Caribbean imaginar[ies]: on counter-narratives

From the colonial gaze of the travel sketch and the plantation blueprint to contemporary forms of resistance and memory, the Caribbean has long been a site of contested spatial and aesthetic meaning. Yet, within dominant art and architectural histories, its spatial and cultural contributions have been erased or rendered peripheral, relegated to the margins of theoretical discourse and institutional visibility. This panel reframes the Caribbean not as a zone of absence but as a generative locus of critical and creative production, where counter-narratives emerge through material and immaterial practices, unsettling inherited canons, and disciplinary boundaries.

Caribbean artists, architects, and cultural practitioners have long developed spatial, visual, and pedagogical vocabularies that respond to histories of colonial extraction, plantation capitalism, and diasporic displacement. Their work reimagines archives, syllabi, and curatorial models while mobilizing decolonial, feminist, and participatory approaches. Glissant’s poetics of relation and opacity, Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the overrepresentation of “Man,” Suzanne Césaire’s concept of camouflage, Fanon’s radical analysis of colonial space and psychic rupture, and Maryse Condé’s reworking of memory and survival each offer profound insights into spatial thought and resistance.

This panel invites papers that engage the Caribbean as a method, geography, and conceptual framework to rethink art, architecture, and spatial practices. Submissions may examine specific projects or practices, address the politics of visibility and voice, or reflect on methodological shifts required to narrate from/with the Caribbean. By foregrounding the region’s entangled histories, ecological poetics, and insurgent creativity, this session seeks to amplify the transformative power of Caribbean counter-narratives.