Abstract
Abstract This article aims to explore, how the struggle over the sacred and the secular is enacted within the material culture of the front room as an index of the double consciousness that takes place in the black every day. The scared is often reduced to the purely religious, but unshackling it, and engaging with the sacred as a spectrum of spiritual experience that illuminates its dialogic relationship with the political, and therefore the secular. Reclaiming the sacred provides a critical praxis towards decolonising the legacy of coloniality in the context of postcolonial modernity. As a cultural institution of self-making, valorising the material culture of the front room as a space of black interiority resists the racist trope that we live on the street, and have no homes to go to, with families and values. This interiority has shaped, and been shaped by the cultural politics of postwar Caribbean migration, and reveals the rich complexity of “black domestic life” that the “generality of society” rarely understands. Connecting the spiritual with the political provides a psychic recuperation towards resisting and healing from trauma as a process in an ongoing structuring of colonial power, cultural imperialism, and racial violence. This article will draw on research in curating my installation-based exhibitions, The West Indian Front Room (2005-06) and Rockers, Soulheads and Lovers: Sound Systems Back in da Day (2015-16).
Highlights
There is often a designated space in the domestic interior, if space is available, where the ritual of receiving guests takes place
This article aims to explore, how the struggle over the sacred and the secular is enacted within the material culture of the front room as an index of the double consciousness that takes place in the black every day
As a cultural institution of self-making, valorising the material culture of the front room as a space of black interiority resists the racist trope that we live on the street, and have no homes to go to, with families and values
Summary
There is often a designated space in the domestic interior, if space is available, where the ritual of receiving guests takes place. The quintessential example of this material culture is inscribed in the aesthetics, gendered domestic practices and prescribed codes of behaviour of front rooms in postwar Caribbean migrant homes, where there was a struggle between colonial “sacred” tropes of respectability, propriety, and decorum, and the “secular” stylistic signification of post-colonial modernity and consumer culture. This sensibility comes through the dressing and curation of objects of affect as shrines/ altars that invoked on a sensorial, emotional and spiritual level, serenity and pleasure in the home. Exploring the sensuality of the corporeal body on the dance-floor is supported by Julian Henriques’ “sonic bodies” (2010), Joy Dent’s diasporic “joy and pleasure” (1992), and Audre Lorde’s connection of the spiritual with the political through the “erotic” of the every day (1984)
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