants of colonial power from the country. PM Williams “insisted that unless a Trinidadian was in favor of the nationalist movement he was not truly Trinidadian” (Harney 1996: 57), but his rhetorical nationalism actually paved the way for the political ascent of the emergent, urban middle-class of African ancestry. While Williams addressed the urgent need for unity and singular allegiance in postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago, it was ethnicity that shaped the integration of the masses into politics, “enabling the development of opposed bourgeois nationalist Afro-Creole and Indian political parties” (Puri 1999: 17). Although Williams hinted at the equality of citizens/children as the only possible solution for governance, the advancement of Africans and Indians has largely been conceived in mutually exclusive terms and, as a result of the political success of the PNM, Afro-Creole culture became more predominant in the following decades under Williams administration (Premdas 2007, see Chapter 2). Four decades later, Persad-Bissessar’s conceptualization of a national “ingroup” identity is different in many aspects from the one proposed by Eric Williams. Clearly, British colonial power is further away in history and cannot represent a key topic for Persad-Bissessar’s nationalist discourse of unity. Rather than marking a distance between a British “out-group” and a Trinidadian “in-group”, PersadBissessar seems to be concentrating more on the thorny issue of national harmony internal to the very “in-group”. The longstanding discursive construction of national ethnic harmony and cultural blending in Trinidad and Tobago seems to be further reinforced by the presentation of her coalition party at the 2010 General Election. Her discursive construction of a national identity is intimately linked to the legitimation of her coalition party as the best political solution for Trinidad and Tobago. Throughout the campaign, both the nation and the coalition are represented as plural, multi-ethnic and multi-faceted, yet serenely harmonious and united in diversity. In the Chaguanas speech, the PM candidate engages in the discursive construction of Trinidadian diversity, an authentic epideictic celebration of the country’s multi-ethnic nature:



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(59) We are a nation that derives its strength from its diversity. We are one nation, comprised of people whose ancestors came from different continents, whose skins have different tones, and who pray to different gods. And the result is a beautiful culture that has produced music, dance, food and festival known throughout the world. We are not merely tolerant of our differences; we embrace our differences. We combine, share and exchange; and the result is that we are all better for it. We are stronger for it. And now the People’s Partnership finally presents for the people of Trinidad and Tobago a political choice that mirrors the strength of the nation. For the first time, our politics is not confined to a contest of race against race; region against region; interest against interest. For the first time, our politics now embraces our differences, and creates strength from what was once divisive in the past.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010, my emphasis)

While diversity usually involves a set of “largely aesthetic, politically and morally neutral expressions of cultural difference” that find their allotted space in the public sphere, difference, on the other hand, refers to “questionable notions and practices in a minority group or category”, which create conflicts, weaken social solidarity and constitute an impediment to national cohesion” (Eriksen 2006: 14). PersadBissessar’s speech deliberately blurs these conceptual lines: while diversity is obviously celebrated as a national strength, any negative connotation of the Trinidadian differences is completely neutralized. As Persad-Bissessar systematically celebrates differences as the dominant trope of nationality (“different continents”, “different tones”, “different gods”), she produces a narrative of Trinidad and Tobago as intrinsically diasporic. Persad-Bissessar’s call for racial and cultural harmony is explicitly articulated through a constructive strategy based on singularization (Wodak et al. 2009), highlighting and praising the nation’s diasporic uniqueness. Ethnic and religious heterogeneity is emphasized as a unique feature that does not pose a threat to national unity (“We are one nation”), on the contrary, it represents the country’s distinctive identity, richness and strength. Persad-Bissessar does not attempt to erase differences à la Eric Williams but keeps them below “the veneer of homogeneity” (Premdas 1996: 3). There might not be “Mother India” or “Mother Africa”, as Williams used to say, but surely there are “Grandmother India” and “Grandmother Africa” in the background of Persad-Bissessar’s new national narrative. This strategic celebration of Trinidadian diversity aims at flattening the racialized Us vs. Them dichotomy in the country and promoting an imagined, larger unified people. Clearly, according to Persad-Bissessar, the only possible political solution for Trinidad and Tobago is a multi-ethnic party like the People’s Partnership, which promises to “embrace differences” and offers full representation for all the citizens that make up the country’s diversity (see Chapter 5).

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In the Chaguanas speech, Persad-Bissessar refers to national culture as one of the most evident manifestations of Trinidadian harmonious diversity. Actually, Trinidadian “music, dance, food and festivals”, being highly visible aspects of national culture and identity, are often at the centre of heated cultural debates. Public discussions typically involve the extent of the role that the different ethnic groups (particularly Indo and Afro-Trinidadians) have played in the cultural production of the nation.2 In the same vein, the actions of “combining, sharing and exchanging” culture in multi-ethnic Trinidad and Tobago are presented as effortless and natural by Persad-Bissessar, in what sounds like a “Caribbean romance” (Edmondson 1999a), an idealized representation of Caribbean society that often marks the way in which interests and conflicts between contending groups are discursively reconciled. The long-standing rhetoric of a “Carnival Nation”, where “nationalism becomes a project of cooking together the big pilau” (Harney 1996: 59), seems to be Persad-Bissessar’s shortcut in order to overlook the complexity of the power relations and the anxieties around the notion of ethnic equality in the country. 6.2 Building a common political past: Teaching history as action 6.2.1 “Brothers of the Boat”: Colonial memory and inclusiveness Historical memory has come to represent an indispensable prerequisite for national identity: the “cultural construction of nationness” (Bhabha 1990: 292), as we have seen in Chapter 2, “builds on the emphasis on a common history, and history has always to do with remembrance and memory” (De Cillia et al. 1999: 154). Although the “narration and confabulation of a common political past” is regarded as a crucial theme in the discursive construction of any national identity (Wodak et al. 2009), it represents an authentic challenge for contemporary politicians in Trinidad and Tobago. How can one make sense of a traumatic past of genocide, slavery, indentureship and colonial exploitation? And how can one build a common past out of a multi-cultural nation, where the two main ethnic groups had very different origins and lived-experiences in the country? In the postcolonial Caribbean, “history, taught as morality, is religion. History, taught as action, is art”, and the only possible use of history is “idiosyncratic, personal, and, therefore, creative” (Walcott 1974). This quotation from the St. Lucian 2. The debate on the national dish of Trinidad and Tobago is one of the most prominent examples of this intra-ethnic tension. The callaloo stew, popular throughout the Caribbean, is far from being widely accepted as a national dish in the country. Other popular options with stronger East Indian origins, such as pelau or fried doubles, are often brought into the debate (see Chapter 2).



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Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott aptly prefigures Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s attitude towards Trinidadian history in her election speeches. “Teaching history as action”, in fact, became instrumental to Persad-Bissessar’s political success: the PM candidate addresses the traumatic past of the country using constructive strategies (Wodak et al. 2009), which contribute to a process of national identity building in the postcolonial context of Trinidad and Tobago. Historical memory, therefore, becomes instrumental to the foundation of a common narrative of empowerment that can promote contemporary inclusiveness, identification and solidarity among ethnic groups. In a country not used to the presence of coalitions in the political arena, the narration and confabulation of a common political past serves Persad-Bissessar’s efforts to broaden the electorate of her People’s Partnership. More specifically, by putting the experience of slavery at the core of the discursive construction of a common Trinidadian past, the PM candidate recreates a narrative of common resistance that backgrounds ethnic antagonism. The “cultural trauma” (Alexander et al. 2004) of slavery becomes collective memory in Persad-Bissessar’s speech, a form of remembrance that grounds the identity-formation of the Trinidadian people as one. In Persad-Bissessar’s speech in Chaguanas, a new ethnic equality is expressed in terms of the equivalent contribution the different ethnic groups gave to the making of the independent nation: (60) My sisters and brothers, today is the day we write a new future of our country. Somewhere beyond the horizon, over the rainbow, the spirits of the great forefathers and foremothers of our land who crossed the Atlantic, the Middle Passage and the Kala Pani, so many centuries ago to brave the slings and arrows of slavery and indentureship and oppression, are looking at us today and they are smiling. They are singing and dancing in the great beyond in joy that finally, the land they toiled to build, the future they wanted and dreamt of for their great-great-grandchildren is at hand.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010)

The construction of a common political past “revolves around founding myths and myths of origin, mythical figures, political success, times of prosperity and stability, defeats and crises” (Wodak et al. 2009: 31). Persad-Bissessar’s speech re-writes the history of the “founding fathers” by narrating their epic, almost biblical, journey across the Atlantic. By using a plural common noun, she is recounting the shared history of “forefathers and foremothers” (and their link with the present-time “great-great-grandchildren”), regardless of any ethnic background. This emphasis on commonality is strengthened by the use of the inclusive form of address “My sisters and brothers”, and by the use of the pronoun “our”, as in “our country”, “our land”. In the context of an election campaign, this degree of inclusiveness is discursively constructed as achievable only with political change. As the opposition leader

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against the incumbent PNM, Persad-Bissessar used a number of strategies of transformation (Wodak et al. 2009), such as relying on the classic locus a tempore, the topos of a favourable time for change (“today is the day”). This urgency for change is achieved also through emphasizing the (awaited) difference between now and the future (“a new future for our country”) and hinting at a blessing by the spirits of the ancestors, who are smiling on the new course of national history she is going to lead. One of the most interesting aspects of the narration is the mention of both the African Middle Passage and the East Indian Kala Pani (the Hindi words for the ‘black waters’ of the Atlantic). The PM candidate is drawing a parallel between the practice of African slavery and East Indian indentureship, the system of labour supply for British colonial plantations that replaced slavery after abolition (see Chapter 2). By paralleling the two phenomena, she is able to build an inclusive, empowering discourse on colonialism that does not leave the East Indian electorate unrepresented, but aims at finding commonality in the historical remnants of postcolonial trauma. In her inclusive effort, Persad-Bissessar enters the longstanding, heated debate on whether East Indian indentureship should be considered as a form of slavery comparable to the African experience in Trinidad and Tobago (Tinker 1974). The conflation of the two colonial labour systems has been fiercely resisted by some segments of the Afro-Trinidadian community, which regard it as a form of distortion and erasure of the African experience for the sake of promoting national unity (Wong 2019).3 The debate over slavery and indentureship in the country represents a crucial aspect of the (explicit and implicit) discussion over “which group contributed more into the building of the nation and was therefore more deserving of political and economic ascendancy” (Geer 2007: 121). In a stance which is more functional to her political goals rather than aimed at historical accuracy, PersadBissessar seems to equate the two phenomena as both forms of “oppression”, stressing the common suffering as an experience that binds and therefore highlights the equality of the nation’s two largest ethnic groups.4 3. Two famous calypso songs embody this debate in the Afro-Trinidadian community. On the one hand, Brother Marvin’s 1996 song Jahaji Bhai (Hindi for ‘brotherhood of the boat’) celebrated Indo-African brotherhood by pointing to the fact that “the indentureship and the slavery bind together two races in unity”. On the other hand, in a response song entitled Jahaji Blues (1997), the calypsonian Gregory Ballantyne (known with his stage name G.B.) accused Marvin of being an “ungrateful Negro” for not taking greater pride in his African roots and claimed it was a fallacy that the two ethnic groups were progressing side by side in the country. 4. Her stance here seems to reprise that of Eric Williams (1962: 278), who maintained that “all the races”, regardless of how and when they settled in Trinidad, were “all victims of the same subordination,” and their cultures had “all been submerged in the common subordinate status of colonialism”.



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6.2.2 Beyond slavery: Counter-narratives of resistance and empowerment Slavery is recounted by Persad-Bissessar by means of an empowering and inclusive narrative: the forefathers (and foremothers, with a hint to the importance of the female contribution to the making of the Caribbean nation) are portrayed in the act of fighting against the Shakespearian “slings and arrows” of colonial oppression. This section of Persad-Bissessar’s speech seems to have been heavily inspired by the poem I’ll Never Return written in 1981 by the Afghan poet and activist Meena Keshwar Kamal.5 However, while the poem narrates Meena’s resistance as an Afghan woman during war times entirely in the first person singular (“I’m the woman who has awoken / I’ve found my path and will never return / I’ve seen barefoot, wandering and homeless children”), Persad-Bissessar employs the first person plural to collectivize the experience of slavery and colonial oppression. Brought to contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, the Afghan poem acquires new meaning through a process of recontextualization and aptly serves Persad-Bissessar’s empowering narrative of past slavery: (61) We’ve found our path and will never return, will never go back. We’ve seen barefoot, wandering and homeless children. We’ve been reborn amidst epics of resistance and courage. We’ve learned the song of freedom in the last breaths, in the waves of struggle and in victory. My brother, my sister, my countryman tell Patrick Manning that he must no longer regard us as weak and incapable. With all our strength, we take each other’s hands and rise on the path of our country’s liberation. Our voices are mingled with thousands of arisen people. Our fists are clenched with the fists of thousands compatriots. Together we’ve stepped up to the path of our nation to break all these sufferings, all these fetters of bondage, of slavery. We are the people who have risen. We’ve found our new destiny and will never return, we not going back.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010)

The Chaguanas speech aims at underlining the often unrecognized active role of the people of Trinidad and Tobago in the abolition of slavery, as well as in the achievement of independence. Rather than conceptualizing these two events as gracious British concessions to patiently waiting slaves, Persad-Bissessar highlights the importance of Trinidadian opposition and resistance.6 This process of rewriting 5. Persad-Bissessar had included a number of intertextual references to the poem also in her No Woman No Cry 2007 speech (see Chapter 4). 6. For historical accounts of slave resistance on Trinidadian plantations, see Brereton (2012). On the role of the 1930s Labour movement in the independence of Trinidad and Tobago, see Kiely (1996).

