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"The article discusses the role that the visual arts and museums-through the way their framing and selection choices shape viewers' perception-play in the construction and deconstruction of post/colonial Caribbean identities. The locus of the analysis is a multimedia installation titled White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece, which was mounted at the Barbados Museum by Barbadian Canadian visual artist Joscelyn Gardner in 2004. The artist's aim in the installation was to expose the telling gaps, silences, and omissions in regard to black and white kinship and inter-racial relations in artistic productions of the colonial period. One such production was the sub-genre of portraiture known as the conversation piece, which was fashionable among an emerging middle class that included colonial landowners and merchants eager to use that visual medium to simultaneously document the wealth their colonial connections brought them and disavow their use and abuse of black bodies to create that wealth. In challenging the conventions of the conversation piece, Gardner recovers unspoken and suppressed stories from the colonial Caribbean past in order to re-present black and white Creole females identities; and in her use of the installation to 'intervene' into items displayed in permanent exhibits, she demonstrates how the Museum can become a site of active contestation of received knowledge."

Recent scholarship in trauma and postcolonial studies has called for more wide-ranging and at the same time more specific paradigms in trauma theory in order to accommodate the complexities of trauma evidenced in postcolonial writing. The work of sociologist Kai Erikson provides a useful model for unpacking the diachronic nature of postcolonial trauma, and for acknowledging the multiple social fractures that trauma inflicts. In a case study demonstrating Erikson's applicability, I show how common tropes of trauma narrative are used as more than an adherence to convention in Marinovich and Silva's memoir, The Bang-Bang Club, which recounts the experiences of white South African photographers covering Soweto's Hostel War in the early 1990s. These narrative strategies produce a space of non-resolution in which the trauma of violence and witnessing can appear.

This essay considers the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs in the context of psychoanalytic trauma theory involving repetition, memory, temporality and narrative formation. The American response to the photographs, especially from military investigators, revealed their urgent investigative need to 'plot' and temporalise the event on an axis of idiosyncratic mistakes in judgement. The response among many Iraqis, however, was to encode the event as a repetition, a latent cultural memory in a longe dure of traumatic historical encounters between the Middle East and the 'West'. Psychoanalysis as a critical method is useful in examining the relation between repetition and memory and the compulsion to 'bind' the energy of individual and historical trauma by narrating, sequencing and organising. The challenge presented to the US Abu Ghraib inquiry team - and also to this study - is a uniquely digital one: an over-abundance of photographs in the form of digital media encoded with metadata. The military investigation's response was to time-stamp images to frame the plot sequence, followed by the clicking of the 'Save As …' button: a mnemonic act of re-naming, categorising, hyperlinking and culturally archiving the digital images in accordance with their role in the plot.

"The paper reflects on the tension that the process of sensing a nation brings to the formation of a post-colony in Southeast Asia. The "aesthetic" in this context creates forms of sensibility of the "national," rendering it present in the world and endowing it with certain identity-effects. On the other hand, it also posits an exceptional singularity, at once discriminating against subjectivities that resist to be contained within the national project and achieving the distinction of autonomy. This process foregrounds moments of finitude, improvisation, and intimacy, aspects of the aesthetic that are central to the crafting of the national and its art."