In/Visibility: Centering Afro-Caribbean Performance Art

Landmark exhibitions like Valerie Cassel Oliver’s Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012) have shown how performance art can center Blackness and challenge colonial legacies. Looking more closely at the Caribbean, Afro-diasporic artists consistently use their practices to resist and question notions of belonging and assimilation. How can art created in “the periphery of the periphery” be centered in our art historical narratives, especially as we work to dismantle the field’s own colonial foundations?

Many Afro-Caribbean artists wrestle with issues of colonialism, displacement, and marginalization. Some adopt the medium of performance to unravel, challenge, and center Blackness, using their bodies as a site of confrontation and as a way to become visible in a world where they have been largely erased, dismissed, and silenced. Two such examples include Haitian Jean-Ulrick Désert whose work is characterized by “conspicuous invisibility” and Cuban-transnational Carlos Martiel whose practice exposes issues of race, isolation and injustice. Rather than attempting to blend in and assimilate, Désert and Martiel confront and center Blackness using their bodies, demanding to be seen and to provoke consideration of issues such as identity, discrimination, and marginalization. Yet this is not work to be done by artists alone. We propose this panel out of the conviction that art histories must continue their current work of troubling traditional cartographies, definitions, and boundary lines to make apparent what has long been overlooked. This panel invites scholars and practitioners whose work is focused on performance, Afro-Caribbean artists, identity, invisibility, and assimilation/resistance.