Rethinking Art's Histories Caribbean ECO Aesthetics

This edited volume reframes the Caribbean as a paradigm of ecological resilience and creativity by bringing together the voices of contemporary artists and scholars who are at the forefront of environmental activism in the region and across its diasporas. Caribbean eco-aesthetics considers the ways in which contemporary artists with Caribbean heritage are working to redress the ecological damage inflicted during centuries of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation by appealing to cultural lineages that trouble capitalist conceptions of progress and sustainability. In offering these grassroots models of ecological action as an entry point into the intersecting fields of Caribbean and environmental studies, this edited volume redefines the terms of a largely catastrophic discourse through the lens of hope, resilience, and creativity. By privileging the work of artists and activists who are confronting the environmental violence of empire, whilst also engaging anti-colonial forms of ecological insurgence, we seek to reposition the transnational Caribbean as a zone from which to imagine and actualise planetary futures beyond the ecocide logic of capitalist accumulation. This edited volume reframes the Caribbean as a paradigm of ecological resilience and creativity by bringing together the voices of contemporary artists and scholars who are at the forefront of environmental activism in the region and across its diasporas. While dominant narratives percolating from the environmental sciences to the mainstream press present the Caribbean as a frontier of planetary disaster, the contributors to this volume show how the region offers radical models for overcoming the environmental challenges of the present. At the heart of this argument lies the history of the Caribbean as a centre for grassroots forms of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance founded upon nature-centred cosmologies and practices. Caribbean Eco-Aesthetics shows how contemporary artists are mobilising this radical heritage in a bid to unlock alternative planetary futures.