The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde Postmodernism as Post-nationalism /
Therese Kaspersen Hadchity.
- West Lafayette : Purdue University Press, (c)2020. Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 0000.
- 1 online resource (pages cm).
- Comparative cultural studies .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Cover -- THE MAKING OF A CARIBBEAN AVANT-GARDE -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- INTRODUCTION -- SECTION 1: DISCOURSE -- CHAPTER 1 Shaping Up the Past: The Critique of Cultural Nationalism -- CHAPTER 2 The Next Generation -- CHAPTER 3 Diasporic Connections -- SECTION 2: SPACES -- CHAPTER 4 The Origin of Alternative Spaces, the Troubled Museum and Cultural Policy in the Caribbean -- CHAPTER 5 Three Spaces in Context -- CHAPTER 6 Stronger Together: The Creative Network -- SECTION 3: ENCOUNTERS -- CHAPTER 7 Through the Eye of the Needle CHAPTER 8 The Caribbean Contemporary in the United States -- CHAPTER 9 Three Barbadian Artists and Their 'National Situation' -- Afterword -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author
"Focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean, The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde describes the rise and gradual consolidation of the visual arts avant-garde, which came to local and international attention in the 1990s. The book is centered on the critical and aesthetic strategies employed by this avant-garde to repudiate the previous generation's commitment to modernism and anti-colonialism. In three sections, it highlights the many converging factors, which have pushed this avant-garde to the forefront of the region's contemporary scene, and places it all in the context of growing dissatisfaction with the post-colonial state and its cultural policies. This generational transition has manifested itself not only in a departure from "traditional" in favor of "new" media (i.e., installation, performance, and video rather than painting and sculpture), but also in the advancement of a "post-nationalist postmodernism," which reaches for diasporic and cosmopolitan frames of reference. Section one outlines the features of a preceding "Creole modernism" and explains the different guises of post-nationalism in the region's contemporary art. In section two, its momentum is connected to the proliferation of independent art spaces and transnational networks, which connect artists across and beyond the region and open up possibilities unavailable to earlier generations. Section three demonstrates the impact of this conceptual and organizational evolution on the selection and exhibition of Caribbean art in the metropole. The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde is a case study in post-colonial cultural dynamics. It delivers an engaged and polemic portrayal of a generational and critical transition, which has brought a segment of the Anglophone Caribbean arts community together and successfully drawn it into the international arena, but which also, it is argued, has problematic political corollaries"--