Temporal Visions: Hurricanes as Chronotopes in Caribbean Art and Cultural Politics

“Qué tremendo temporal!” Oh, tremendous tempest! These lines echo throughout the cultural history of Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean. They come from El Temporal, a lively folksong (plena) written in 1929 by anonymous musicians, and illustrated by Puerto Rican artist Rafael Tufiño in linocut in the 1950s. The song and Tufiño's print commemorate the generative horror that followed hurricane San Felipe II on September 13, 1928. Such pictures and songs engage a wide-ranging aesthetic history of hurricanes, interwoven through histories of transculturation, colonialism, and decoloniality. Hurricanes reveal chronotopes in Caribbean art history. That is, hurricanes offer us both transformative and transcendent moments in multiple times and spaces, which are important in reconstructing diachronic and synchronic histories of art and cultural politics in the greater Caribbean. By taking a longue durée view of hurricanes within Caribbean visual cultures, from pre-Columbian art to contemporary works, my talk aims to expose the limits and possibilities of art and art history as a means of mitigating and responding to climate disasters alongside colonial legacies. State-sponsored arts produced after meteorological disasters have historically reenforced the colonial matrix of power, while modern and contemporary artists suggest the need for decolonial solutions to ongoing eco-traumas. The processes and visualization of decolonization, like the hurricane itself, however, is not something always-already in the present or future. It is also historical, proposed over again by Caribbean peoples in art and song. Recording the hurricane in the diverse time-spaces of Caribbean art history helps us to re-envision decolonial narratives.