Navigating the Cultural Marketplace: Negotiating the Folk in Trinidadian Performance

Abstract

This essay explores Trinidadian cultural production as it moves through the bumpy process of defining a cohesive cultural nationalism. Focusing on contested ideas of ‘the folk’ across the 20th century and into the new millennium, this essay considers how cultural performance plays an integral part in articulating Trinidadian notions of belonging. From state-sponsored cultural institutions to independent performance companies, local cultural production serves as a mighty signifier for both civic belonging and civic exclusion. Examining examples of Trinidadian performance on the public stage and in the studio environment, I argue that embodiments of culture become powerful tools to broker meanings of the nation, consolidate and define subjectivities, and to determine civic belonging and responsibility not only in relation to the state but– as importantly – within the community of each performing company's constituents and practitioners. Performance can be used to complicate notions of a stable folk practice, local–national identity and community by opening up new renderings of localness, combining or juxtaposing rural and urban forms of expression along with bringing different ethnic, class, generational and gender-coded performance styles into contact. In this era, historic cultural entities such as Carnival are in a dynamic relationship with contemporary cultural workers. Artists participate in these institutions, but they also chart creative paths outside them attempting to stamp their own visions of local creative practice for Trinidad's future.