Five Essential Books About Caribbean Art History

Édouard Glissant’s work has taken the art world by storm, becoming a key theoretical guide for postcolonial art history and curation. His concept of “opacity,” of the right to embrace those things that cannot be translated for a hegemonic audience, has galvanized artists especially. In this foundational 1997 book, the Martinican poet and philosopher describes the Caribbean as a site of generative approaches to history and creativity while rejecting hierarchies, subjection, and extraction. In place of such verticality, he valorizes horizontal and rhizomatic relationships that creolize, converge, create, and dissipate.

Building on Paul Gilroy’s seminal 1993 book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, as well as the landmark exhibitions “Infinite Island” (2007) at the Brooklyn Museum and “Global Caribbean” (2009) at the Little Haiti Center in Miami, this catalog, for the 2010 Tate “Afro Modern” exhibition, centers the Caribbean in its telling of a quintessentially modern Black Atlantic art history. Afro Modern features work that embodies the aesthetic synergies of contact and exchange occurring in this local and global geography, amid and in the wake of histories of slavery, indentureship, and colonialism. The exhibition and catalog are anchored by a conversation between Glissant and Manthia Diawara that dissolves notions of “center and periphery,” as well as the concept of The Other—a task taken up in work by diasporic artists like Wifredo Lam, Ronald Moody, Uche Okeke, Chris Ofili, and Ellen Gallagher.

The catalog for this 2022 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago mobilizes the foundational approaches to global Caribbean art histories laid out over the past 40 years. Though its scope ostensibly stretches back to the 1990s, this catalog melds past, present, and future in a nonlinear and intergenerational selection of artworks. It includes work by artists from the English-, French-, Spanish-, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean, acknowledging the region’s shared colonial history, while focusing on the criticality of form. Forecast Form can be seen as a Glissantian plateau that subtly employs the work of Ana Mendieta to platform its critical questions taken up by other artists, including Daniel Lind-Ramos, Didier William, and Joscelyn Gardner, Ebony G. Patterson, Teresita Fernández, and Lorraine O’Grady.

Caribbean Art, one of the earliest such survey treatises, was published in 1998. Written by Veerle Poupeye and recently revised, that stellar effort is now joined by this expansive two-volume set featuring 29 essays by leading curators and scholars. The collection covers more than 500 years of artistic production in Latin America and the Caribbean, regions united by histories of conquest, slavery, and colonialism where artists are committed to forging postcolonial imaginaries. The last volume in this historic series, published this year, provides an extraordinary overview of the modern and contemporary arts of the Caribbean in the Americas and the world.

This 2019 book by art historian Genevieve Hyacinthe presages the work of Forecast Form and models a postcolonial method for writing Caribbean art history and criticism, as do art historians Krista A. Thompson and Veerle Poupeye. Hyacinthe’s book brings Mendieta—a pivotal figure in Caribbean art—into necessary conversation with the long history of Black Atlantic aesthetics. She also engages transnational feminist art histories and practices, including earthworks and performance art. Mendieta and Hyacinthe both model the discursive nature of creolized Caribbean modernisms that helped transform the way a generation of artists approached Afro-Cuban spirituality in their work.