The ballad of Adelbert Bryan

I want to mirror Bastian’s two historical accounts in the journalistic representations of cultural events. What was emphasised in the journalistic articles from 1998; the experienced history or the documented? And how is that binary reflected in

journalistic concepts like freedom of speech and objectivity? Might the journalists learn from Adelbert Bryan’s intervention and contention that he has a right to speak – more so than ‘the other colours’ – because he is Crucian? It seems fair to say that Senator Bryan’s view as it is presented here is both locally and racially biased in the sense that he argues for political priority to be given to people of Crucian and African descent and because he claims a kind of Crucian authenticity. However his position raises the question already mentioned above: What are the political implications of the decision to perform the historical event in the way it was done?: Who got to speak, who was heard and who was silenced? Put in journalistic terms the question is about how ‘objective’ the representation of this particular historical event is and if there are degrees of ‘freedom of speech’ involved in a less than ‘objective’ representation?

The analysis above has shown that Adelbert Bryan was portrayed and described as aggressive, as ridiculous and as a criminal, on top of which the quotes underlined the irrationality of his account. Senator Bryan is ‘the madman’ contrasted to the civilisation standing in shock and awe over the wildness of his behaviour. His portrait sets up an opposition between him and the reader in which this element of disorder needs to be suppressed in order to develop ‘reason’ (Foucault 1989). Bryan disrupts order with the ambivalence he produces (Baumann 1991). Bryan is black and he speaks for the case of the African descendants in St Croix. Governor Roy Schneider is also black – as is more than 80% of the USVI population – however; within the journalistic narrative he is placed on the side of the ‘establishment’ and order and thus on the side of the white governor before him, von Scholten. In the community of the USVI it is not so much a question of colour as it is a question of belonging – it’s a question of ‘having been there twenty years and lived through at least one major hurricane’¹⁰² or being ‘ban’ya’. The narrative structures of journalistic cultural memories calling for identification thus assume an important position and the personal and political positions of the journalist-subjects become pivotal.

If Bryan constitutes ‘racial’ division, then The Daily News reporter, Bedminster (1998), writes about the future, present and past coinciding in the minds and hearts of

102 Bill Kossler made this questionable remark during an interview about his journalistic work in the territories. Kossler is white, male and in his forties. He is born, raised and has been working for most of his life in ‘continental’ US.

the audience in a unifying – or perhaps post-racial – context and does not mention the particulars of race, gender, ethnic origin and class. In this way Bedminster may claim an ‘objective’ position and thus that she is speaking for all USVI citizens and allowing freedom of speech for all. However, in feminist tradition this would be a mistake. Feminist theorists have argued for ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991) and ‘strong objectivity’ (Harding 1993) stemming from an acknowledgement of particularities. In chapter 1 I connected these theories to the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, in which emphasis in knowledge production is placed on sensorial experience and embodiedness. Both feminist and ‘race’ scholars have underscored the importance of embodied differences of experience. Feminist theorists argue that in order to understand and critique the foundations of a given knowledge claim one has to understand and be able to reflect on one’s own particularities and situatedness.

Reflexiveness is thus pivotal to engaging in a ‘strong objectivity’ which is rooted in the scientists’ (and I argue the journalists’) understanding of their own point of departure. This means that particularities such as gender, ethnic origin and ‘race’

become crucial to ‘objectivity’ – without an acknowledgement of difference and diversities there is no ‘objectivity’, the feminist theorists argue. ‘Race’ scholars in particular have developed theories about the interpellating force of visual difference.

The experience of looking different from the ‘white’ norm and the double consciousness (DuBois) or third-person experiences (Fanon) this perception enhances creates a certain position from where the world is viewed and known. Feminist ethnographer Gloria Wekker (2006) develops a radical relation against objectivity when she suggests that ‘methodology provides information about the various ways in which one locates oneself – psychologically, socially, linguistically, geographically, epistemologically, and sexually – to be exposed to experience in a culture’ (Wekker 2006:4). Wekker’s ‘inverted model’ allows her to take upon herself an active and generative role in her research on female Afro-Surinamese sexuality. Wekker’s implication in her research is total in the sense that she acknowledges that her own methodological position – as ‘an Afro-Surinamese anthropologist who loves women’

(Wekker 2006:4) and who is romantically involved with the main informant of her research – calls attention to the always implicated and complicit position of the researcher. Journalist-subjects may find inspiration in Wekker’s conceptualisation of positionality by bearing in mind the embodiedness and embeddedness of anyone who tries to tell another subject’s story.

Wekker’s positionality draws the concept of ‘objectivity’ into question and helps deconstruct the concept. In a complementary move, Gayatri Spivak (1988) questions whether the ‘subaltern’ can speak and thereby she challenges the ‘western’

researchers who represent the ‘subaltern’ in various studies. Researchers as well as journalist-subjects continuously struggle with the consequences of their findings and their writings. How does a researcher or a journalist-subject avoid creating the problem which s/he is uncovering? How does the anthropologist avoid presenting their informants – the ‘subaltern’ – as other? And how does the journalist-subject avoid belittling or demonising their object of information? Bedminster (1998) universalised the USVI public implicitly against the disorderly figure of Bryan.

Bedminster’s journalistic assumption was that ‘western’ journalistic objectivity speaks for all in equal representation and diversity if differences are not taken into account. By giving voice to the cultural and historical re-enactments and productions, journalists are allowing several accounts of history to be heard. However, Spivak’s critique of ‘western’ academics can be levelled at ‘western’ journalists as well; that is, the assumption of African collectivity in the USVI territories represented through politicians such as Senator Bryan and the re-enactments become a limited and forced homogeneous account of a heterogeneous and extremely diverse reality of a diasporic and post-colonial population. The fact that a majority of USVI journalists are in fact born, raised and trained in the continental US makes this critique even more pertinent.

Taking Wekker’s position and regarding the journalist-subject’s presence and agency as constituting of (the future of) journalistic practice and production may be over-stepping the mark, but a qualified reflection upon Wekker’s positionality should be advised.

Several journalistic accounts have been given about what happened during the scheduled re-enactment of the 1848 emancipation in 1998. All of these have displayed political or social bias – that is, they have all said more than what was written. In this case study I am trying to draw out the implicit cultural and historical assumptions of the journalistic statements. Though there are different versions the journalistic practices seem to reproduce an account based on universal objectivity, which is taken to mean to be undifferentiated and which feminist theorists have exposed as a disembodied and disembedded ‘god-trick’. The USVI constitute a postcolonial

community of diasporic majority and the islands are presently under the jurisdiction of the US as well as being culturally, historically, geographically and in terms of migration within the population, a part of the Caribbean island chain. These intrinsic diversities do not mean, however, that the journalistic representation of the culture there is beyond the reach of the paradigm of modernity. Feminist, ‘race’ and postcolonial theories – and theories of embodied and embedded journalistic practice and subjectivities – therefore offer new ways of analysing the tensions and questions involved in USVI and Danish journalism about the historical and cultural representations in the USVI territories. This does not have to take the form of an elaborate in-depth anthropological study in which the journalist-subjects not only reflect on their complicity in the story but create the story through it. Rather the reflection and acknowledgement of the journalist-subject’s positionality may guide the journalistic knowledge claim and allow for an ethical response.

In the following I will discuss the claim of historical representation in the re-enactment with ideas of memory and history presented earlier through the Deleuzian notion of history as ‘singular memory’. I will moreover discuss how this Deleuzian – European-philosophical – concept relates to the cultural memory that the USVI rely on in the absence of their archives.