Dialogues in Caribbean Modernism: A Small Axe Symposium
Dialogues in Caribbean Modernism: A Small Axe Symposium
Artists, scholars, writers, and art practitioners gathered at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, on 24 and 25 October for the second iteration of the Small Axe Caribbean Modernisms project. The symposium challenged the Western formation of modernism as an artistic style and its effect on a set of artistic and intellectual practices in the Caribbean and its diasporas to make a case for “Caribbean modernism.”
By Dantaé Elliot
The first Caribbean Modernisms Symposium was held in Amsterdam, NL from 9 to 11 November 2023, and explored the questions, what and when was Caribbean modernism? The recordings and papers generated during that symposium are now available on our website.
The most recent symposium was organized around intergenerational, interisland, and interdisciplinary conversations to explore the forces that shape contemporary Caribbean literature, art, and discourses about injustice and struggles against it. Presenters from Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname, Curaçao, and the diaspora dialogued with each other about the emergence of new aesthetic styles and cultural-political languages developed by Caribbean writers and artist that respond to modernism similarly but with crucial differences that consider memory, time, space, and locality.
Évelyne Trouillot and Régine Jean-Charles 
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and Évelyne Trouillot at Casa de Cultura Ruth, Poetry evening 
Mayra Santos-Febres at Casa de Cultura Ruth, Poetry evening
The conversations spoke to the malleability of the diasporic Caribbean and the region, which blends linguistic and visual elements (Caribbean Creole, French, Spanish, English, Haitian Kreyòl, and Dutch) as points of intersections for discussing Caribbean modernism as a process rather than a specific time and place.
The symposium concluded with a roundtable of invited artists and curators at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo on 26 October. The conversation addressed some challenges art institutions face in the Caribbean and the complexities of producing intra-regional exhibitions, precisely highlighting Puerto Rico as a colony/territory. In this regional dialogue, artists and art practitioners in Puerto Rico imagined ways to materialize more collaborative projects through different Caribbean art institutions.
Dialogues in Caribbean Modernisms made space for the participants to wrestle with the inconsistencies and limitations of modernity by considering the transnational and multilingual position of the Caribbean and its refusal of a category and creating alternative forms of knowledge, be it ancestral, Indigenous, environmental, or community-based.
You can learn more about Dialogues in Caribbean Modernisms by visiting our website.