“Is Trini? I Trini!”: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of hybrid cultural elements in experimental documentary Coolie Pink and Green

Trinidad has been marked by colonization, slavery, and internal divisions that hindered the formation of a unified Trinidadian national and cultural identity. Specifically, descendants of Indian immigrants often maintain strong emotional and cultural ties to ‘Mother India’ and identify themselves as Indians despite having never been there; at the same time, creolising impulses impact the community and threaten efforts of preserving ancient traditions. This tension is evident in the experimental documentary Coolie Pink and Green, directed by Trinidadian scholar, writer, and filmmaker Patricia Mohammed, which explores the aesthetics of the Indo-Trinidadian community by recounting the story of a Hindu girl navigating her hybrid cultural identity. The audiovisual product displays and questions linguistic and visual specificities re-rooted in the Trinidadian context and no longer standing on a mono-cultural level. Based on these premises, the study aims to analyse the experimental documentary from a multimodal critical perspective in order to i) identify the hybrid Indo-Trinidadian culture-specific elements; ii) understand the inter-semiotic strategies through which they are represented; iii) and explore how their representation serves to support the narrative transformation of the protagonist from a member of the Indian community to a member of the Trinidadian one. The study attempts to demonstrate how cinema functions as a site of negotiation where postcolonial identities are redefined and national belonging is rearticulated beyond fixed ethnic categories.