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decision to make San Juan a crossroads for the meeting of the best printmakers from Latin America and the Caribbean. In tandem with the socio-political urgency of the 1960s and 1970s, the stimulus that led to the setting up of the San Juan Biennial was also triggered by the desire to provide Puerto Rican and Latin American artists with a forum for technical and conceptual
progress along a 1 40 Colouring the Caribbean 4 Unknown artist, 1st National Hero, Chief of Chiefs, c. 2000 path amidst a densely wooded landscape. The three women at the rear of the line stoop under the weight of their heavy loads, carried in the traditional Carib manner in woven pegals.4 Paused in front of them, the second in the procession bends over the fallen load at her knees, repacking her carrier, while the leader of the female party, wearing a baby slung in a fabric carrier across her breast, stands at the front. She faces her husband, the bent knees of
Gopinath in her Impossible Desires (2005) loosely refer in their scholarship.13 As Gilroy describes in his now epochal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), his intercultural theorization of the Black Atlantic is not tethered to identitarian notions of ethnicity or nationalism.14 He famously invokes the metaphor of slave ships ‘in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean’ to theorize black diasporic identities and to ‘focus attention on the middle passage’.15 Gilroy refers to this ‘middle passage’ as the ‘Black
erected and moved because their owners usually did not own the land on which they were situated.3 They were wooden homes, built on blocks and generally without nails so that they could be easily deconstructed to be reassembled elsewhere. They invariably comprised two rooms in a symmetrical frontage with a door in the centre, with their windows distinctively shaded by ‘bell awnings’ (rounded canopies) or other forms of shelter from the sun or with ‘jalousies’ (pierced screens) designed to permit the free flow of air. These can still be seen in the Caribbean, though they
, as quoted in Jane Hiddleston, Understanding Postcolonialism (London; New York: Routledge, 2014), 146. First published in 2009. 2 Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 182, as cited in Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 79, 100 (note 10). 3 Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 79. 4 Ibid., 6–7. Meskimmon’s more recent writing on artworks that through their agency of world-making bring into being
those coming after me to embrace these labels even if they don’t quite fit. Do I see myself as a migrant artist? It is not solely my focus, but I do deal with these subjects, they are the things I want to make visible. It is impossible anyway to talk about Browness without dealing with migration. What is this Brown box – because they all want to put us in a box in this country, to give us a label – when people from South Asia and the Caribbean do not speak the same language or share the same culture? Editors: You are a Philly born New Yorker artist – but you are
statistics of what the reality is for most women in the world. But these types of mediations take time – four years of negotiation behind the scene for the gender violence exhibition, and remain subject to budget constraints. The repercussions of the financial crash of 2008 hit just as the artworks selected after the call for participation were literally being loaded into the airplanes, and we were forced to scale down, and cut the budget dramatically, especially for participation from the Caribbean and Latin America. Years later, we managed to revive the event and, out
of indigenous (and working-class) people and the threatening health risks associated with them. On the other hand, there has always been a conflict between security and comfort in the empire. The comfort of the dominant imperial people often ensured that they should have staffs of servants to minister to them. In Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, such supporting staffs of servants were necessarily extensive in numbers and required to be on hand (if at times supposedly out of sight) to supply the supports the dominant people required. These dominant people have
that it was an ‘English, not a Scotch colony’ and that the Anglican church should take precedence,43 a conflict which was to emerge elsewhere. The resulting church was built in a neoclassical style, with several columned porticoes. It was destroyed in the Jamaican earthquake of 1907 and replaced by a smaller and lower, presumably less wind-resistant, building. Presbyterian churches duly appeared on other Caribbean islands, such as Grenada, later destroyed in Hurricane Ivan in 2004, reflecting the seismic and climatic problems so many colonial buildings had to face.44
colonial expansion of European nations, the increase of the transatlantic slave trade and the exploitation of African slaves in America and the Caribbean. ‘Black’ became a synonym of slave and a discriminative marker in the colonial politics of slave labour. Along with it, body colour slowly migrated into the outer zones, and became – as skin colour – a potentially essential category and a marker of racial identity. Initially, this locating of the colouring matter in the skin was not part of the attempt to classify humans in sets of species or of racially defined groups