2 - Envisioning African-Asian Archipelagic Connections through Caribbean Contemporary Art

This paper explores African-Asian creolization in the Caribbean through a selection of paintings, sculptures and performances. I adopt an archipelagic epistemology and methodology, inspired by Edouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking and Ottmar Ette’s fractal and network reading of ‘literature without an abode’. I bring together artists of African-Asian Caribbean origin, whose productions contest the violent (post-)colonial plantation legacy of enslavement and indenture. I analyse the project ‘Afro-Asian Feminist Art: Futurist Genealogist’ spearheaded by two women of Afro-Chinese Caribbean heritage, British Tao Leigh Goffe and American Andrea Chung alongside Indo-Guadeloupean painter Mary Kelly Sinnapah’s artworks that reclaim the marginalized memory of indenture. By examining the works of Francophone and Anglophone artists of Caribbean origin, living in the Caribbean and in the global North, I offer an archipelagic perspective highlighting the entanglements of the legacies of enslavement and indenture, as well as the multiple cultural artistic productions arising from such connections. I argue that contemporary art unveils unexpected long-standing African-Asian solidarities while interweaving new ones and imagining their future. Thus, I contend that visual and performance arts’ recent developments are where future Caribbean-Africa interconnections inclusive of the Asian socio-cultural wealth that keep shaping the Caribbean can be imagined. The Dakar Biennale of Contemporary Art, which hosted the exhibition ‘Indigo, le cabinet des curiosités’ by Martinican artist Valérie John in 2022 and is to host the ‘Pavillon Martiniquais’ in November-December 2024, could become a key venue to rethink and shape Africa-Asia relations in the encounter between Caribbean artists and the Senegalese space and audience.