black jamaicans and historic preservation

Dianne T. Golding Frankson I'm working on the same thing. Over three hundred plus years, the major visual culture of Jamaicans comprised colonial architecture. African sculpture, like African languages, was taboo. The entire visual African heritage went into those buildings. But it did so in a subtle and underplayed way. That is the essence of creole visual culture. We take pride in the spoken and musical manifestation of that culture, but none at all in the visual, since it's thought to be entirely white and foreign. When we wipe out this heritage, we lose the only real visual culture Jamaicans possess. And since the largest part of the brain is devoted to visual experience, when this culture is erased, Jamaicans become a stunted and deformed people. This is not a good thing, and this is why I say (with a little exaggeration) that preservation of all sorts of colonial architecture is the only critical issue the country faces. Everything else is irrelevant.