Identity Politics: Struggles over Symbols, Culture and History

Abstract

Following the conquest of Trinidad, the British Administration had the opportunity to impose its own cultural forms and symbols on the small community of resident Amerindians, Spanish settlers and their African slaves. Over the following decades, as a more heterogeneous population mosaic was implanted through successive waves of African, Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish and Syrian immigration, slowly English values, language, aesthetics and institutions became dominant and emerged as the measure of social status and preferences in practically all spheres of colonial life. To be sure, a totally integrated society was not forged from the disparate diversity of cultures that were imported in the creation of an essentially plural immigrant society. Rather, British norms and practices were superimposed as a veneer to be imitated or absorbed by the non-western immigrant groups. The different communities adapted differently to the new order of British imperial control. Even the proud and more numerous French planters who resisted absorption by the English, keeping their cultural boundaries in language and religion initially preserved, in the long run succumbed and all the Europeans of British, French and Spanish extraction became assimilated into what became known as the ‘French Creoles’, constituting the new cultural elite and the carriers of the hegemonic European colonial way of life. English and Christian symbols superseded all others and were elevated to a vaunted acceptable civilizational status.