Rebellious Creating: Opacity as Praxis in the Contemporary Caribbean

Édouard Glissant famously demanded the right to opacity, or the right to be unseen, unknown, or unindexed. Opacity negates the oppressive colonial gaze; opacity allows for wholeness; opacity resists a single transparent reading of a work of art, a way of being, or identity. Opacity is wayward, it is radiant, it is living.

This panel attends to the rebellious and generative methods of creation used by artists, makers, and scholars in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Through these practices—the sharing of stories, myths, rituals, and experiences—the collaborative aspect of making and creating not only disrupts Western linear timelines but also establishes mappable networks of kinship. We welcome proposals from scholars of art history and adjacent fields, artists, and makers at any career stage—students and emerging professionals are encouraged to submit. We envision a range of voices, perspectives, and methodologies to demonstrate the robust nature of creating inherent in the Caribbean. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Contending with the archive (speculations, shifts, revelations)
• Spectacle, sight, and the gaze (including surveillance and techniques of avoiding surveillance)
• New methodologies and sources of information/knowledge (embodied, experiential, hauntological, gossip, practice-based)
• Materiality and process connecting to ancestral and historical memory/memories/re-memory
• Traditional and “non-traditional” media as tools for liberation (clay, fabric, collage, mapping, digital art, hair)