BEYOND BOUNDARIES: SEEING ART HISTORY FROM THE CARIBBEAN

What yield is there for art history to engage with the Caribbean—a region that has remained peripheral to the field yet has always existed beyond its disciplinary boundaries? It is the polyvalent and polyphonic nature of the Caribbean, from the nation state to political economy and to artistic production itself that sustains its long history of intellectual production, and its challenge against Western conceptions of modernity. The development of Caribbean intellectual thought instructs us from the plantation to anti-slavery discourse and decolonization, from transculturation to creolization to the very concept of what constitutes the human. Why has art history—a discipline often defined by its relationship with shifting terrains of theoretical critique and analysis—been slow to engage with Caribbean writers and thinkers, to take seriously their multidisciplinary, multi-theoretical, and multi-lingual voices?

This conference asks what a deep engagement with the nuances of Caribbean intellectual thought could mean for art history. When informed by new, interpretive methodologies that actively build and sustain the promise and possibilities of freedom and alternative forms of value, what could this offer to the field of art history? How might the discipline at this critical juncture, sustained by the interpretive possibilities of relationality and the poetics of form, not simply respond to these voices, but change tactics? How can this help us to rethink the configurations and contradictions that form within art history? How can it compel a refashioning of the field?