Read more about Caribbean thinker, George Lamming, who theorized art and seeing as an entry point to understanding the world:

George Lamming (b. 1927, Barbados) was one of the most well-known writers in the modern Caribbean, producing a body of work that was profoundly anchored in his own experiences while also probing the larger historical forces at work in modern Caribbean life. Lamming, a Barbados native, was part of the post-World War II migration of Caribbean young people to the United Kingdom, which was fuelled by the desire for fresh possibilities and paralleled in many ways the Great Migration of African Americans from Southern USA to the North in the early twentieth century. In England and around the world, Lamming gained acclaim as a writer. However, his work remained centered on the Caribbean, and he later returned to the region where his writing was set.

In his 1960 collection Pleasures of Exile, Barbadian poet George Lamming created the term ‘way of seeing’ as an anticolonial activity. Lamming believed that it is our task to develop ways to change the cultural perception of the Caribbean and its people, to dismantle accumulated harmful myths about the region, both cultural and political, that have been perpetuated by an inherited and uncritical way of seeing. He believed that art and education are the most powerful weapons to do so, and are our best and safest bet among the young. In 1951, when Lamming gave a reading at the newly established Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, he was met with thunderous ovation, on his concepts related to “ways of seeing”. 

Through closely looking at Khaffi’s artwork of a Caribbean home and responding to what we see in the image, our observations, beliefs, and assumptions surface. We hope that this exercise will develop visual literacy through describing the image but also allow an opportunity of reflective practice to critically engage with one’s assumptions of the Caribbean, an exercise that Lamming was dedicated to.