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history through political rhetoric has different means of realization throughout the excerpt. To begin with, the former enslaved population of Trinidad and Tobago is represented as the actor of a large number of different processes in the metaphorical narrative of liberation: material (“We’ve found our path”), mental (“We’ve seen […] children”) as well as relational processes (“We’ve been reborn”). While material processes represent an action having an effect on an outer entity and relational processes are related to being and becoming, a mental process construes a “change in the flow of events taking place in our own consciousness” (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 197). Drawing on their experience of colonial survivors, Trinidadians are represented as the main social actors and main authors of a major change in the national socio-political asset and a process of postcolonial self-determination. In the same vein, slavery is linguistically characterized using words belonging to the semantic field of war: an epic of “resistance and courage”, a “struggle” that in the end led to “victory” thanks to the work of “compatriots” coming together. This choice can be interpreted as a further narrative of empowerment and postcolonial rewriting with a strong focus on the agency of the colonized. A war, in fact, implies two sides equally fighting for victory, while colonialism entails an imbalance grounded in the conceptualization of colonized people as victims of a stronger power. The process of liberation from slavery and the colonial yoke is conceptualized as an authentic journey (Charteris-Black 2005; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Evidence can be found in the use of journey metaphors like “path”, “step”, “return”, “go back”. In the excerpt, metaphors are used to conceptualize freedom from slavery as a “path” that has been found, and a “song” that has been learned, that both collectivize and empower the audience. The main rhetorical purpose of journey metaphors in political discourse is to create solidarity and “encourage followers to accept shortterm suffering for worthwhile long-term objectives” (Charteris-Black 2005: 46). However, in this excerpt the “journey” of liberation from slavery is completed, and is pictured in retrospective, having the high value of experience (topos of historia magistra vitae, see Forchtner 2014) with the final aim of creating a strong parallel with the present Trinidadian political situation. This relationship between past and present is organized largely across two temporal lines. For the narrative of slavery and liberation the present perfect tense is used rather than the past tense, a choice implying a strong relation between the colonial past and the present time. For the comment on the present political situation and the government of Patrick Manning, Persad-Bissessar switches over to the present tense. This use of different tenses is neither arbitrary nor neutral, but always indicates different orientations towards the topics that are talked or written about, as “temporal distance nearly always conveys modal distance” (Fowler et al. 1979: 207).



Chapter 6.  The nation 147

Indeed, this parallel between past and present in Persad-Bissessar’s speech gives way to a second parallel, this time between the PNM and slavery. Framing Manning as a slaver that regards his citizens as “weak and incapable” is clearly part of PersadBissessar’s wider campaign strategy of “positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation” (Reisigl and Wodak 2001). We have seen in previous chapters how Persad-Bissessar’s “negative other-presentation” depicts the PNM as racist and non-egalitarian. Persad-Bissessar high use of the first person plural subjective “we” and possessive “our” reinforces the idea of a party “in-group” overlapping with a national “in-group”. In Persad-Bissessar’s words, Patrick Manning is isolated and left alone in the “out-group”, with his Afro-Trinidadian electorate finding a new political home in the People’s Partnership, the Rainbow Party of ethnic inclusion. 6.3

Proud achievements and historic moments: Narrating history as myth

The popularization of national “heroes” or “icons” seems to be the “indispensable appendage to any possible interpretation of national identity” (Eriksonas 2004: 15). The emotional ties to the native country are fostered by a sense of national pride, supported by a description of the achievements by notable citizens, which are able to incarnate a narrative of exceptionalism and transmit messages about what it means to belong to a particular nationality (Hall 1996). The 2010 We Will Rise campaign is an example of Persad-Bissessar’s interest in the creation of a narrative of “national heroes”.7 In her Chaguanas Presentation of Candidates speech, Persad-Bissessar dedicates a full section on the life and achievements of notable Trinidadians and pride seems to be the dominant feeling that the PM candidate aims to transmit to the audience: (62) We are proud of this land, we are proud of our people, we are proud of the progress that we have made together. We are proud of the achievements of our citizens who have excelled in sports and in the arts, in business and in labour, in politics and in government, in Parliament and the Judiciary, in the media, community and society. Our nation would not be the same without them. We would not have the same sense of ourselves without them, we would not be the same people or society or country without them.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010, my emphasis)

7. Persad-Bissessar’s idea will be further developed in 2012, resulting in the publication of a booklet on the achievements of 60 notable Trinbagonians entitled National Icons of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, as part of the Government’s celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Independence.

148 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

In her argument, Persad-Bissessar establishes a triangular relationship between pride, achievements and identity. In Persad-Bissessar’s words, the achievements of notable Trinidadians are instrumental to building identity for their fellow citizens both at the individual and at the collective level (“we would not be the same”). At the same time, pride is powerfully inclusive and recognizing the exceptionality of these individual achievements and being proud of them is the common feeling that binds. After her introduction, Persad-Bissessar lists a number of national icons of different ethnic backgrounds, and briefly describes the reasons why Trinidadians should be proud of them and their achievements: (63) When a Brian Lara or Hasley Crawford or a Daren Ganga or George Bovell or a Dwight Yorke gives a world class performance we feel uplifted, our spirit soars and our hearts are glad and we rise. It is at moments like when our nation qualified for the World Cup thanks in no small part to our very own Jack Warner that we recognise ourselves for what we truly are: citizens of Trinidad and Tobago. When a Minshall or MacFarlane surprises our imagination we get a jolt of joy, and we feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when we are exposed to the work of our great artists like the late Issiah Boodhoo or Jackie Hinkson or Leroy Clarke who leave us to ponder and to reflect. When Nobel Laureates like V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott speak of their sources of inspiration, or Earl Lovelace writes about how we live with each other and how we feel and dream, we are inspired that we are also part of a society and culture of what created them. And when people like Pat Bishop speak we should listen, not silence her. People like Anthony Sabga, Sydney Knox, Helen Bhagwansingh and Joseph Charles give us a first-hand example of how business empires are built and prompt us to feel that with hard work, patience and dedication, genuine accomplishment is possible. A Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, an Adrian Cola Rienzi and a George Weeks make us proud that ordinary citizens can rise to be leaders, that ordinary people banding together to serve their interest and to secure their dignity can change the course of history and make a difference. George John we remember as distinguishing himself as a journalist. In politics, we have had some proud moments. When the late Dr. Eric Williams and Dr. Rudranath Capildeo found common ground to make it possible for agreement on the 1962 constitution and pave the way for Independence for Trinidad and Tobago… that was a proud moment. When the whole country came together for the clean-up campaign immediately after the election when the NAR government came to power in 1986, that was a proud moment.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010, my emphasis)



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In this excerpt, national pride constitutes a strong, positive pull of allegiance for Persad-Bissessar’s target audience. The speech is an authentic process of emotional elicitation, with a strong focus on feelings. Rather than the way Trinidadians should feel about the cited works and events, Persad-Bissessar talks about the way they actually feel. This is primarily achieved choosing verbs in the present tense that describe the positive inner reaction to these “national achievements”, such as “feel uplifted”, “feel a sense of pride and accomplishment”, “get a jolt of joy” as well as the more metaphorical “our spirit soars”, “our hearts are glad”. The first part of the excerpt describes the achievements in sports, arts, literature and culture, that are mainly valued for the emotional enrichment they can represent for the Trinidadian people. Persad-Bissessar’s celebration of national achievement begins with a long list of athletes. The role of national sport in breeding authentic foundation myths of national superiority is largely acknowledged, to the point that it has been compared to war and state funerals in its capacity to act as a “ubiquitous metonym” for the concept of a nation in both daily life and media discourse (Alabarces et al. 2001).8 While sport can be seen as a classic source of national pride at an international level, Persad-Bissessar also gives prominence to more specific aspects of Trinidadian culture, such as the masquerade tradition of the Trinidad Carnival. The Carnival is the national cultural phenomenon par excellence: a tradition legitimated by “having deep and unquestionable roots in the heart of Trinidadian culture”, as well as being “a national allegory of the major popular art forms in Trinidad: costume-making, steelband and calypso” (Harney 1996: 43).9 Peter Minshall and Brian McFarlane, two of the nation’s most famous and respected mas-men (Carnival costume designers), are therefore included by Persad-Bissessar in the artistic contributions of the country together with the painters Isaiah Boodhoo, Jackie Hinkson and Leroy Clarke.

8. Brian Lara and Daren Ganga are famous first-class cricketers, the athlete Hasley Crawford became Trinidad and Tobago’s first Olympic champion in 1976, while the swimmer George Bovell won the first-ever Olympic swimming medal for the country in 2004. Dwight York played in the English Premier League and in the World Cup for the Trinidad and Tobago national team, the Soca Warriors. Persad-Bissessar also praises the work of the UNC politician Jack Warner, who at the time of the 2010 election was also President of the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) and Vice President of FIFA (1997–2011). Warner was involved in Trinidad and Tobago’s successful qualification campaign for the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany, as well as in a number of transparency controversies and allegations of corruption that Persad-Bissessar clearly avoids mentioning. 9. On the crucial importance of Carnival in the nation-building process of Trinidad and Tobago see: Cozart Riggio (2004); Mason (1998); van Koningsbruggen (1997).

150 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

The second part of the excerpt focuses on achievements in business, labour, journalism and politics, which are mainly valued for the moral example they can set for the Trinidadian people. In particular, when describing achievements in politics, Persad-Bissessar strategically selects two moments in the country’s political history as “proud moments in politics”. Her final aim is to identify historical precedents for Indo/Afro collaboration in the political history of the nation and thus legitimize indirectly the political project of the People’s Partnership. Firstly, Persad-Bissessar refers to the creation of the 1962 Constitution and mentions two notable politicians who had a crucial role in the draft: Eric Williams and Rudranath Capildeo.10 As political history is often monopolized by the key role played by the Afro-Trinidadian Williams and the PNM, Persad-Bissessar aims at creating inclusivity also by highlighting the East Indian contribution of Capildeo in the making of the independent nation.11 Secondly, Persad-Bissessar mentions the election of the National Alliance for Reconstruction, when the “whole country came together for the clean-up campaign”. The NAR is the only political precedent for a multi-ethnic coalition in the history of the nation and is highly instrumental to the legitimation of the People’s Partnership.12 The description of achievements in the political history of the nation allows Persad-Bissessar to conclude the discursive celebration of the Trinidadian national icons with a connection to the political present of the country. The final aim of the canonization of the Trinidadian national icons becomes clearer in the following excerpt:

10. The two politicians emerged in the pre-independence 1956 General Election as the political leaders of the two major ethnic groups in the country: Eric Williams, leader of the People’s National Movement (PNM), was supported by the urban-based middle and lower classes, who were mainly of African ancestry, while the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) led by Rudranath Capildeo, was the expression of the more conservative rurally-based Indo-Trinidadian middle and upper-middle classes. 11. The creation of the 1962 Constitution is actually a highly controversial issue in the history of the nation. While the Persad-Bissessar praises Capildeo for his involvement and collaboration, in fact Williams’ PNM already had the political power to impose the majority of its choices during the writing process. 12. When the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) came into power in 1986, the Prime Minister ANR Robinson immediately initiated a Clean Up Day, with volunteers cleaning the cities and the beaches of rubbish. It was a highly metaphorical action as the party succeeded in power after the PNM, hinting at the many accusations of corruptions and patronage in the uninterrupted years of rule of the Afro-Trinidadian party.



