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Book Launch “After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary” by Erica Moiah James
Join Erica Moiah James at ICA Miami for a conversation about her new book After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary, published in 2025 with Duke University Press. Dr. Moiah James will discuss her book and answer questions from the audience.
In After Caliban, Erica Moiah James examines the rise of global Caribbean artists in the 1990s and their production of a decolonized art history for the Caribbean. She draws on Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which Caliban becomes the sole author of his own story, dissolving his fixed position as colonized in relation to Prospero as colonizer.
Erica Moia James will be in conversation with Richard Powell (Duke University) and Patricia Saunders (University of Miami).
Erica Moiah James is an art historian, curator and Associate Professor at The University of Miami. Before arriving in Miami, she was the founding director and chief curator of the National Gallery of The Bahamas and an Assistant Professor of Art History and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research centers on indigenous, modern, and contemporary art of the Caribbean, Americas, and the African Diaspora. James has been awarded several grants and fellowships in support of her work including the Warhol Foundation/Creative Time Art Writing Prize, and grants from the Terra and Mellon Foundations for The Geoffrey Holder Project. Most recently, she curated the exhibitions Didier William: nou kite tout sa dèyè; Nari Ward: Home of the Brave and LaVaughn Belle: Of Being, Myth and Memory. She is a senior research associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg and a former Clark-Oakley Fellow. Her current book is entitled After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary (DUP 2025).
About Richard Powell
Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. Along with teaching courses in American art and the arts of the African diaspora, he has written on a range of topics. Some of his publications include Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997, 2002, and 2021), Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), and Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020). His forthcoming book, Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect (2026), traces the visual and conceptual pathways of particular colors as strategically employed by selected modern and contemporary painters. Powell has also organized numerous art exhibitions, most notably Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997), To Conserve a Legacy: American Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999), Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (2005), and Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (2014). From 2007 until 2010, Powell was editor in chief of The Art Bulletin. Powell received an MFA in printmaking from Howard University and his MPhil and PhD in the history of art from Yale University.
About Patricia J. Saunders
Patricia J. Saunders is Professor of English and Hemispheric Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami, Coral Gables where she is the editor (and one of the founders) of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal. She is the author of Alien-Nation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2007) and co-editor of Music. Memory. Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination (2007). Her second monograph, Buyers Beware: Epistemologies of Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2022), examines a range of contemporary Caribbean popular cultural modes of expression including Jamaican dancehall music, practices of body modification, as well as works by Caribbean contemporary visual artists Ebony G. Patterson, Christopher Cozier, and Leasho Johnson. Her work has also appeared in numerous academic journals including Small Axe, Transforming Anthropology, The Journal of West Indian Literature, Plantation Society in the Americas, Anthurium, and Feminist Studies. She is currently working on a third book tentatively titled, We Always Knew We Were Fly: Race, Representation, and the Politics of Presence in Black Portraiture.