How may we imagine the new world differently than that constructed through the western discourses of enlightenment and progress from the fifteenth century onwards? How may we perceive the conquest, colonisation and cultural development of peoples of the Caribbean region? The film, the first in a series, sets up the parameters by which we might begin to view the “Other” and deconstruct the binaries, which have underpinned western thought.

I came to this project through the study of gender because it allowed me the voice to speak, to move from the personal to the political, from the specific to the general, to break disciplinary boundaries, to disrupt the knowledges that we have inherited. The study of gender has been perceived primarily as a litany of woes about man-woman relations and the battle of the sexes. The film attempts to dispel popular perceptions that this is the totality of gender scholarship and activism. Gender offers us a new way of seeing, not only how stereotypes are constructed and perpetuated, but how we might make use of different sources of data that will remind us of different legacies that people bring to their society’s development, despite and because of their particular gendered, ethnic and class experiences.