Visualizing / Performing Blackness
in the Afterlives of Slavery:
A Caribbean Archive

Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive

Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive

Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive

Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive

Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive

Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive

Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive

Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive

Our digital archive critically engages the afterlives of slavery and its relationship with regimes of visuality. This archive demonstrates that the visual functions not only as a site for the formation of systems of racialization and anti-blackness, but also as a means of disrupting and contesting those systems. The images and performances that constitute this archive address the mechanics and disruptions of the disciplinary gaze in slave and post-slave societies, practices of black self-fashioning, memorialization, and tactics of visual insurgency.  

(Español)

Nuestro archivo digital explora la relación de la esclavitud con los regímenes de visualidad y el papel de lo visual en el más allá de la esclavitud. Este archivo demuestra que lo visual funciona tanto como sitio para la formación de sistemas de racialización y de racismo como medio para desestabilizar y cuestionar esos sistemas. Las imágenes y representaciones que constituyen este archivo abordan la mecánica y las perturbaciones de la mirada disciplinaria en sociedades esclavistas y posesclavas, prácticas de construcción de subjetividad negra, memorialización y tácticas de insurgencia visual.

A counter archive… This is a place to re‑write the past.

— Danielle Roper, Curator Click here to read the full Curatorial Statement.