In After Caliban, Erica Moiah James examines the rise of global Caribbean artists in the 1990s and their production of a decolonized art history for the Caribbean. She draws on AimE CEsaire's rewriting of Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which Caliban becomes the sole author of his own story, dissolving his fixed position as colonized in relation to Prospero as colonizer. James shows how visual artists such as Marc Latamie, Janine Antoni, Belkis AyOn, Edouard Duval-CarriE, and Christopher Cozier followed CEsaire's model by employing a range of practices and methodologies that refused marginalization. Just as CEsaire decolonized The Tempest, so too did these artists, who crafted a decolonial aesthetic that redefined their own cultural and historical narratives and positioned art as a key pathway toward a postcolonial future. By providing the foundation for a postcolonial, post-Caliban art world, these artists redefined the critical and popular notion of contemporary Caribbean art. At the same time, James argues, they fulfilled CEsaire's dream for a postcolonial Caribbean while creating a nonhegemonic art historical practice that exists beyond modern binaries and borders.
Erica Moiah James is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami.
Acknowledgments vii Introduction. "Wat Wrong wit Dis Place?" 1 1. From Behind God's Back: Janine Antoni's Embodied Histories 37 2. Meeting in the Upper Room: Belkis AyOn's La Cena, 1988-1993 77 3. Historical Drag: Genre, Violence, and History in Edouard Duval-CarriE's Mardigras at Fort Dimanche, 1992 121 4. The Caribbean Does Not Exist: Maurizio Cattelan's 6th Caribbean Biennial, 1999 163 5. "Wrong Way" Lenny, Tempests, and Other DEtournements 205 Notes 223 Bibliography 259 Index
"By thinking art history from and with the Caribbean, Erica Moiah James demands a reorientation and expansion of the theoretical toolkit used to understand the region. Her questioning of the analytical purchase of Caliban disturbs the taken-for-grantedness of earlier examinations of the Caribbean while opening up space for how we might think it otherwise. After Caliban will be of great significance, having an important impact on the field of art history, especially in this moment as attempts are being made to decolonize the discipline." - Wayne Modest, Professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam "Insightful, transformative, and a must read, After Caliban centers artists working in the 1990s who newly reenvisioned history and the world from a Caribbean perspective and offered a decolonial critique of art history in the process." - Krista A. Thompson, author of Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
