Framer Framed

9 Nov –
10 Nov 2023

Symposium: What and When Was Caribbean Modernism?

What and When Was Caribbean Modernism? is a three-day symposium on different temporal contexts and idioms of modernism as manifested across the Hispanophone, Francophone, Dutch, and Anglophone Caribbean (and their diasporas). The first two days will be held at Framer Framed on 9 & 10 November.

The symposium seeks to explore the different temporal contexts and idioms of modernism as they emerged and manifested themselves across the Hispanophone, Francophone, Dutch, and Anglophone Caribbean (and their diasporas). Day one will be devoted to visual modernism and day two to literary modernism.

Across a range of expression and identity, artistic as well as intellectual, modernism has been a shaping force in the twentieth-century Caribbean. If European modernism partly established itself through its imperial connection, the modernisms of the colonial world find their voices by appropriating, indigenising, creolising, transforming the forms and languages of modernism. Across the regional and diasporic Caribbean, modernism contributed to the modes of radical artistic and intellectual response to colonial domination, dispossession, and oppression.

Modernism provided some of the idioms, styles, and infrastructures which articulated the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of self-determination. In the last three decades or so, with the decline of postcolonial sovereignty and the rise of globalisation, there is reason to doubt that modernism continues to be the subversive force that it was thought to be. Our aim is to understand the role of visual, literary, and intellectual modernism in the twentieth-century Caribbean, regional and diasporic, and to then explore whether modernism’s oppositional energies continue to be a significant point of reference.

This event is in English. Entry free of charge, a donation at the door is appreciated.

Programme

For more information on the program, please refer to the abstracts here.

Symposium: What and When Was Caribbean Modernism? is co-organised by Small Axe, Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, Research Center for Material Culture and Framer Framed.

Image credit: Cascade and Hummingbirds – After Martin Johnson Heade (2013) – © Eduard Duval-Carrié, Mondriaan Fonds – Inventory No: AM-708-2

Attachments

• Bios– What and When was Caribbean Modernism?

Network

Faith Smith

Scholar

Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé

Scholar

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles

Literary scholar and cultural critic

Norval Edwards

Scholar

Thalia Ostendorf

Scholar

Daphne Lamothe

Scholar

Yra van Dijk

Scholar

Erica Moiah James

Art historian and curator

Carlos Garrido Castellano

Art historian

Lázaro Lima

Researcher and filmmaker

Petrina Dacres

Researcher and curator

Lindsay J. Twa

Art historian

Julian Isenia

Researcher and writer

Jerry Philogene

Scholar