The Afterlives of Slavery

The online exhibiton Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive brings together Black artists to critically reflect on the afterlives of enslavement, its relationship to regimes of visuality, and its implications for contemporary constructions of Blackness. The archive poses a set of questions: How does slavery condition modes of seeing or not seeing the Black body and how do its afterlives structure visuality today? Can one speak of a visual afterlife or visual afterlives of enslavement? How does one map its spatial and temporal dimensions? Visualizing/Performing Blacknessexplores the tensions and imbrications of seeing and embodying Blackness in the wake of the plantation. It seeks to discern how Black artists make visible and trouble the contours of the afterlives of enslavement. Open-ended and incomplete, this archive scans the lived quotidian of anti-Black racism: It rummages through city ruins, open landscapes, domestic, and intimate spaces; it mines the repertoires of black culture, religious, and social life, and it looks for shared and diffuse grammars of representation in advertising, tourism, folklore, ritual, fairy tales, and children’s books.