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Americocentrism and art of the Caribbean: contours of a time-space logic

Over the past decade there have been various curatorial attempts to assemble and understand the art of the African diaspora and to offer a more global sense of the histories from which such works emerge. This article questions whether such uses of the diaspora concept will continue to be crucial for imagining community beyond the nation, by showing that the term's internationalist emphasis has given way to a provincializing attitude grounded in United States-centred experiences. The essay demonstrates critical alternatives to the current global geo-politics of curatorial representation and cultural memory surrounding racial and ethnic difference with reference to the art of the transnational Caribbean.

Interrogating this complex field, this article questions assumptions about the global status of ideas around black diasporic art and visual culture. It focuses partly on the background of concepts and approaches encouraged within the United States academy from which perspective the Caribbean and its diaspora in Britain has been represented. It unsettles the established canon of post-war British art by reference to a wider analysis that takes in the Caribbean and the United States. By so-doing it challenges conventional understandings of the chronology and geography of modern and contemporary art of the transatlantic region.

The article was researched in three national settings: the UK, Trinidad and Guyana, with supplementary archival work conducted in the United States, supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and project funding from HERA (European Science Foundation) for international fieldwork in the Caribbean region. The article is part of a themed issue devoted to 'Art Across Frontiers in the Americas', with editors and co-contributors from humanities departments in Europe and throughout the Americas, published in a long-established, interdisciplinary journal from Cambridge University Press.