CULTURE, KNOWLEDGE AND MEANING A conscious and uplifting Culture Week, 2013 to my Virgin Islands kindred, especially my persevering colleagues in cultural work who keep the flambeau burning long after the comfoo dance is done. I am hoping we can use this time to remember and demonstrate that KNOWLEDGE is key to meaningful, everyday cultural living...knowledge of our cosmos, our story, our heritage, our ancestors, our elders, our s/heroes, our journey, our suffering, our achievements, our homeland/s, our re/connections, our traditions, our values, our expressions, our capabilities, our possibilities, our legacy, ourselves... In my experience as a cultural studies researcher and teacher, I constantly struggle with certain questions. What meaning is Culture (with a capital C) if our cultural practice remains limited to a short season and a small show? What will happen to Virgin Islands Culture if we do not train more historians, archaeologists, curators, artists? When will we get a decent public library, archives, and museum? When will our cultural institutions and policies be able to adequately support and sustain our quest for knowledge formation and cultural preservation? How can we convince our children that Virgin Islands cultural practice really gives our lives that vital, ongoing, and collective sense of meaning, of identity, of be/longing? In the meantime, I hold on to the hope that the promotion of Virgin Islands Culture will lead us to the conviction that Culture once taken seriously, once given the actual human and financial resources to move it past the cottage paradigm, will indeed help us to live confidently in the everyday knowledge of who and what we are in light of where we have been, how we have overcome, and what we hope to be/come in the world.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 20:49:44 +0000
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