Chapter 6.  The nation 151

(64) And today we are marking another such moment. This is another one of those historic points in time that defines what is happening here in our country now, the shift that is taking place, this warm embrace by the population of change, the emergence of this Partnership of the People, the commitment by all on this platform to partner with the people – this movement of unity that is building momentum across our country- that we are creating together – this will take us to another proud moment in our national history. and we will rise.  (Chaguanas, 02/05/2010)

National history is still “the advent of the epochal” (Bhabha 1990: 141) in PersadBissessar’s words: contextualized in the discursive celebration of the excellent Trinidadians of the past, the People’s Partnership candidates presented in the Chaguanas rally are elevated as moral examples of “commitment” and “unity”. Drawing on a locus a tempore, Persad-Bissessar presents the People’s Partnership as a “shift that is taking place”, a moment that is marking another “historic point in time” of the national history. Its formation and its future election success are portrayed as the next proud moment in the history of Trinidad and Tobago. The implication is that, by electing Persad-Bissessar’s coalition, the audience can witness the making of the Trinidadian myth. 6.4 Patterns of interdiscursivity and intertextuality 6.4.1 Religious discourse as national discourse Daughter of a Pundit and born into a Brahmin Hindu family, Kamla PersadBissessar “was baptized as a child in the Spiritual Baptist faith, a radical step for any Indian family, but also attended the Mohess Road Hindu School, Erin Road Presbyterian School, and the Siparia Union Presbyterian School” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 148). This personal story of religious syncretism was often brought to the fore during the campaign. Persad-Bissessar’s multi-faith stance, in fact, contributed to her legitimation as impartial leader and won her the endorsement of a number of religious leaders in the country, including the Shouter Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Muslim community, as well as the Hindu Maha Sabha. The political use of rhetorical and persuasive strategies recontextualized from religious discourse is a classic rhetorical strategy in political discourse that has been widely used by Persad-Bissessar. It is perhaps surprising that the Indo-Trinidadian Persad-Bissessar made no direct references to Hindu culture or religion throughout the campaign, while often making more specific references to Christianity.13 13. At the same time, she took her oath as Prime Minister swearing not on the Bible but on the Bhagavad Gita, one of the holiest scripts of the Hindus.

152 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

A possible reason for this choice could be that Persad-Bissessar’s We Will Rise campaign was specifically aimed at the inclusion of the Afro-Trinidadian electors of the PNM, mainly of Christian faith. More generally, as an Indo-Trinidadian PM candidate in a multi-faith country, this religious rhetoric could have possibly helped Persad-Bissessar to position herself at a higher, spiritual level, while winning her the sympathy of the Christians who make up almost 55% the country (TTSCO Census 2011). An example of Persad-Bissessar’s religious interdiscursivity is the choice of the theme of rising as the leit-motif of her campaign. Being plural, future, and biblical, We Will Rise displays all the staples of political communication and has been widely used as a claptrap throughout the campaign. The use of the inclusive pronoun we is strategic, and it is extended metonymically to represent all Trinidadians. The choice of the semi-modal will represents an epistemic rendition of Kamla’s determination and keen desire to lead Trinidadians above their current difficulties, linking to both the context of corruption and scandals that led to the 2010 Election, and to the future of Trinidad as a developing country. Rising is the crucial predication of empowerment in Persad-Bissessar’s campaign, and represents the discursive qualification of Trinidadians as risen from the ashes of past slavery. An example of this use is found in the Chaguanas speech, when the PM candidate refers to the Trinidadian people as “the people who have risen”, in an intertextual reference to Matthew 28:6 “He is not here, for He has risen”. In Persad-Bissessar’s view Trinidadian people, the people who have already risen once from slavery and colonialism, are ready for the present and future with the new People’s Partnership government. This aspect is further reinforced by the futurity in the motto, clearly implying a negative judgement on the current status quo of the PNM government. 6.4.2 Recontextualization as adaptation: “I Have a Dream” The U.S. President Barack Obama popularized and brought back into fashion interdiscursivity between political and religious discourse, and his 2008 presidential campaign has become famous for its correspondences with Martin Luther King’s speeches. The Reverend’s style also seems to have had a major impact on PersadBissessar’s 2010 campaign: the PM candidate often included in her speeches King’s sermon-like parallelisms, vocatives, enumerations, repetitions and rhetorical questions. In a passage from her Chaguanas speech, Persad-Bissessar’s interdiscursive references to a higher religious or spiritual discourse become more explicitly intertextual. Her integrative rhetoric echoes Martin Luther King’s seminal I Have a Dream speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963:



Chapter 6.  The nation 153

(65) Today we make a new future and honour our history by charting a new country forward. Today the dream of our forefathers and foremothers to create a land that is prosperous for all, a land where every child and every single person is afforded equality, safety and judged, not by the colour of his or her skin or the texture of his or her hair, but by the content of his or her character, today, that country, that land is just within our grasp. Today, we stand together as one people: men, women, children, African, Indian, Chinese, labour leaders, academics, labourers, every creed and every race have come together for a new mandate for Trinidad and Tobago’s future.  (Chaguanas 02/05/2010)

Obviously, the Reverend’s speech had undergone an essential recontextualization in time and space in order to be adapted to the Trinidad and Tobago of the 21st century. While King’s emancipatory speech pushed his narrative in an epistemic realm of futurity (reinforced by his repeated use of “will”), in Persad-Bissessar’s speech there is a higher level of factuality, expressed by tenses in simple present. The Trinidadians of 2010 are free men and women that do not limit themselves to “dream” as their “forefathers and foremothers” did in a time of slavery and colonial oppression. For the PM candidate, change is not going to happen in an unspecified future thanks to the faith in God, but is happening in the present because of the actions of the Trinidadian people (“today we make”, “today we stand”). King’s speech was a defining moment in the American Civil Rights Movement and one of its most famous lines is a strong reference to the racial issue in the United States: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  (King 2001 [1963])

Persad-Bissessar quotes the passage entirely, but adds a second reference to the texture of the hair, which represents a more precise racial indicator in the contemporary Caribbean.14 Another aspect that Persad-Bissessar seems to borrow from Martin Luther King is the definition by enumeration of the main social actors at play, as shown in Table 12:

14. Skin color is often an inaccurate ethnic marker in a Caribbean country with a less than 1% White population and a “Mixed” ethnic group constantly increasing. Consequently, hair texture is often believed to be the most reliable indicator of ethnic identity among the population of Trinidad and Tobago. More specifically, “hard hair” is believed to imply African ancestry as opposed to “soft hair”, usually regarded as indicator of East Indian or mixed-white, “Spanish” ancestry (Khan 1993).

154 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Table 12.  Social actors in King’s I Have a Dream and Persad-Bissessar’s Chaguanas speech MLK

KPB

All of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics

men, women, children, African, Indian, Chinese, labour leaders, academics, labourers, every creed and every race

King is addressing a very specific issue in the United States of the 1960s and seems to focus more on race (black men and white men). The appeal to religion (Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics) is seen by the Reverend as a possible source of equality (all of God’s children). Speaking of contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, Persad-Bissessar introduces the issue of gender equality (women), ethnicity (African, Indian, Chinese) as well as class (labour leaders, academics, labourers), while the references to religion and race (every creed and every race) are condensed in the intertextual reference to the Trinidadian national anthem. In particular, the national anthem represents another source of inspiration and legitimation for Persad-Bissessar, who employs it in a meaningful intertextual reference in the conclusions to her Chaguanas speech and is further explored in the following sections. 6.4.3 Recontextualization as relocation: Building a common national body Together with enumeration, repetition is another powerful rhetorical device that exemplifies the strong interdiscursive links between political and religious discourse. A basic device of lexical cohesion and reinforcement, repetition is also found in the rhetoric of Old Testament prophets and in religious sermons (Charteris-Black 2014: 68). In the final part of her Chaguanas speech, Persad-Bissessar gives a bird’s eye view of the Trinidadian national geographic space, following a pattern of repetitions similar to King’s conclusions to his I Have a Dream speech, as shown in Table 13. In this excerpt, Persad-Bissessar engages in the discursive construction of a national body: such a political focus on the “local, geographic and physical dimension” (de Cillia et al. 1999: 158) of the national territory with its boundaries, its natural resources and its landscapes, is one of the main semantic macro-areas related to the discursive construction of national identity. In Trinidad and Tobago, the divide between East Indians and Africans, as well as Trinidadians and Tobagonians, is also marked along geographical lines and paralleled by a strong urban/rural divide (Munasinghe 2001). Hence, the intertextual reference to a masterpiece of inclusive rhetoric such as King’s I Have a Dream speech helps Persad-Bissessar in the creation of a new, inclusive national narrative, where the most diverse and remote corners of the nation can feel represented.

Chapter 6.  The nation 155



Table 13.  The discursive construction of a common national body in King’s and Persad-Bissessar’s speeches MLK

KPB

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that: Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

And we will rise from white sands of Las Cuevas to the black pitch lake in La Brea; We will rise from the busy industrial town of Point Fortin to the quiet fishing village of Parlatuvier; We will rise from serene village of Moruga to the tranquil village of Matelot; We will rise from the striking shore of San Francique to the stunning shore of Sans Souci; We will rise here from the centre of Chaguanas to the centre of Castara, We will all rise. We will rise as one people, one nation, united together under the People’s Partnership and rejoice together “free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!!!”

The PM candidate operates a recontextualization of King’s speech, which relocates it in the Trinidadian geographical context. For example, although mountains were a biblical trope dear to the Reverend (used also in another seminal speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop), quoting King’s repetition of famous mountain names in the United States would not have been as effective in Persad-Bissessar’s speech. Since the geography of Trinidad and Tobago sees the highest hills concentrated in the Northern Range of the country, King’s mountains are substituted by a number of different places across the country, such as shores, lakes and villages. The uniqueness of Trinidadian geography is reinforced by Persad-Bissessar’s frequent use of adjectives, used in pairs either to stress diversity (white sands / black pitch lake; busy industrial town / quiet fishing village) or similarity (serene village / tranquil village; striking shore/ stunning shore) throughout the nation. The localities seem to have been carefully chosen to represent the whole nation and its diversity: – two places representing the naturalistic uniqueness and diversity of the nation: the beaches of Las Cuevas and the Pitch Lake of La Brea; – two cities representing two of the main economic resources of the country, that is oil production and tourism: the major oil-producing centre of Point Fortin in Trinidad and the popular tourist destination of Parlatuvier in Tobago; – two of the most remote countryside villages of the nation, representing the rural heart of the nation: the small fishing village of Moruga in the deep south

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of Trinidad and the isolated rural settlement of Matelot in the north-eastern corner of Trinidad; – two seaside villages, representing the island nature of the nation: the tranquil village of San Francique on Trinidad’s south west coast and the popular beach break of Sans Souci on Trinidad’s north east coast; – two cities representing the bond between the island of Trinidad and the island of Tobago and the urban and the rural natures of the nation: the busy city of Chaguanas where the rally is held, which is the largest borough and fastest-growing town of the nation, and the small seaside village of Castara on the leeward coast of the island of Tobago. In her repetition pattern, Persad-Bissessar substitutes King’s “let freedom ring” with her political motto We Will Rise. In the U.S. America of the 1960s, King’s choice was motivated by his concern with achieving freedom and equality for African Americans. Conversely, for Persad-Bissessar the idea of rising is crucial to the dismantling of the PNM government in power and the presentation of the 2010 General Election as the favourable time for a change (locus a tempore), as we have seen in Chapters 4 and 5. The conclusion of Persad-Bissessar’s narrative journey across Trinidad and Tobago is made powerful by the quotation “free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last”.15 By quoting King’s spiritual, PersadBissessar implies that true freedom can be achieved only through integration with our opposites, a unity which in her words can only be made possible by her party, the People’s Partnership. Religious interdiscusivity seems to be the preferred strategy for the discursive construction of a common national body also in a speech given in the East Indian village of Felicity, on the East coast of Trinidad. Here Persad-Bissessar employs the repeated tell them structure, found in the Gospels to stress the importance of proselytism in Christian faith. The use of repetition contributes to a sermon-like crescendo towards the final We Will Rise slogan. (66) Tell them there is a New Day and a New Way Forward for everyone in Trinidad and Tobago! Tell them there is no longer a Black, White or Brown Trinidad and Tobago, Tell them there is no longer a North and South Trinidad and Tobago, Tell them there is no longer an East-West corridor, Tell them there is no longer an ocean of difference between Trinidad and Tobago, Tell them each and every citizen will benefit from the change sweeping the nation. 15. King had in turn quoted the famous expression from the chorus of an “old Negro spiritual”, one of the many African American songs collected by the Nashville choir director John Wesley Work Jr. c6-fn15



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Tell them, each of you, We Will Rise! Every man, woman and child, no matter who you are…say it, We Will Rise! We Will Rise!  (Felicity, 26/04/2010)

Inclusiveness in the discursive construction of a common National Body is achieved by discursively positing an ideal space, where the different geographical corners of the country are no longer as polarized as they used to be before the advent of the People’s Partnership. Persad-Bissessar’s slogan, A New Day and a New Way Forward, is embedded in the first line of the excerpt to make it evident that the coalition under her leadership represents a departure from the past. In the excerpt, Persad-Bissessar is hinting at the differences between North Trinidad, usually regarded as busy and urban, and South Trinidad, rural and less developed. These North/South and Urban/Rural dichotomies quite significantly also align to an implicit Afro/Indo distinction in Trinidad and Tobago, linked to the dual labour market which has traditionally seen the two principal sectors of the national economy dominated by the two ethnic groups, with East Indians traditionally employed in sugar and Africans in oil (Allahar 2005a; Clarke 1993). In addition, Persad-Bissessar addresses another crucial divide in the country, the one between the island of Trinidad and the one of Tobago. Tobago’s history developed independently up until 1898, when it became a ward of Trinidad. This union was never organic and the “ocean of differences” between the two islands and their peoples is far from being metaphorical.16 Throughout the decades, these differences have encouraged the construction of a Tobagonian ethno-national identity vis-à-vis a Trinidadian one, as well as constituting the basis for the Tobagonian movement for independence (see Luke 2007). Thanks to the presence of the Tobago Organization of the People (TOP) in the People’s Partnership coalition, PersadBissessar aimed at showing her commitment to Tobagonians and their issues while stressing the importance of unity in the twin-island state. As the concepts of place, culture, race, ethnicity and class are so mutually constitutive in Trinidad and Tobago, the discursive construction of a common national body actually contributes to Persad-Bissessar’s wider discursive construction of social equality and ethnic inclusivity in the country. This is further reinforced by drawing on the cohesive message of the National Anthem, as shown in the following section. 16. Tobago is separated from Trinidad by 18 miles of ocean, and is different from Trinidad in terms of its ethnic composition (in Tobago people of African descent comprise the 85% of the population) as well as language (Tobagonian Creole is distinct from Trinidadian Creole and closer to other Lesser Antillean creoles). The social relations between Tobagonians and Trinidadians are affected by various stereotypes and mutual prejudices. In Trinidad, the widespread image of Tobago is the one of “a rural and backward society”, inferior to Trinidad’s “more cosmopolitan, mixed population”. Conversely, in Tobago the central government is often viewed as “distant, unconcerned and unsympathetic” to local issues (Luke 2007).

