Tony's Oldies: Visualising Vincentian Diasporic Memory

Abstract

was beginning to see that this could be a photographic museum in cyberspace and a way of connecting Vincentians and keeping Vincentians connected with the homeUnd.- Tony Hadley, Tony's Oldies WebmasterIF YOU GOOGLE THE PHRASE 'Tony's Oldies', you will access a website portal to 156 pages of photographic images. The access icons to the individual pages are designed to look like so many miniature shoe boxes where old photographs might be stored. On the left of the page is a roll call of over three hundred deceased Vincentians, many with obituaries, from around the world. The site, which also contains a guest book section and commentaries on Vincentian history and lifestyle, is built around a core consisting of an independently run cyber-museum of Vincentian photographs, mastered by the Vincentian-born photographer Tony Hadley.After completing his secondary education in St Vincent, Tony Hadley emigrated to Canada in the late 1960s and settled in Montreal. In August 2001, after many years as a professional photographer, he registered a website at www.tonyoldies.homestead.com.1 This was the start of Tony's Oldies, where he began by making available his collection of 1960s black and white photographs of fellow secondary school pupils, mostly from the Boys' Grammar School in Kingstown, St Vincent. He describes the start-up as follows: after obtaining a scanner he some of these old images . . . that no one else had seen to a school friend who sent them out to others . . . the reaction was fantastic . . . and soon was getting requests from other people. was beginning to lose track of what sent to whom.2 The site sprang spontaneously out of popular interest, and soon a form of horizontal comradeship was being practised among those who had images to offer and memories to share, as many visitors commented on and supplemented his collection.By October 2011 the site had over five hundred photographs covering a wide range of St Vincent island topics. In a ten-year period the site had accumulated a total of 406,665 visits. For the first ten months of 2011 the site received a total of 13,454 hits from twenty-nine countries - of which 70 per cent were from Canada and the USA, 10 per cent from the United Kingdom, 10 per cent from St Vincent and the Grenadines and the remaining 10 per cent from the rest of the Caribbean (4.1 per cent) and sixteen other countries. In an email interview, Hadley explained that as the number and range of images he received began to increase, I started to think about a vision for this site ... was beginning to see that this could be a photographic museum in cyberspace and a way of connecting Vincentians and keeping Vincentians connected with the homeland. Adding the Guestbook and the Obituaries were important tools in the connection business. also added links to local news.3Hadley 's website has three objectives: recording memory through photographs, museology and Vincentian connectedness. The images in the museum comprise commercial postcards that offer an outsider perspective on the society, in addition to historical photographs contributed by Vincentians located in St Vincent as well as those Vincentians located in the diaspora. However, although the objectives of the cyber-museum could be read as 'tropicalisation' as defined by Krista Thompson in An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque,* will argue that the style and content of Tony's Oldies present a challenge to this form of nostalgia. Not only does the site provide an alternative to the touristic gaze as embodied by postcard images, it actually subverts the outsider view, replacing it with a nuanced insider perspective, that is, one that falls between insider and outsider. This perspective presents a challenge to the conventional idea of a national museum by challenging the national (insider) idea of the meaning of heritage. In addition, it complicates the conceptualisation of diaspora by offering alternative priorities for the recounting of memory and history. …