Disordering the Land: Visual and Material Strategies of Creating Futurity and the Otherwise in Contemporary Caribbean Art

“Disordering the Land: Visual and Material Strategies of Creating Futurity and the Otherwise in Contemporary Caribbean Art” seeks to destabilize static meanings and complicate conventional academic sources, thus shifting away from the over-reliance on traditional archives and toward expansive Caribbean, African, and Indigenous sources of knowledge. This dissertation is situated and rooted in art history, but I work across the boundaries of academic fields—incorporating theories from Black Geography, Indigenous Studies, Literature, Environmental Sciences, and more—which allows me to build upon and from critical tools and frameworks expansively and openly. My rhizomatic approach is at times at odds with—or even severed from—the typical Eurocentric definition(s) of art; particularly in my use of “non-traditional” source material and methodologies, such as critical fabulations, fragmentations, rememories, hauntings, gossip, ancestral and embodied knowledge, rituals, or oral tales. The study and use of these methods, and their incorporation into a broader art history, helps create a more diverse and equitable archive of knowledge. Interrogating and changing modes of how we know is an important aim of my project. Two concomitant forces link this project together: the colonial-imperial project imposed upon the land and people of the Caribbean and its diasporas and the ways the land and people of the Caribbean and its diasporas recast the colonial-imperial project to create transformative sites of radical possibility rather than ones that necessarily involve monotony, order, surveillance, and the implication of Black violence/death. This type of reading creates new routes; built upon extant rhizomatic systems of survival and collaborative knowledges, bypassing those of death foretold, and insisting upon futurity.