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6.4.4 Recontextualization as appropriation: “Forged from the Love of Liberty” Recontextualization, from one discourse, text or genre to another, occurs when a dominant text imports some element of another text “for some strategic purpose” (Chilton and Schäffner 2002: 17). This “appropriation of elements of one social practice within another” (Fairclough 2003: 32) has often been considered by discourse analysts as one of the most important processes in text production and meaning making (Wodak and De Cillia 2006: 345). As shown in Table 14, Persad-Bissessar concluded her Chaguanas speech with another crucial intertextual reference to the National Anthem of Trinidad and Tobago, Forged from the Love of Liberty:17 Table 14.  Intertextual references to the national anthem in Persad-Bissessar’s Chaguanas speech National anthem lyrics

KPB’s Chaguanas speech

Forged from the love of liberty In the fires of hope and prayer With boundless faith in our destiny We solemnly declare:

As the sun rises on the morning of 25th May after the election; let this be the signal for all of us to join hands in building a new future for this Country based on the guiding principles of this great nation;

tab14-versgoupSide by side we stand Islands of the blue Caribbean sea, This our native land We pledge our lives to thee. Here every creed and race find an equal place, And may God bless our nation Here every creed and race find an equal place, And may God bless our nation.

tab14-versgoup2forged from the love and liberty – we will rise; in the fires of hope and prayer – we will rise; with boundless faith in our destiny – we will rise; side by side we stand – we will rise; islands of the blue Caribbean sea – we will rise this our native land we pledge our lives to thee – we will rise; where every creed and race find an equal place – we will rise, May God bless you, May God bless our nation WE WILL RISE.

The idea of futurity embedded in the We Will Rise motto is the key to PersadBissessar’s Changuanas speech’s conclusions. The rising sun is not only a classic metaphor for a new beginning, but it is also a double reference to both PersadBissessar’s United National Congress party (whose symbol is a sun rising above the Trinity Hills) and to her personal motto as a leader and PM candidate Kamla, a new day, a new way forward. Her extensive use of an inclusive we also echoes 17. Originally composed by Patrick Castagne as the national anthem for the short-lived West Indies Federation (1958–1962), it was adopted by Trinidad and Tobago when it became independent in 1962. The anthem line “side by side we stand, islands of the blue Caribbean Sea”, originally meant to apply to the nature of the Federation, was easily adapted to describe the twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago.



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Trinidad and Tobago’s motto, Together We Aspire, Together We Achieve, embodying the atavistic preoccupation with producing a Trinidadian people in an ethnically fragmented country. The final “May God bless you” stresses the interactive nature of the rally speech and the inclusive relationship that Persad-Bissessar tries to build with her audience by addressing it directly. By quoting entirely the lyrics of the National Anthem, recontextualizing them in her speech and interposing the We Will Rise motto at every line, Persad-Bissessar appropriates the Anthem and creates a new version of it. She embeds the concepts of racial equality and religious freedom as originally set forth in the National Anthem, so that the guiding principles of the nation can become the guiding principles of the party, in a way that automatically legitimizes the new government after the Election Day of May 24th. 6.4.5 From “Yes We Can” to “We Will Rise”: Celebrating the multi-ethnic nation With their given contextual differences taken into consideration, the People’s Partnership campaign has often been associated with the 2008 Obama campaign by Trinidadian journalists and intellectuals. According to Maharaj (2013: 93), “the PP campaign shared with the Obama campaign common themes of unity across previous divisions, hope in the political subject and the necessity for change in political and social structures”. It appears that Obama’s political communication strategies represented a successful and convincing model for Persad-Bissessar. In fact, the We Will Rise thematic ads for the People’s Partnership campaign were conceptualized by the Ross Advertising company based in Trinidad and Tobago, in tandem with the A. S. G. K. Public Strategies, the same new media and political team that organized Barack Obama’s election campaign in 2008. Persad-Bissessar also hired Bernie Campbell, an American political organization consultant who had previously worked on Obama’s campaign.18 The People’s Partnership We Will Rise party video ad seems to follow in the footsteps of the globally famous Yes We Can video from the 2008 Obama Campaign. Obama’s video featured the singer will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, a multi-ethnic U.S. American hip-hop group. The editing alternated footage from Obama’s New Hampshire primary speech with a multi-ethnic cast of famous actors, musicians 18. Mr. Henry B. Campbell, who was part of Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy team, was hired by the PM candidate ahead of the 2010 General Election. The collaboration between Campbell and Persad-Bissessar became public during the campaign when Campbell was denied entry by Trinidad and Tobago Immigration on April 23th, 2010. Persad Bissessar gave her version of the event during the rally held at the Cumuto International Grounds, blaming the People’s National Movement (PNM) for the deportation of the American strategist.

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and other American youngsters repeating or singing Obama’s words. Like Obama’s Yes We Can video, Persad Bissessar’s We Will Rise video features a local celebrity, Nigel Rojas, the vocalist and guitarist of the Trinidadian reggae/rock band Orange Sky. Similarly to Obama’s video, Persad-Bissessar’s video is also shot in stark black and white, with an alternation between Persad-Bissessar speaking, Nigel Rojas singing and a number of Trinidadians chanting “we will rise” in the refrain (see Figure 19). The choice of the We Will Rise rock ballad also constituted a neat and modernizing departure from the fast soca or the loud and catchy political kaiso (calypso music) that have usually dominated the Trinidad and Tobago political arena.

Figure 19.  Frames from the We Will Rise video ad

The video ends with the slogan Kamla 2010 – a New Day, a New Way Forward written on the evocative background image of a sky at dawn, symbolizing the new start that her leadership represents for the country (see Figure 20). The colours of the flag of Trinidad and Tobago (black and red) are chosen for the lettering. The address of her website, www.kamla.tt, is written at the bottom of the image. The



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URL redirects to her Facebook fan page, opened in March 2010 and updated daily during the Campaign. The slogan Kamla 2010, exemplifies how Persad-Bissessar was frequently called by her first name by the media and the public during the campaign. Although often denounced as a form of gender discrimination in media discourse (Stein 2009), in the case of Persad-Bissessar the self-naming as Kamla can be seen as part of her self-presentation as a motherly figure for the nation. Compared to her long, hyphenated surname, her first name may serve to give a stronger sense of familiarity.

Figure 20.  Final frame from the We Will Rise video ad

Persad-Bissessar’s footage included in the We Will Rise ad is taken from the Voice of the People Rally held by Persad-Bissessar on March 27th, 2010 in Chaguanas. As the UDeCOTT scandal was bursting out, the Opposition leader Persad-Bissessar tried to gain the support of political parties, labour leaders as well as business and non-governmental organizations towards a unified opposition front against Manning. The We Will Rise ad was released in four different versions: the editing is similar, with the same alternation of Persad-Bissessar’s speech, Nigel Rojas’ song and the supporters chanting the refrain. What changes is the extract of PersadBissessar’s speech, as different moments from the rally are selected to address different topics: 1. We stand for a vision of a nation in which our abundant natural resources are invested in the people not in political profiteering. We stand for a society where law and order is restored and women and children can be safe in their homes and on the streets again. We stand for a system of government that is accountable to the people: not just those who elected them, but for all of the people of Trinidad and Tobago.

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2. Today we are united as a nation – one people under God, united in a common purpose to save our nation for all of us and for generations to come. 3. This will be a victory of the people, whoever you happen to be, man or woman, of every creed and race. We will continue to raise our voices and clamour for change until we are free again. Until criminals are behind bars and we no longer live in self-imposed jails. Until our children can be safe in schools. Until our hospitals have beds and medicines. Until we can rule out and run out the drug trade destroying our children. 4. We stand for a system of government that is accountable to the people, not just for those who elected them, but for all of the people of Trinidad and Tobago. We stand in support of negotiations with, but not impositions on our nation’s unions and workers. I want to say that People’s victory is finally at hand. May God bless you, may God bless our nation. In the speech, some of the main themes of the People’s Partnership future campaign are put to the fore: the management of natural resources, the issue of crime and safety as well as government accountability. The use of text on screen is limited, only the We Will Rise phrase appears in capital white letters, always synchronized with the refrain. During the refrain, Kamla leaves the scene to her electorate and Nigel Rojas singing, projecting the audience into an unspecific future: s6-45dipquote1We will rise, we will rise, I can see a new day dawning from the hope that’s in your eyes. We will rise, we will rise, turn the pages of our history, change the courses of our lives.

The Yes We Can catchphrase trademarked by Obama is substituted with Kamla’s motto We Will Rise. Both slogans share a rhetorically effective triadic structure. Because of the idea of permission and ability inherent in can, Obama’s modal choice constitutes the lowest degree of pressure, but showing a positive, can-do attitude (“Yes” and “Can”) and shortening the distance between himself and his audience with the inclusive (“We”). Although the Yes at the beginning of the catchphrase increases the epistemic force of the proposition, Obama’s can primarily concerns ability and potential, and its elliptical nature further opens up potentially infinite possibilities. Compared to can, will represents a higher scale of modal commitment, and signals a higher degree of certainty about the validity of a proposition (Radden and Dirven 2007). Will represents an epistemic modal rendition of Kamla’s strong potential as leader, and reassures the electors that more actions will be definitely taken in the future. Obama’s Yes We Can video was the linchpin of his campaign, based on the core themes of change, hope and unity, in which he offered a new vision of race relations based on his own version of the American Dream. Similarly, the political



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advertisement of Persad-Bissessar’s coalition in the We Will Rise video is linked to the visual construction of a national image of unity and ethnic inclusivity in Trinidad and Tobago. Just as in the Obama video, Persad-Bissessar does not mention election day or voting, and, although its primary communicative goal is linked to the General Election, it could be considered a sort of universal claim for national inter-ethnic harmony in Trinidad and Tobago. One of the most interesting aspects characterizing the We Will Rise video is that Persad-Bissessar appears and speaks first, contrary to Obama’s one, where the singer will.i.am is the first to appear on the screen. In a dialogic musical structure of “call and response”, Persad-Bissessar is the leading voice that elicits the audience’s response and receives “a supporting response of acceptance” (van Leeuwen 2004: 252) consisting of singing and music. As she elicits, she positions herself as leader in “an exchange that occurs in situations with an unequal relationship” (van Leeuwen 2004: 254) and characterizes ritual interactions between social groups and their leaders, like a priest does during prayers in a Christian church. The constant sound of applause and cheering in the background reinforces the response as acceptance. In the video, the responders are Trinidadian citizens of various ethnic groups, who follow her lead like a congregation and chant We Will Rise with Nigel Rojas. The citizens appear one after another in a one to many progression: the very act of singing together is highly symbolic, and represents a strong unifying factor. The video can be defined as a “social unison”, because the participants sing the same notes, and in this way express a sense of belonging, of being united (van Leeuwen 2004: 252). However, although the single voices chanting “we will rise” harmonize, they are still recognizable thanks to the clearly distinguishable turn-taking of the spoken “we will rise” lines, that can be matched to the voices of the different men and women portrayed in the frames. The choir, therefore, does represent unity without complete uniformity, advertising the People’s Partnership as a place where Trinidadians are still allowed to maintain their own identity and diversity and portraying Persad-Bissessar as the mediator of this diversity by popular demand. The guest appearances are by Trinidadians and Tobagonians of varied ethnic background, age and gender, in a basic East Indian/African alternation. The presence of the dread-locked, Afro-Trinidadian Nigel Rojas can be interpreted as acting as an authentic visual counterpart for Kamla’s East Indian ethnicity. In this respect, Persad-Bissessar’s video recalls the ads branded by Luciano Benetton for his United Colors of Benetton clothing company. From 1984 on, Benetton’s advertising consisted of the (then unusual in Europe) inclusion of Asian, Hispanic and Black young models, giving rise to a new de facto standard for inclusivity and diversity representation in ads. Benetton’s ads came to incarnate “the antithesis of conflict, the expression of unity, the nurturer of internationalism” (Back and

164 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

Quaade 1993). Similarly, the alternating images of young Trinidadians of different ethnic backgrounds singing together in the We Will Rise video aim at creating a visual representation of a harmonious, almost choral, multi-racial country.

