By Citlalli Alcaraz-Curtis, a final-year Honours student in Art History at the University of St Andrews
In her recent print edition, A Hymn to the Banished (2022), multi-media artist Annalee Davis explores the imperial linkages between Barbados and Scotland through a consideration of the individual. Removing Britain’s colonial project and installation of plantations throughout the West Indies from its typically generalised historical context, Davis instead considers this historical period through a carefully curated collection of personalised, intimate objects. Containing the knowledge, hopes and losses of the women affected by transplantation from Scotland to Barbados as indentured labourers, Davis explores the interconnections between the women’s local spaces and the transnational culture they contributed to. Deliberating Davis’ exhibition in relation to the ongoing environmental crisis, in this short blog post I consider how Davis’ prioritisation of voice and narrative functions as an instrument for cultivating understanding, empathy and change both historically and today.
In today’s globalised planet, where the happenings of nearly every nation are immediately available to us, we find ourselves often facing scales that appear too large to comprehend. Nowhere is this truer than in news of the environmental crisis, whose status as a global occurrence has led to the dissemination of this topic centring mostly around either overwhelming statistical information that serves to distance the viewer, or dramatic recounts of tragic events that spectacularise this issue. In the need to inform the many, consciousness of the presence of the environmental crisis within localised spaces has been dampened. A lack of diversity in the perspectives we hear on the environmental crisis and the scale through which it is fed to us has generated hopelessness and apathy, exacerbating the distance between local responsibility and the global scale the crisis functions on. As ecofeminist scholar Doreen Massey states, there is alive in every space a ‘specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations’ [1]. Like the identities that Davis captures in her work, it is through raising the experiences of the individual that a deeper understanding of, not only local space can be gleamed, but how the sharing of local cultures and knowledge can have global impact.
Whilst the work of Davis functions to comment on the broader colonial links between Scotland and Barbados, it does so through a collection of sensitive, individualized studies into the women who were affected by these imperial links. The prayers, incantations, names, belongings and personal knowledge contained within Davis’s print edition look beyond the greater statistics that we typically associate with the overwhelming scale of suffering and devastation that was caused by, and indeed still exists due to, British imperialism, and instead magnifies the voice of the individual – the narratives that are all too often glossed over. Considering the human connections forged between the forcibly transplanted enslaved Africans and the indentured labourers dispatched from Scotland, Davis highlights personal narrative and cultural knowledge as the foundation of the new globally influenced culture born within the locality of Barbados.

As Karen J. Warren states, ‘narrative provides a way of conceiving of ethics and ethical meaning as emerging out of particular situations moral agents find themselves in, rather than as being imposed on those situations as a derivation from some predetermined, abstract rule or principle’ [2]. In centring the voices and experiences of these women through a series of individual items and artifacts, we are provided with a series of links which span across the various nationalities, journeys and landscapes that these women found themselves in. Beginning with PART I: As long as we see, and we know and we remember (Merle Collins) (Fig.1) and PART II: A Fishnet from Glenburnie (Fig.2) wherein the objects shown are deeply tied to the Scottish landscape and traditional labour, our eyes trace the journey of these indentured labourers, whose items gradually become increasingly intertwined with cultural aspects gained from Barbados and the enslaved African workers they lived alongside. By Part IX: An Impossible Map (Fig.3), we see not only the cultures of Scotland and Barbados intertwined, but the physical contours of the two landscapes, linked by imperialism but also, as Davis has shown, through the social relations and culture that the identities alive in these pieces inspired.

Whilst A Hymn to the Banished links perhaps less explicitly to environmental matters than earlier work Davis has produced, implicit in the art contained in this exhibition at the Wardlaw Museum is a link between two seemingly disparate landscapes: Scotland and Barbados. Considered through the narratives of women whose stories and experiences Davis here presents, we can see how the degradation of Barbados’ landscape under colonial rule is intrinsically tied to the lives of those exploited alongside it. In her seminal 2004 text, Caliban and the Witch, Marxist feminist Silvia Federici highlights how the commodification of common land in Britain beginning in the 16th century would not only go on to influence plantation culture during British imperialism, but also disproportionately affected women, who, unable to support themselves through traditionally masculine forms of labour, utilised common land to a greater degree. As English and Scottish landscapes found themselves being rapidly privatised, in Barbados the combined knowledge of enslaved female workers and indentured labourers facilitated new forms of survival, with both groups of women often collaborating in ‘building a vast network of buying and selling relations which evaded the laws passes by the colonial authorities’ [3]. Utilising their knowledge of planting and growing, both enslaved women and indentured female labourers reappropriated the knowledge and labour they were exploited for to become market vendors in their own right, opposing the capitalist structural conditions imposed by colonial landowners by beginning an ‘inter-generational transmission of knowledge and cooperation’ [4]. As is seen in both the writing of Federici and in Davis’ work, small, individual acts of resistance function as the building blocks for a greater culture – one that can then go on to inform the fabric of a landscape.

The effects of the climate crisis, like the colonial landscape, can feel removed from us in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom due to its nature as a process that disproportionately affects certain parts of the world over others, especially in the Global South. Combined with the statistical way this crisis is fed to us, it becomes a matter that revolves around localised instances, acting, as Massey states, as a new ‘source of geographical uneven development’ [5]. However, as Davis’ work expresses, this way of seeing is entirely reductive. The global and the local are not only intertwined but reliant on each other, their historic collaborations facilitating culture on a large and small scale. Like the items that Davis connects throughout A Hymn to the Banished, it is through not only finding these links but highlighting them that important narratives can come to light. As we view these items, learning the names of the women and willingly listening to their voices, we too take part in this trans-mission of knowledge – one that through this act of viewing now not only spans space but time. Much like these women it is through a willingness to listen, to uplift diverse voices that new cultures can be made and life sustained apart from the greater structures that look upon the earth as an economic investment.
[1] Massey, Doreen, ‘A Global Sense of Place,’ in Space, Place and Gender, 146-156. University of Minnesota Press : Minneapolis, 1994. 156
[2] Warren, Karen J., Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 103
[3] Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia : Brooklyn, N.Y, 2004. 113
[4] Ibid, 113
[5] Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place,’ 156
Recommended sources for further reading:
Beinart, William; Hughes, Lotte, ‘Environmental Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Caribbean Plantations,’ in Environments and Empire, 22-39. Oxford Academic: Oxford, 2007
Fiskio, Janet, ‘Dancing at the End of the World: The Poetics of the Body in Indigenous Protest,’ in Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos, 101-113. Routledge: New York; London, 2017.
Roberts, Jennifer L., ‘Things: Material Turn, Transnational Turn,’ American Art, 2:1. (2017), 64-69
Bibliography:
Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia: Brooklyn, N.Y., 2004
Massey, Doreen, ‘A Global Sense of Place,’ in Space, Place and Gender, 146-156. University of Minnesota Press : Minneapolis, 1994
Warren, Karen J., Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: USA, 2000