An Evening with Erica James

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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 Aim C saire'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 Ay n, Edouard Duval-Carri , and Christopher Cozier followed C saire's model by employing a range of practices and methodologies that refused marginalization. Just as C saire 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 C saire'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 and Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg.

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