Chapter 7

Concluding remarks

7.1

Summary of findings

With the 2010 General Elections in Trinidad and Tobago called halfway into the sitting PNM government’s office, Kamla Persad-Bissessar was called to run for Prime Ministership only a few months after her hard-fought election as leader of the opposition party UNC. In a postcolonial national context that is ethno-politically segmented, Kamla Persad-Bissessar managed to emerge as the favourite PM candidate thanks to a slick election campaign and strategic inter-ethnic political alliances. When Persad-Bissessar was elected as the seventh Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in May 2010, she was eagerly saluted as the political figure that could finally be able to emancipate the country from “the mud of race-based and men-led politics” (Fraser 2010). As a matter of fact, the very election of a female PM candidate of East Indian ancestry marked a significant novelty in the political scenario of Trinidad and Tobago, although it was not completely unforeseeable. Throughout the 20th century, in fact, Trinidadian women have been making tremendous gains in terms of equality and rights, even more striking if we are to consider their starting point as trophies of masculinity and status in the male-dominated colonial demography. On the wave of the Oil Boom of the 1970s and 1980s, the country has seen the growth of a more articulate and economically secure group of women of all ethnicities. A growing number of women have come to find their space in the Trinidadian political arena, not only as voters, party canvassers or supporters, but also as parliamentarians and ministers. At the same time, Persad-Bissessar’s success is remarkable if we intersect her experience as female political leader with the long history of (self-)isolation and struggle for political visibility of the East Indian community in the country. As a woman born in south rural Trinidad with a story of upward mobility through education, Persad-Bissessar managed to raise above the double discrimination and intersectional patterns of invisibility and exclusion she faced as an East Indian woman in the Trinidadian public arena. Upon their arrival in the Caribbean, in fact, East Indian women “confronted a hydra-headed patriarchy of colonial, Afro-Caribbean, and Indian men” (Mehta 2016: 2) that had been conditioned by class-based, racialized, and sexualized myths of Indian women’s moral lasciviousness (Shepherd

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2002). Persad-Bissessar’s exercise of leadership is ground-breaking per se, for its potential to challenge the stereotypical assumption of “a culture of deep deference and self-effacement among Indian women” (Davies 2011: 128). As such, it is unsurprising that many local journalists and academics fell into a triumphalist rhetoric of Indo-Caribbean feminism upon her election, framing the “ascendancy of Kamla” as “the apex” and “the fulfilment of the steady progress of Indo women in all walks of public life” (Kanhai 2013: 1), also relating Persad-Bissessar’s success to the spaces that Indo-Caribbean women had been carving for themselves in the literary arena (Hosein and Outar 2012; 2016; Mahabir and Pirbhai 2015). Some others were not so enthusiastic upon her election: she was seen an East Indian woman who was stepping out of line, and a potential threat to the postcolonial black masculinist leadership. As mentioned by Carole Boyce Davies (2011), the Trinidadian Calypsonian Brown Boy condensed this feeling in a calypso song in which he accused Persad-Bissessar of “wanting the Black man post”. In the song, “post” is also a cheeky metaphor for the male sexual organ, yet again sexualizing the promiscuous Indo-Caribbean woman, who is commonly blamed for the miscegenation of dougla (Indo/Afro “mixed”) Trinidadians. Against this backdrop, the critical discursive analysis in this book has contributed to existing debates with a more multifaceted and nuanced perspective, grounded in the analysis of the discursive strategies of self-legitimation enacted by Persad-Bissessar in her 2010 campaign. We have seen how she discursively presented herself as an experienced politician, but also openly ran as the woman candidate to the sounds of Helen Reddy’s 1970s feminist anthem I am Woman.1 Her positionality as wife, mother and grandmother smoothed her acceptance as a new leader, fostering her perception as an inclusive, collaborative and caring candidate that would have been able to cross all racial, ethnic and religious lines in the polarised Trinidadian context. By equally drawing on her long political career and on her gendered family roles, she managed to appeal to a range of constituents, male and female of both East Indian and African background, who understood and respected the power of a strong motherly figure, but also saw in her the potential to be a different leader from the male figures who ruled the country since its independence. As such, Persad-Bissessar managed to present herself as an agent for change, who would bring unity to the coalition of parties and, as a result, to the whole country. In this respect, her success could be contextualised within a wider political trend that sees female candidates triumph during hard political times, especially in 1. As noted by Anton Allahar in one of our conversations on the topic, the choice of Reddy’s song is somewhat surprising, especially if we consider the calypso song Woman is Boss by the white Trinidadian calypsonian Denyse Plummer as a local, and possibly more meaningful, alternative.



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Latin America and the Caribbean. As she was campaigning for power after a period of authoritarianism and corruption, her gender difference could have possibly been instrumental in reinforcing hope in an actual political change. In fact, some gender stereotypes have been seen to work as an advantage for women candidates during moments of public discontent and distrust, as they are largely perceived as “more honest, more trustworthy, and less associated with the traditional political elite” (Funk et al. 2019). However, Persad-Bissessar’s strategy of self-presentation as the woman candidate who magically appeared to clean up politics in Trinidad and Tobago was not the only factor at play in her successful positioning as an anti-corruption political force. The fact that she was leading a coalition of different parties and movements, supported by Trinidadians of both East Indian and African origins, consolidated the positive self-presentation of the People’s Partnership as both representative and accountable. As such, the People’s Partnership targeted two of the major issues of contemporary Trinidadian politics: guaranteeing true democracy in a multi-ethnic country trapped in a Westminster system, and fighting the corruption and party patronage that had been characterizing both PNM and UNC single party rule. The analysis of Persad-Bissessar’s election campaign also showed that postcolonial nation building, and its difficult marriage with the country’s multi-ethnicity, still represents a central topic in discourses on and from Trinidad and Tobago. Ever since the fragmented national independence movement, in fact, the quest for harmony has represented “the hidden text of all discourse on nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago” (Harney 1996: 37). With elections in Trinidad and Tobago usually serving as a site of struggle for ethnic assertion, Persad-Bissessar aimed to present herself and the People’s Partnership as the beginning of a new politics of ethnic harmony in the country, setting off a new order of democratic governance that could be able to avoid exclusivism and promote power sharing between East Indians and Africans. In this respect, we have seen how the discursive construction of the multi-ethnic People’s Partnership should be understood in a dialectical relationship with the one of the multi-ethnic nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The rhetoric of a plural party for a plural nation, in fact, represents the most straightforward legitimation strategy of the coalition as the best political solution for the country. Throughout the campaign, both the nation and the coalition are depicted as plural, diasporic and diverse, yet serenely harmonious and united in diversity, through a political narrative that places a strong accent on cohesiveness and inclusiveness to counter any ethnic tension in the country. Persad-Bissessar’s contemporary rhetoric of political unity in present Trinidad and Tobago makes a wise use of both colonial and postcolonial national history. The ex-post narration and confabulation of a common political past, in fact, is her

168 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

chosen groundwork to create new narrative foundations for contemporary solidarity among the different ethnic groups of the twin-island state. Interestingly, Persad-Bissessar shows a clear awareness of the need for colonial history to be rewritten from a postcolonial perspective, to challenge the historiography of the British Empire while at the same time rejecting the very existence of a historical objectivity, seen as a Eurocentric concept at the service of the power/knowledge of colonial masters. In particular, she draws upon one of the most established strategies in postcolonial historiography, that is, highlighting the erased agentivity of the colonial subject. She places a strong accent on the active role of the resistance by slaves and indentured workers in the abolition of both colonial systems of labour, as well as in achieving independence. Most importantly, she creates a shared narrative of resistance, knowing full well that the choice of the main protagonists and their role in history have important implications in political legitimacy and power relations today. By re-telling the story of both the African Middle Passage and the East Indian Kala Pani (Hindi for the ‘black waters’ of the Atlantic), Persad-Bissessar reinforces the idea that both East Indians and Africans made history in Trinidad and Tobago and they are entitled to share both the past and the present on an equal basis, rather than sticking to a simplistic first come, first served logic which would clearly see her and other East Indian Trinidadians at a disadvantage. As only the second leader of East Indian ancestry in the history of the independent nation, Persad-Bissessar seems to draw on a poetics of Jahaji Bhai, a Hindi expression meaning ‘brotherhood of the boat’. While it was originally coined to refer to the strong ties that bound East Indians that crossed the Atlantic on the same boat, it also came to be used to indicate that both Africans and East Indians were brought by boat to Trinidad and Tobago during colonial times. It is perhaps only coincidental that a song by Brother Marvin entitled Jahaji Bhai became an absolute hit immediately after the election of the first East Indian PM Basdeo Panday in 1995, as he lead his United National Congress/National Alliance for Reconstruction (UNC/NAR) coalition to an historic defeat of the People’s National Movement (PNM). The song celebrated how “the indentureship and the slavery bind together two races in unity”, promoting a new notion of cohesiveness which was saluted by some Caribbean scholars as “dougla poetics” (Puri 2004, see also Reddock 1999), drawing on the Hindi name for the offspring of one East Indian and one African parent born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. In the wake of the 1995 elections that saw the East Indian UNC party prevail, dougla poetics was often mistaken for assimilation and dilution of one’s own ethnic identity, only to be exacerbated by the widespread panic of an Indian revenge across the “stunned, tearful and traumatized” (Ryan 1996: 335) Afro-Trinidadian PNM electorate. But in 2010, thanks to the presentation of a carefully engineered Indo/Afro coalition party, Persad-Bissessar’s dougla poetics “offers a vocabulary for a political identity”



Chapter 7.  Concluding remarks 169

(Puri 1999: 33) able to legitimate her proposition as an East Indian PM candidate as well as to make the East Indian contribution more visible without necessarily downplaying the African one. We have seen in Chapter 2 how food metaphors are frequently used in academic, political and lay discourses as “mixing metaphors” (Khan 2001) to negotiate different degrees of heterogeneity and homogeneity in the discursive construction of national identity in Trinidad and Tobago. In her 2010 campaign, Persad-Bissessar carefully avoided any attempt at homogenization in her discursive construction of national identity. She necessarily departed from a vision of a nation as a “melting pot” (Laubeová 2005), locally represented by the Trinidadian callaloo stew, where all the ingredients yield a final product of uniform consistency and flavour, which is quite different from the original inputs. Her issue with the Trinidiadian callaloo/ melting pot is not simply that the different cultures become amalgamated into one common culture, but that this is generally reflected in the culturally and politically dominant Afro-Trinidiadian group. The concept of pelau/ethnic stew, with the different ingredients still keeping their solid structure and their flavours in the final dish, offers a higher level of compromise between integration and cultural distinctiveness, and it is a compromise with a great rhetorical potential. Far from being negated, Trinidadian diversity is portrayed as completely non-conflictual and constitutes an ideologically central component in Persad-Bissessar’s nationalist narrative, praising “the coexistence of diverse ancestral kinds in harmony” rather than the new invention of “a new identity out of many old identities” (Segal 1994: 226). The paradox of postcolonial nationalism unfolds in the violent creation of colonial sites that escape any notion of autochthony, historical precedence, purity, and homogeneity on the one hand, and in these features being key values of the modular European nationhood influencing colonies upon their independence on the other hand (Munasinghe 2002, see also Chapter 2). The critical discursive analysis revealed how Persad-Bissessar’s national discourse draws on one of the most widespread and enduring paradigms of essential Caribbeanness, that of “cultural hybridity”, which is discursively “canonized” in her campaign, so that there is “no necessary opposition between hybridity and the nation” (Puri 1999: 14). Persad-Bissessar’s pelau politics is grounded in the awareness that no claims to purity, homogeneity or autochthony can be possibly made, therefore a state of impurity rather than purity is foregrounded, without this necessarily disabling the nation “at the level of rhetoric, far less at the level of political economy” (Puri 2004: 21). Persad-Bissessar’s celebration of national impurity can be regarded, drawing on Belinda Edmondson, as one of the most successful and established “Caribbean romances”. These “romances” are “mystified tropes and discourses” in hegemonic Caribbean discourse that “serve dominant or contending groups, whether political, social, economic, or scholarly” in their effort to “reconcile ideological interests

