Subversive Bodies: Womyn Performing Blackness in the Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora
In an essay reflecting on her 1992 performance Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit… with Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco noted the inability of the majority of the white audience members to read the performance as a satire. She observes that, “What may be ‘liberating’ or ‘transgressive’ identification for Europeans and Euro-Americans is already a symbol of entrapment within an imposed stereotype for Others.” For Fusco, the complexities of performing alterity are tripled as a Cuban immigrant woman of African descent. Her performance surfaced the submerged histories of the Caribbean resulting from its role as nexus of both regional and transcontinental exchanges of peoples, material cultures, and ideas since the middle ages. Fusco’s performance continues to loom large in the discipline of art history, even as scholarly conversations around performance and identity have expanded into the past, considering enslaved communities in the Americas, as well as into the future, postulating and critiquing the utopian aspects of digital technologies. Building on the eponymous fall 2024 Contested Bodies roundtable supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, this panel seeks studies focused on tensions between the performance of political and artistic radicalism of Afro-Caribbean women from any time period.
Keywords:
1. Geographica Area: Caribbean
Topics: Women
Topics: African Diaspora
Topics: Interdisciplinary
Medium: Figurative/Human Body
Chairs: Hilary R. Whitham Sánchez and Stephanie Gibson, Hollins University
Abstract are due: August 29, 2024
