Averting Racial Violence: Nationalism, Culture, and the Invention of Trinidadian Indigeneity through the Prime Minister's Best Village Trophy Competition, c. 1950s–70s

As Trinidad & Tobago prepared for political independence in the early 1960s, many feared that Trinidad would descend into racial violence like its neighbor British Guiana. Since both Trinidad and British Guiana had similar racial compositions – where African- and South Asian-descended peoples each constituted about half of the population with no clear majority – these realities forced reflection on the possible tools available to ameliorate racial tensions. Trinidadian political parties largely divided the nation along racial lines, and everyone from the Prime Minister to popular musicians vocalized their views about the racial problems plaguing Trinidadian society. In this postcolonial moment, the popular festival of Carnival came to be seen as a distinctly Caribbean festival that could eliminate racism, and it served as the inspiration for new festivals that aimed to harness its cultural power to avert racial violence. While Trinidadian cultural history often centers on Carnival, I argue that the state-invented Prime Minister’s Best Village Trophy Competition became the primary avenue where politicians and cultural producers came together to teach and disseminate their nationalist ideas to the “people.” Through this annual festival that grew from the 1960s to the 1970s, the state identified the music, dance, and folk cultures of Trinidad’s multiracial population to redefine them as “indigenous” to Trinidad, and it became the space where the people of the nation could learn about themselves. Nevertheless, not everyone agreed with the privileging of Best Village over other performative spaces. Thus, ideas about nationalism, inclusion, and race relations were continuously debated and negotiated. By centering this invented festival in postcolonial nation-building, I show how performative cultural forms from across the racial spectrum were reimagined as "indigenous" to the Trinidadian nation.