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and conflicts by disguising them” (1999a: 4). It is by romanticizing Trinidadian hybridity as national harmony that Persad-Bissessar is able to manage the contradictions inherent in that very hybridity, strategically overlooking the complexity of the power relations between the different ethnic groups in the country as she campaigns for her own political success. Probably the most paradoxical element that emerges from the critical analysis of a political triumph that was saluted as the “triumph over race” (Bissessar and La Guerre 2013: 147), is that race itself was the most discussed topic throughout the campaign. In fact, the actual choices made by Persad-Bissessar and her team in terms of framing multi-ethnicity both at the party and at national level represented one of the key winning factors of her 2010 campaign. Such tropes of ethnic identity, national unity and democratic representation continue to figure centrally in any political project in the country, characterizing what Anton Allahar (1999: 247) has called the “racialization of political consciousness” in Trinidad and Tobago. In particular, ethnicity is seen by Allahar as working as a “political distraction” (ibid.) in the country, as it manages to capitalize political and media attention. Such debates on ethnicity and social divisions, fostered by both Afro and Indo-centric “ethnic entrepreneurs” (Allahar 2005b: 245), have been serving the classed political and economic interests of the élites, in a developing country marked by unaddressed inequality and poverty and in a system of neo-colonial, dependent capitalism characterized by the “introduction of external investment, foreign government, expatriate managers and imported laborers” (Meighoo 2008: 104, see also Bissessar 2019). Although the poetics of hybridity does not necessarily come with a politics of equality in Trinidad and Tobago, most political and national discourse remains firmly embedded in and informed by the discourse on the country’s ethnic plurality and its related quest for harmony. This “metadiscourse on race” in the words of Stefano Harney (1999: 59) has largely come to represent a Bourdieusian habitus in Trinidad and Tobago’s national discourse and Persad-Bissessar’s campaign was only yet another example of how it is still the privileged weapon of Trinidadian nationalism as well as a key winning factor in a general election. 7.2

Towards a postcolonial CDS

The 2010 General Elections of Trinidad and Tobago and the landslide victory of the People’s Partnership have recently made an unexpected comeback to global public attention, with the release of The Great Hack in July 2019. The controversial documentary went behind the scenes of the 2018 Facebook – Cambridge Analytica data scandal, revealing that personal data of millions of people had been harvested from their Facebook profiles without their consent and subsequently used for political



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advertising. The documentary exposed the work of Cambridge Analytica and its former parent company SCL Group in the politics of various countries, including the 2016 U.S. elections and United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign. It also revealed that the small Caribbean state of Trinidad and Tobago had a surprisingly important role in the company’s data mining experiments. In the documentary, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix reveals how the company worked “for the Indians” in the 2010 elections in Trinidad and Tobago, meaning they worked on behalf of the largely Indo-Trinidadian United National Congress (UNC) party and its People’s Partnership coalition, that teamed up to defeat the incumbent Afro-Trinidadian People’s National Movement (PNM). The documentary includes a Cambridge Analytica sales presentation audio in which Nix himself illustrated that the campaign titled “Do So”, discussed and analysed in Chapter 4 of this book, was actually crafted by them with the ultimate aims of changing the voting behaviours of specific segments of the Trinidadian population. At the time of the elections the campaign was thought to have been inspired by the actions of Percy Villafana, an elderly pensioner who defiantly crossed his arms in denial of access to his property when the then-prime minister and PNM leader, Patrick Manning, was canvassing voters in Villafana’s neighbourhood. However, revelations about how Cambridge Analytica operated have since cast the seemingly grassroots movement in a sinister light, as it was apparently created by the company to “increase apathy” among young, Afro-Trinidadian voters. The multimodal analysis highlighted the elliptical nature of the “Do So!” slogan and the absence of any reference to political messages, such as party symbols or colours, and the fact that posters with the iconic crossed arms symbol were often printed on a white background, instead of the iconic yellow of the People’s Partnership. At the same time, the semiotics of the “Do So” campaign seems also to acquire new meanings in the light of the revelations included in the documentary. According to Nix, in fact, it was necessary to craft what looked like a nonpolitical campaign, and to frame the refusal to vote as “a sign of resistance against […] politics and voting”, presenting abstentionism as being part of a cool anti-establishment movement, given expression in songs, group dances, and graffiti. “Do So”, therefore, would have been interpreted as “Don’t Vote” by a vast majority of young Black voters, which resulted in a lower turnout for the PNM. In discussing the “Do So” campaign, Nix also showcases a considerable knowledge of social and family dynamics in the country, and how these differ according to ethnicity. He claims that the company expected Afro-Trinidadian youth to actually desert the polling stations, while the Indo-Trinidadian youth would vote in much higher proportions, not necessarily out of a real political interest but being pressured by their parents in the context of tight-knit Indian families. Nix claims that this resulted in a 40% difference in the voter turnout of the 18–35 age group of the two different

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ethnicities, which swung the election by 6%, which was more than enough for the People’s Partnership to win. The scandal and the accusations against the Trinidadian government in The Great Hack were reprised by the publication, a few months later, of a book entitled Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World. The book was written by Christopher Wylie, the data analyst and programmer who became a globally famous whistleblower after a series of detailed interviews about his time at SCL Elections / Cambridge Analytica. In the book, Wylie devotes considerable attention to Trinidad and Tobago, described as an “island nation, self-contained yet with a variety of cultures […] creating an interesting cultural tension to explore” as well as a location which could “with 1.3 million people, fit the bill perfectly” and therefore “was an ideal laboratory in which to run our experiments at scale” (Wylie 2019: 61). What he refers to as “the Trinidad project” was a consultancy project he worked on for the Trinidad Ministry of National Security. The Ministry aimed at counteracting crime, using data to identify not only possible criminals, but also aiming at predicting when and how crimes would occur. Eventually, as Wylie recounts, the Trinidadian government’s attention for forecasting behaviour resulted in an interest in applying the same system to the political field, with a specific focus on elections. The “Trinidad project” came to entail triangulating the raw, unredacted and de-anonymized census data, allegedly provided by the Trinidadian government to SCL (including demographic data on gender, age, ethnicity etc.) with the information retrieved by tapping into citizens’ internet browsing history and their social media profiles, tracing their “online foot printing” (Wylie 2019: 61). Wylie maintains he managed to generate a full map of Trinidad and Tobago where these data were made available, and “real people” were represented by a layer of “neon-yellow dots” populating the map (Wylie 2019: 69). As imaginable, both the release of The Great Hack and the publication of Wylie’s book sparked a huge debate in Trinidad and Tobago. Kamla Persad-Bissessar and the UNC have routinely denied both knowledge of the company’s existence and any link with them, but the Congress of the People (COP), one of the political parties that comprised the People’s Partnership in 2010, admitted that there had been “discussions and some engagement” with SCL (Loop News 2018). In particular, since the book was published, the government of Trinidad and Tobago has been chasing Wylie to have him to testify in front of Parliament’s Joint Select Committee and shed light on the issue, hoping he will provide evidence on which UNC top officials sanctioned the Cambridge Analytica political strategy. Wylie’s revelations are particularly explosive as he discussed an established system of corruption in place “throughout the various micronations of the Caribbean”, by which after it helped selected politicians get into power, SCL “would often recoup its investment in government contracts” (2019: 61).



Chapter 7.  Concluding remarks 173

While any consideration on the veracity of Nix’s and Wylie’s affirmations is well beyond the scope of this study, the critical analysis of this book has painted a more comprehensive picture of Persad-Bissessar’s political momentum in 2010, encompassing a number of intersecting factors. These include widespread dissatisfaction in Manning’s PNM on the wave of the UDeCOTT scandal and Persad-Bissessar’s self-presentation as a woman to the rescue, leading a multi-ethnic party of unity which compacted the opposition in a coalition of five parties and avoided vote dispersion. Although the alleged participation of Cambridge Analytica is unlikely to have been the only factor at play in Persad-Bissessar’s success, the involvement of Trinidad and Tobago in the Cambridge Analytica – Facebook scandal is extremely significant and resonates strongly with the aims of this book. In particular, it demonstrates how timely it is that we should reconsider our academic perception of centre and periphery in the contemporary digitalized and globalized world. In the past two decades, research trends in (critical) political discourse studies have revolved around a very limited amount of hot topics which were regarded as being of critical interest, such as the “War on Terror” in the light of the 9/11 attacks, the Arab Spring revolutions, Barack Obama’s mastery of political oratory, the tweet politics of Donald Trump, the debate on climate change, the European migrant crisis and the Brexit debate. Yet, our perception of what may or may not be a political scenario worth our investigation is always bound to be imperfect, especially if marred by a Western-centric perception of the global political chessboard, whereby places like the Caribbean are bound to count as historically and geopolitically marginal. This book aimed at introducing a fresh focus on Caribbean political discourse that not only has the potential to enrich the fields of (critical) political discourse analysis but has major implications in the field of Caribbean and postcolonial studies too. When delimiting the scope of Caribbean discourse analysis, in fact, the centrality of literary and cultural studies in postcolonial studies has largely directed the interest of Caribbeanists towards literary forms as well as other forms of expression, like the plethora of music genres and dances from the Caribbean, as well as practices and performances like Carnival or dubpoetry. These cultural artistic expressions represent a crucial object of study, as they have been the site of production of knowledge and culture otherwise, capturing the Caribbean’s multivocality in a way that art excels at doing. This focus has fostered “new ways of looking at and across places” and has allowed mapping the Archipelago by “envisioning links between how a place is imagined, represented and lived” (Preziuso 2010: 145). However, this established tendency to focus on literary and cultural production and its criticism as a lens to interpret the postcolonial social world has crystallized a narrow and limited definition of discourse in the field, at the expense of political,

174 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

institutional and media discourses (see Lalla et al. 2014). My reflection here is not oblivious to the fact that the poetic is always political, a connection that is particularly evident in the political functions of Carnival in multicultural Trinidad as well as Jamaica (Edmondson 1999b) or in the role of calypso music in Trinidad and Tobago as “source of political information and shaper of cultural taste” (Allahar 1999: 247). On the contrary, it aims at bringing to our attention that the political is also outside of the poetic, in the configuration of new and evolving structures of power in the “post-colonial neo-colonized” (Spivak 1989: 290) reality of the contemporary Caribbean. In the words of Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1993: xiv), “for a full comprehension of the dynamics, dimensions and workings of a society, the cultural aspects cannot be seen in total isolation from the economic and political ones”. More specifically, the economic and political are not only to be regarded as mere contextual implications or interpretations of the postcolonial cultural message, but they are worthy of investigation as discourses in themselves, highly imbricated in various dimensions of the socio-politico-economic processes and systems at large. Already two decades ago, Harney (1999: 40) was drawing attention to the dangers of “relying too heavily on readings of cultural ideology in any interpretation of Caribbean nation-states”, and how cultural reductionism could have been avoided by the means of beneficial, interdisciplinary accounts of the institutions, practices and conditions in Caribbean nations also from a political, economic and social perspective. One of the main dangers of leaving political and media discourse out of the researcher’s lens, is to paint only a partial picture of the complex configurations of the contemporary Caribbean, marked as it is by “neo-colonial dependency, global capital’s assaults on sovereignty, cyclical and mass migrations of population, environmental and cultural ravages, and bitter ethnic tensions among the members of its disparate diasporas” (Puri 1999: 14). As an MA student in Cultural and Postcolonial studies, my first encounter with the Archipelago came with absorbing readings of the masterpieces of Caribbean literature, such as Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), and V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Much less was said about the complexities of identity, ethnicity and politics in the contemporary, neo-colonial Caribbean nation-states, leaving me with the feeling that we were trying to understand the Caribbean society from a still life dated sixty years before. What happened next? was the question that lingered after I was awarded my MA (with a thesis on Indo-Caribbean literature, of course), a question that came to represent the main drive behind the investigation of Caribbean political discourse in this book. This analysis of the 2010 election campaign in Trinidad and Tobago shows the extent to which many of the complexities, struggles and contradictions at the heart of the Caribbean novels of the 1950s and the 1960s are still being negotiated

Chapter 7.  Concluding remarks 175



in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, albeit by different means and, most likely, with different aims. In fact, the discursive construction of the present and future of Caribbean nations poses an authentic challenge to contemporary Caribbean politicians like Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who have the complex duty of addressing and redressing both the traumatic colonial experiences of the past and the complex inter-ethnic relationships and economic challenges of the present. In particular, when it comes to Trinidad and Tobago, one of the most evident consequences of a burdensome past of genocide, slavery and colonial exploitation is exemplified by the bi-lateral hostility between Africans and East Indians. Aptly defined by Shalini Puri (1997: 120) as “one of the great ironies of decolonization”, it represents a heavy inheritance with longstanding ramifications affecting claims to political legitimacy and national identity. The value of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) as a postcolonial critique is precisely its potential to represent a theory and method to address the What happened next? and other questions, by the means of a critical investigation of contemporary discourses from postcolonial settings in fields of actions other than the literary, such as politics and media. As the critical discursive analysis focuses simultaneously on linguistic analysis and on context, it emphasizes multimodal and multimethodological approaches that combine different levels of analysis of text in context, its social and historical situatedness, and the intertextual and interdiscursive dimensions. The discursive exploration of Caribbean nationalism is particularly promising because the region “repeatedly transgresses neat sociological dichotomies between primitive and modern, Western and non-Western, center and periphery” (Munasinghe 2002: 671). By offering a critical discursive perspective on identity, ethnicity and the complex power dynamics of the postcolonial Archipelago, CDS bridges an existing theoretical and analytical gap between the more macro aspects of socio-political investigation and the more micro aspects of linguistic analysis that has the potential to open up new prospects in Caribbean Studies. 7.3

