Sites of Freedom: Caribbean Art, Gender and the Politics of Space 135 views

This dissertation examines feminist approaches to space in 20th and 21st-century visual cultural production from the Caribbean and its diasporas. It considers how contemporary Caribbean women and queer artists use their creative platforms to disrupt the cartographies of colonial modernity and imagine radical forms of geographic freedom. Each chapter turns to a traditional space of domination—the colonial map, the body, and the domestic—to argue that Caribbean women’s geographical imagination has played a vital role in reconfiguring and dismantling Western practices of racial, sexual and spatial oppression. Through the analysis of visual culture, artist interviews, and archival sources (including personal papers and cartographic maps), and using feminist and decolonial theories and methods, I study how artists from the Caribbean and its diasporas grapple with different sites where racial-sexual oppression materializes. More importantly, I examine how these artists use their creative practices to imagine and build, or to site, spaces of freedom. By developing an in-depth study of Caribbean women’s geographic practices and their representation in contemporary visual cultural production, this dissertation attends to the central role of contemporary Caribbean arts in visualizing, and actively transforming, Caribbean women’s interrelated struggles for gender equity, racial justice and spatial freedom, while also contending with the limitations of these reparative creative gestures.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Caribbean Art; Feminist Geography; Spatial Politics; Feminist Art; Caribbean Women Artists

English

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2025-07-21