Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Erica Moiah James is an Art Historian, Curator and Assistant Professor at The University of Miami (UM). Her research centers on modern and contemporary art of the Caribbean, African and African American Diasporas. Recent publications include Charles White’s J’Accuse! and the Limits of Universal Blackness (AAAJ, 2016); Every Nigger is a Star: Re-imaging Blackness from Post Civil Rights America to the Post-Independence Caribbean (Black Camera, 2016); Caribbean Art in Space and Time (Barbados Museum, 2018); Decolonizing Time: Nineteenth Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art (NKA,2019), and The Black Sublime: René Peña’s Untitled (Archangel), 2018 (Small Axe, 2019). Her forthcoming book is entitled After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary. She a 2019 fellow at UM’s Humanities Center and a 2019-2022 Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Center, University of Johannesburg, S.A.

Broadly, my research concerns African Diasporic subject formation, migration, and the negotiation of globalized structural inequalities. Situating these processes within the specificities of national and international political moments, I explore questions of social hierarchy and diversity within the African Diaspora. I am particularly interested in the social and economic conditions under which racialized subjects assert their cultural identities and how such assertions shift over time. I have conducted research in eastern Cuba among people of English-speaking Caribbean descent in which I explore narratives of “jamaicano” identity and the reemergence of Anglophone Caribbean institutions during Cuba’s Special Period. I have also conducted research in the urban United States and am intrigued by the extent to which racialized categories are disrupted and/or reinforced by the globalization and mass consumption of multi-rooted black popular culture. Thus, in addition to forthcoming chapters on West Indian Cuban cultural citizenship and negotiating racial and national identity in the field, I have published work exploring the social context in which recurrent images in mainstream hip hop culture are disseminated.