Some final thoughts

The book has sought to provide some insights into the discursive and political strategies behind Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s election as the first East Indian woman PM of Trinidad and Tobago. In her 2010 campaign, Persad-Bissessar engaged with a vast number of topics across different political fields, and this book has shed critical light on many of them. For example, it has illustrated how Persad-Bissessar discursively constructed her gendered leadership and negotiated issues of democracy and political representativity in postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago. Also, it has explored how Persad-Bissessar engaged in the discursive construction of a

176 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

cohesive Trinidadian national identity, a longstanding issue in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural country caught between pluralism and creolization. While this study represents a fairly comprehensive investigation of PersadBissessar’s 2010 campaign, it is not without its own limitations in terms of scope and design. Above all, I regret that my study did not entail an in-depth analysis of the voice of Persad-Bissessar’s opponent Patrick Manning. As a partial justification to this, I may say that the PNM Secretariat denied me access to Manning’s speaking notes and materials from the 2010 Campaign, frustrating any possibility of a contrastive analysis. Other sources of data on the 2010 campaign, such as media coverage, could have been included. Also, the inclusion of ethnographic data (such as interviews with politicians or focus groups of electors) could have enriched the study and were not part of the research design due to constraints of time and space. The same constraints prevented me from embracing a fuller diachronic perspective or a wider geographical mapping of political discourse in the Caribbean, instead of concentrating on a case-study of an election campaign from one specific country. It is hoped that at least some of these aspects will be covered in future research projects. With the 2010 General Election in Trinidad and Tobago as a case-study, that blind spot between Creole Linguistics, Language Policy and Euro-American CDS has finally opened up to exploration. By choosing a political campaign from the Caribbean as an object of research, I hope to attract more critical discursive attention towards contemporary political, institutional and media discourses from the region, which have been largely overlooked in comparison to its literary and artistic forms of expression. However, this book sought to innovate not only in terms of its object of research but also in its theoretical and methodological choices. The nature of political discourse as a highly culture-bound text required a critical analysis, that is, not merely an investigation of linguistic features, but also an integrated socio-cultural ethnography paired with a deep historical understanding of Trinidad and Tobago’s postcolonial political context. With the 2010 People’s Partnership campaign as a case-study, I hope to have demonstrated the broader potential of a critical multimodal approach to Caribbean political discourse, drawing on the tradition of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), infused with multimodal insights from Social Semiotics. Although I cannot by any means claim to have reinvented DHA, I believe I have extended it in a new and promising direction in the light of the postcolonial critical imperative. In particular, the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) allows the exploration of topics and themes that are of particular interest in the Caribbean region and that, at the same time, acquire new levels of complexity and new shades of meaning when investigated in postcolonial contexts like Trinidad and Tobago. These include how national histories and identities are discursively constructed in

Chapter 7.  Concluding remarks 177



political discourse, the role of racial and ethnic diversity in intergroup relations, and how such in-groups and out-groups are created through discourse in multi-ethnic societies. Particularly fruitful in the Caribbean is the historical and ethnographic nature of DHA, and the customary integration of knowledge about historical sources and the social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded. As such, this book was intended to introduce the reader to the potential of CDS as a postcolonial critique, a promising concept that is deserving of further attention from scholars active in the field of CDS and Postcolonial Studies alike and which can open new ground both from a theoretical and an applied perspective. At the same time, this study has not only hoped to illustrate how CDS can be fruitfully applied to the postcolonial political context of the Caribbean, but also what CDS can and should learn when applied to socio-political contexts beyond the Euro-American zone. In fact, one of the main and broader implications that this work hopes to have for CDS as a theoretical and methodological paradigm is the need to engage in some necessary self-reflection beyond its markedly European scholarly milieu. A clear perception of one’s own positionality, a heightened consciousness of one’s own familiar framework of knowledge, and the awareness of the need for a context-dependent conceptualization are all CDS best practices that should be taken on board well beyond this specific case-study of Caribbean political discourse. In this volume, I have tried to explore complex themes such as gender performativity, ethnic identity, nationalism and the political process in a postcolonial context, by looking at how these issues are discursively negotiated in an election campaign. This has been made possible by a multimodal critical, discursive approach which is highly context-sensitive, historical and ethnographic in nature. If having an eye for contradictions is the job of the Caribbeanist, having one for detail is the role of the Linguist. Tackling research questions with an open, yet critical, mind is the only possible way forward in the exploration of contemporary postcoloniality, where a substantial critical and transdisciplinary approach to political discourse enables deeper reflections on the perpetuation of power relations and the production of ideology in hegemonic narratives from the Caribbean and beyond. 7.4

Epilogue: Kamla 2010–2015

Branded by Persad-Bissessar as coalition politics, the confluence of disparate ethnic, geographical, and apparently ideological factions in the People’s Partnership was saluted as potentially capable of marking a departure from the postcolonial malaise of rigid bureaucracy, persistent corruption and wasteful public expenditure in

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Trinidad and Tobago. By the time Kamla Persad-Bissessar won the elections, Patrick Manning was embattled not only with numerous allegations of corruption, but also with an economy on the slide, public debt increasing in the face of declining revenue, high food prices, increasing unemployment, a host of outstanding payments to contractors, outstanding VAT refunds, outstanding payments at State companies and a spiralling tide of criminality. Persad-Bissessar’s was, therefore, a thorny inheritance: the key to her mandate was not only economic restructuring, encompassing a thorough reconfiguration of public spending, but also social reform, which she kick-started by initiating a number of public enquiries to investigate the allegations of corruption against the Manning Administration. Bribes and political nepotism in Trinidad and Tobago did not start with Patrick Manning and did not end with him, rather they are a de facto feature of politics in the country, a constant topic of discussion in local media and lay conversations. Corruption is not only “the butt of jokes” and “the subject matter for calypsos”, but it is widely recognized as “endemic to the political system” (Rodney 2013: 3) and plays a major role in the profound scepticism toward parliamentary democracy in postcolonial countries like Trinidad and Tobago. After all, one of Persad-Bissessar’s winning arguments in the 2010 Elections was that the plurality of a coalition party would solve the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power. The People’s Partnership’s coalition politics should have been able to ensure a higher degree of accountability and democracy in the nation, while the party politics of PNM’s one party rule was negatively connoted as oligarchic and corrupt, a source of the party patronage that had been adversely affecting the country since its independence. However, as probably expected, Persad-Bissessar’s mandate was far from being immune to accusations of mismanagement and controversies, the biggest and most widely discussed of which are summarized in this section.2 In 2010, the Afro-Trinidadian academic Selwyn Cudjoe had saluted the People’s Partnership electoral victory with a publication provocatively entitled “Indian Time Ah Come.” While the book outlined the historical evolution of Indian political power in Trinidad from the East Indians’ arrival in 1845 to present day, the title was interpreted both as a way of admitting the political marginalization of East Indian Trinidadians as well as the existence of double-standards and discrimination against East Indians under PNM administration. At the same time, the title was a way of hinting at the widespread fears among the African-based PNM electorate of East Indian political domination of the country. The multi-ethnic nature of the People’s Partnership coalition could not have been stressed more in the 2010 Election campaign. Yet Persad-Bissessar was an East Indian woman and the biggest 2. For a more detailed overview of the main events in Persad-Bissessar’s 2010–2015 mandate as PM see Baptiste (2016).



Chapter 7.  Concluding remarks 179

and most important party in the coalition was still the East Indian-based United National Congress, which she herself led and represented. As expected, accusations of ethnic nepotism, partiality and discrimination were constant throughout Persad-Bissessar’s mandate and were also at the heart of the 2011 State of Emergency controversy. The debated state of emergency was imposed by Persad-Bissessar on August 21st, following a concentrated spate of murders (eleven in 48 hours) and remained in effect in mainland Trinidad until December 2011. Related provisions included a 9 p.m. curfew in hot spot areas and police authority to conduct searches and seizures without warrants. By early October, Persad-Bissessar claimed that more than 3,000 people had been arrested and about TT$750 million (US$117 million) in drugs had been seized thanks to her Anti-Gang Act, targeting the issues of drug smuggling, money laundering and gang culture which have affected the islands for years (Seepersad and Williams 2016). However, the state of emergency was heavily criticized by the opposition and civic groups, not only for the excessive force being used by police officers, but also because of the underlying ethnic connotation of gang-crimes and drug-dealing in Trinidad and Tobago. Given the association between these crimes and Afro-Trinidadian males under 35 years old, some local representatives were vocal about the treatment received by detainees, denouncing fears of ethnic and class profiling of African youths by an East Indian government. On the other hand, the East Indian and Syrian-Lebanese middle classes and business-owners praised the initiative as finally acknowledging an overlooked issue. Although thousands were arrested and held during the 5-month-long state of emergency, most were eventually released after their cases were reviewed by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Eventually, many arrested by the police and charged under the Anti-Gang Act filed claims of victimisation, wrongful imprisonment and false arrest against the Government, some of them managing to receive multi-million compensation a few years later (Loutoo 2018). Instilling ethnic fears among Tobagonians was again one of the strategies adopted by the PNM to win back Tobago at the local elections for the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) in January 2013. The Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP) led by Ashworth Jack had managed to secure the two Tobago seats in the 2010 General Elections as a member of the People’s Partnership coalition and was presenting a strong challenge to the PNM also for the local elections in Tobago. In the wake of the elections, the THA assemblyman and PNM candidate Hilton Sandy sparked a controversy by warning the Tobagonian electorate that a ship was anchored in Calcutta waiting to come to Tobago to take over the island should the TOP emerge victorious from the election (Baboolal 2013). While Sandy was accused of racism and was forced to apologize, his statements capitalized on a generalized mistrust of the Afro-Tobagonian majority towards East Indians and their

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fears of Indians taking over. Eventually, the TOP was defeated in a landslide by the PNM, losing the 4 seats it held previously and giving the PNM complete control of the Tobago House of Assembly. Later the same year, a historic 43.5% of the electorate voted in that Local Government General Election in Trinidad: the PNM surged ahead with 42%, securing 85 of the total number of 136 seats, while the People’s Partnership party managed to secure a mere 27% of the votes cast (and 44 seats). Such defeats in local elections were suffered throughout the People’s Partnership mandate and hinted at dissatisfaction on the part of the electorate, eventually allowing an accurate prediction of the results of the 2015 General Elections. Not only local election defeats, but also major scandals contributed to eroding the political trust in Persad-Bissessar’s coalition. When the country was still under the state of emergency, the then Justice Minister Herbert Volney passed an amendment to Section 34 of the Administration of Justice (Indictable Proceedings) Act 2011. Barring prosecution of individuals more than 10 years after the date of offence, the amendment provided a legal mechanism for impunity of serious crimes and sparked even more resentment towards the People’s Partnership. Referred to as the Section 34 fiasco, the amendment prompted protests from trade unions, civil society organisations as well as the PNM, which easily turned into widespread public outrage when the Trinidad Guardian reporter Denyse Renne discussed serious allegations of Government conspiracy and corruption in relation to the amendment. In particular, Renne denounced the connection between the amendment and an open case against UNC financiers and businessmen Ishwar Galbaransingh and Steve Ferguson, wanted on fraud and corruption charges related to the construction of Trinidad’s $ 1.6 billion Piarco International Airport terminal. To dispel the nationwide flurry of accusations, Persad-Bissessar fired Justice Minister Volney and eventually the law was repealed in 2013. By the time the Section 34 scandal was being settled, the so-called Emailgate brought into the spotlight new allegations of misconduct by government minsters in Persad-Bissessar’s administration. On May 20th 2013, the Leader of the Opposition Keith Rowley read 31 personal e-mails in a parliamentary session: the emails would have allegedly been exchanged between Persad-Bissessar, the then attorney general Anand Ramlogan, then national security advisor Gary Griffith and then government minister Suruj Rambachann and were aimed at a number of illegal acts, including conspiring to remove Roger Garspard from the post of Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and murder the Trinidad Guardian reporter Denyse Renne, in charge of the coverage for the aforementioned Section 34 scandal. Allegations resulted in an Integrity Commission inquiry and a police probe, and the investigation was conducted with the involvement of F. B. I., Google and Microsoft. Only two years later, in May 2015, the report stated that there were insufficient grounds for continuing the investigation and the case was dismissed. As a result,



