Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive
Curator: Dr. Danielle Roper (University of Chicago)
This digital archive brings together nine black artists to reflect on forms of visualizing and performing blackness in the afterlives of slavery in the Caribbean. Each artist was invited to create a performance/visual art piece reflecting on the legacies of slavery in their individual countries. We have chosen the Caribbean to account for multiple structures of racial domination that have produced varying iconographies of blackness. In bringing together these nine Black artists, this archive attends to the tactics of visual and embodied insurgency forged in the afterlives of slavery.
"Visualizing/Performing Blackness" is part of "The Afterlives of Slavery," a digital platform created by the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture that investigates the relationship (and endurance) of visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world and contemporary modes of seeing black bodies. It consists of two digital exhibits exploring the history of visual regimes of enslavement and their legacies in post-slavery societies:
This platform is supported by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society through two projects: the Slavery and Visual Culture Working Group and Visual Regimes of Enslavement. The Afterlives of Slavery is also supported by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC).
Featuring works by:
- Awilda Sterling (San Juan, Puerto Rico)
- Carlos Martiel (Havana, Cuba)
- Fabio Melecio Palacios (Palmira, Valle del Cauca, Colombia)
- Joiri Minaya (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic / New York, USA)
- La Vaughn Belle (Christiansted, US Virgin Islands)
- Las Nietas de Nonó (Carolina, Puerto Rico)
- Leasho Johnson (Kingston, Jamaica)
- Luis Vasquez La Roche (Venezuela / Trinidad)
- PERMANENCIAS (director: Nemecio Berrio Guerrero) (Cartagena, Colombia)