Chapter 7.  Concluding remarks 181

Persad-Bissessar suspended Keith Rowley from Parliament for the remainder of the parliamentary term. With Manning having tripled the budget during his mandate, Persad-Bissessar’s budget increases were far more restrained. When she spoke publicly on her intentions in her Inauguration Speech on May 26th, 2010, Persad-Bissessar made this clear by stating that development was not supposed to be measured in the “grandeur of tall structures as an architectural manifestation of how far we have come”, but had more to do with a strong infrastructure platform and competitive business environment, as well as with education and alleviation of poverty. With failed infrastructures (such as the Brian Lara Stadium, the National Academy for the Performing Arts, and Las Alturas Housing Complex) often invoked as tangible examples of failings of governance (Jobson 2018), the People’s Partnership focused on much more ordinary infrastructure enterprises, including new waterlines and school construction projects as well as new water ponds and agricultural access roads. The only actual big project which Persad-Bissessar undertook was the longanticipated highway from San Fernando to Point Fortin, repeatedly promised since 1961 but never delivered. With an estimated cost of $ 1.2 billion, it was destined to be the largest and most expensive infrastructural endeavour ever executed in the country, intended to ease the traffic from commercial centres to the oil company towns of the South-West peninsula of Trinidad. Taking on the challenge of delivering, Persad-Bissessar believed the project would open up fertile space for business expansion and superior industrial access. In particular, a newly proposed section of the highway, the Debe-Mon Desir segment, promised to boost development in some of the rural, East Indian municipalities that constituted the strong electoral base of the ruling People’s Partnership. Ironically, it was the very segment from Debe to Mon Desir that was to cause Persad-Bissessar the most problems, as it encountered the hostility of the residents of the 13 rural communities of the Oropouche Lagoon area, directly affected by the construction of the highway. Under threat of losing their homes, agricultural lands and businesses, while at the same time uncertain of adequate compensation, they joined in the Highway Re-Route Movement (HRM) group under the lead of Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh, a Trinidadian environmentalist and activist. Using hunger strikes and vigils outside Persad-Bissessar’s office to gain media attention, Kublalsingh raised concerns about the potential social, environmental and economic impacts of the four-lane highway. His re-route project was less expensive to construct and would have not destroyed as many communities and valuable agricultural lands and wetlands. After the Government refused to review the construction of the controversial segment, Kublalsingh started a nine-month long hunger strike. When the People’s Partnership lost the 2015 General Elections, the incoming PNM government abandoned the controversial Debe to Mon Desir segment, and

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instead concentrated on completing other segments. Pending in the High Court since August 2012, the Debe to Mon Desir segment project eventually collapsed after hardly getting off the ground. The controversial segment can be regarded as the epitome of the People’s Partnership 5-year mandate, which started with high hopes after a successful and persuasive campaign, but was dogged by numerous controversial decisions and scandals, fostering a sense of disappointment in the electorate. Persad-Bissessar herself was often at the centre of gossip and derision, and constantly accused by media of suffering from long-time alcoholism, a rumour started by former UNC leader Basdeo Panday as they were competing for the UNC leadership in 2010. Such allegations questioned the nature of her leadership, especially during difficult moments of her mandate like the scandal outbreaks, to the point that Persad-Bissessar had to publicly deny having a drinking problem (Holder 2011). The gendered nature of these accusations has also been highlighted, as more or less proved alcohol consumption of male leaders in the country has never been associated with their capacity to lead as politicians (Ranjitsingh 2016). In the same vein, her fashion style and dress code were the object of ample scrutiny, in a way that saw no correspondence with the media treatment of former male PMs. Under constant national and media scrutiny, Persad-Bissessar navigated five difficult years of attacks on her policies, her decisions and her ability to lead, still managing to complete her mandate. Although she had promised to clean up the country from corruption, nepotism and racism, she did not manage to escape the same accusations that had been levelled at the PNM before her. With public perception shaped by the vast number of allegations of mismanagement, and the heavy toll taken by defeats in local elections, Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s People’s Partnership lost the General Election of September 2015. The People’s Partnership went from a 2010 position of 29 seats to 18 seats only, and was relegated to the Opposition, making way yet again for a 5-year return of the PNM.

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Index

A accountability  118, 121, 125, 162, 178 Afro–Creole  32, 43, 132, 140 vs Afro–Caribbean  21–22 agency  2, 13, 18 B Brathwaite, Edward Kamau  41, 44 British colonialism 23–31 elections 2010  112–114 C callaloo  44–45, 142, 169 calypso  62–63, 101–102, 109– 110, 120, 131, 144, 149, 166, 174 calypsonian see calypso Cambridge Analytica  170–173 Caribbean history 49–50 linguistics 6–7 romance  142, 169 sociology 39 CDS see Critical Discourse Studies coalition as United Force for Change 114–117, 122–126 ethnic inclusivity in  92–93, 130–136 vs party  118–121 code-switching  106–110, 182 colonial society  39 common political past  137, 142–143, 167 Congress of the People (COP) 2, 34–37, 92, 116, 120, 124, 133, 135, 172

context  58–60, 62–63, 65, 67–68 see also recontextualization COP see Congress of the People Creole language  6–7, 63, 103, 106–110, 157 society 41–44 Creolistics see Caribbean linguistics creolization  6–7, 27, 39, 41–45, 139, 176 Critical Discourse Studies  4, 6–9, 11–20, 53–54, 57–60, 62, 67, 170, 175–177 Critical Theory  9–10, 12, 17–18, 55 critique  4, 8–9, 11–13, 15, 17–19, 51, 55, 59, 175, 177 D deictics 126–130 DHA see Discourse-Historical Approach discourse 13–19 see also Critical Discourse Studies Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)  4, 20, 24, 48–50, 54–58, 65, 68–69, 71–72, 176–177 discursive construction of a common national body 97, 137, 154–157 of female leadership  79–89 of national history  142–146 of national identity  48–50, 137–142 of the coalition party  118–122 of the postcolonial nation 44–46

of Trinidadian national icons 49, 137, 147–148, 150 discursive strategies  68–75 diversity ethnic  24, 45, 130–132, 136, 155, 163, 167, 169 vs difference  140–142 E East Indian  21–22 elections see general elections ethnicity  21–24, 28–29, 31, 39, 42–43, 48, 130, 135, 140, 154, 157, 163, 167, 170–172, 174–175 F feminist  86, 88–89, 166 fictionalization of politics  122–125 Foucault, Michel  9, 13 Frankfurt School see Critical Theory G gender  80–83, 89, 93–95, 161, 163, 165–67, 172, 177 general elections  31–38 Gramsci, Antonio  9, 16 H Hindu  4, 26–30, 42–43, 47, 88, 134, 151 I identity  20–21, 39, 44–50, 65–67, 69–71, 126–28, 131–133, 136–38, 140–43, 147–48, 153–154, 163, 168–170, 174–177 ideology  7–8, 11–13, 15–16, 32, 44, 83, 174, 177

206 Politics, Ethnicity and the Postcolonial Nation

indentureship  26–27, 137, 142–144, 168 see also Kala Pani Indo-Caribbean  21, 27, 166, 174 in-group  71, 79, 99, 101, 107, 111, 136–140, 147, 177 interdiscursivity  58–59, 97, 132, 137, 151–152 intertextuality  58, 85, 97, 137, 145, 151, 158 K Kala Pani  143–144, 168 King, Martin Luther  132, 137, 152–153 knowledge  13–15, 17–19, 65, 101, 106, 168, 171–173, 177 see also power L language policy  7, 176 leadership  19–21, 28–30, 37, 44, 79–81, 83–85, 87–89, 94–95, 97, 166, 175, 182 M Manning, Patrick  2, 20, 34–36, 70, 79, 88, 99, 101, 104–107, 111, 116–118, 127, 145–147, 171, 176, 178 as Emperor  2, 95, 102–103, 105–106, 110, 135 Marxism 10 metaphor  45–46, 53, 72–74, 108–109, 130–131, 139–140, 146, 158, 166 Movement for Social Justice (MSJ)  2, 36, 116, 121, 133 MSJ see Movement for Social Justice multimodal analysis  67, 171 see also Social Semiotics N NAR see National Alliance for Reconstruction National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR)  33–34, 99

National Joint Action Committee (NJAC)  2, 33, 36, 116, 122, 133, 135 nationalism  23–24, 39, 45–47, 140, 142, 167, 169–170, 175, 177 NJAC see National Joint Action Committee O out-group  71, 79, 99, 102, 104, 139–140, 147, 177 Obama, Barack  7, 152, 159, 173 see also Yes We Can P pelau  44–46, 142, 169 People’s National Movement (PNM)  2–3, 19–20, 29–37, 70–71, 74, 85, 99, 92, 107–111, 113–114, 116–121, 138, 140, 144, 147, 150, 156, 159, 165, 167–168, 171, 173, 176, 178–182 People’s Partnership  2–4, 19–20, 35–37, 63, 65–67, 73, 76, 78, 86–88, 90–94, 99–102, 104, 109–116, 118–125, 127–133, 135–137, 141, 143, 147, 150–152, 155–157, 159, 162–163, 167, 170–172, 176–182 as Force for Change  66, 114–117, 122–125 Persad–Bissessar, Kamla  36–37 as angel  94–97, 110 as female leader  21, 86–94 as mother of the nation  80– 85, 88–89, 95, 97, 104, 134 as self–made woman  86–89 picong  70, 79, 103, 105–106, 109 plural society  39–41, 139 pluralism  10, 32, 39–40, 132, 176 PNM see People’s National Movement political campaign  4, 21, 53, 63, 68, 171, 176 context  43, 63, 71, 79, 176–177 manifesto 66

political discourse analysis  50–54, 62–67 mediatization of  52–54, 62, 91 professionalization of  53–54 rhetoric in  48, 139, 146 Postcolonial CDS  12, 18, 170 Postcolonial Studies  9–14, 47, 173–174, 177 Post–Structuralism 12 power 12–19 pronouns  73, 84–85, 126–127, 130, 143, 152 R race  3, 21–22, 30, 39, 119, 141, 153–154, 157–158, 162, 165, 170 vs ethnicity  21–22 recontextualization  59, 85, 145, 152–155, 158 religion  26, 28–30, 39–40, 42, 47, 88, 97, 132, 134, 137, 151–157 representativeness 112–113, 118–119, 121, 130 S Said, Edward  10, 13–14 slavery  5, 25–26, 28, 31, 42, 50, 85, 113, 142–147, 152–153, 168, 175 abolition of  31, 120, 144– 145, 168 vs Kala Pani  143–144, 168 Smith, M. G.  39–40, 44, 46–47, 139 Social Semiotics  50, 59–60, 176 strategies see discursive strategies Subaltern Studies Group  10 T Tobago history of  23 relations between Trinidad and  154–157, 179–180, 179–180 Tobago Organization of the People (TOP)  2, 33, 36–37, 57, 77–78, 84, 116, 120, 129– 130, 133, 136, 157, 172, 179–180

Index 207

TOP see Tobago Organization of the People Trinidad and Tobago 2010 general elections  35–38 colonial history  25–31 ethnic composition  23–24 geography 155 political history  31–35 Trinidadian Creole see Creole Language U UNC see United National Congress

UNC-A see United National Congress-Alliance United National Congress (UNC)  1, 3, 33–34, 36–37, 65, 80–81, 84–85, 91–94, 120, 124, 128–130, 133, 135, 137, 158, 167–168, 171–173, 179–180, 182 United National CongressAlliance (UNC-A)  34

W We Will Rise  66, 85, 87, 89, 93, 97, 111, 134, 147, 151–152, 155–164 Williams, Eric  3, 29, 31–32, 65, 105–106, 121, 135, 138, 140–141, 144, 148, 150 Wylie, Christopher  172 see also Cambridge Analytica

V video ads  66, 123–125, 159–161 Visual Grammar see Social Semiotics

Y Yes we Can  137, 159–160, 162

This book explores the politics of ethnicity and nationalism in the Caribbean from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. Focusing on political communication in Trinidad and Tobago, it offers unique socio-political insights into one of the most complex and diverse countries of the Archipelago. Through a detailed reconstruction of Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s 2010 victorious run for office, this book offers ample empirical evidence of the multimodal discursive strategies that held the key to the success of the first woman PM candidate and her inter-ethnic coalition bid to overcome political tribalism in the country. In parallel, it explores the implications and challenges of the postcolonial Trinbagonian national project, caught between pluralism and creolization. Through its innovative, contextdependent and interdisciplinary CDS approach, this book breaks new ground in Caribbean Studies while at the same time broadening the horizons of the Euro-American tradition of Political Discourse Studies to address the complexities of global postcoloniality.

“Systemic analytical detail in this book is based on a sophisticated theoretical framework consisting of an impressive number of references in discourse studies and other disciplines, to which this book makes an original contribution.” Teun A. van Dijk, Centre of Discourse Studies “Esposito has conducted a wonderfully incisive study of the complex interplay of ‘race’, ethnicity, gender, history, culture, politics and identity in modern Trinidad. She writes with the familiarity of an insider, the objectivity of an outsider, and the commitment of a true scholar. The argument she advances is theoretically innovative and happily free of jargon.” Anton Allahar, University of Toronto “Mixing postcolonial theory, history and multimodal

isbn 978 90 272 0861 3

critical discourse analysis, this book tells a compelling story and maps out a promising new sub-discipline – postcolonial critical discourse analysis.” Theo van Leeuwen, University of Southern Denmark

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