consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean takes the Caribbean and Caribbean thought as a starting point to reconsider global histories of art and contemporary public cultures. As a region wrought by the transhistorical forces of enslavement, colonialism, resource extraction and industrialisation, Caribbean modernity allows us to theorise larger patterns about forms of global modernities. Drawing on the foundational work of Caribbean thinkers Édouard Glissant, Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, the symposium explores their impact on our understanding of the material, epistemological and ontological repercussions of these histories.
The symposium highlights how these thinkers’ contributions continue to act as generative frameworks for imagining new ways of being in the world, particularly within our current context of a global pandemic, planetary environmental precarity and transnational migration. In particular, it asks how their ideas could enable new worldings, new decolonial and reparative modes of understanding global art histories, artistic practices and public cultures more generally. Addressing the contested spaces of universities, museums, and cultural institutions, this symposium thinks with and through Glissant, Hall, and Wynter to radically transform our ways of relating to the world around us.
The symposium will include a keynote lecture by scholar Katherine McKittrick, as well as five panels. It will bring together an international group of scholars and artists whose contributions will explore these thinkers’ lasting influence on our understanding of public culture, education, counter-histories, colonialism, world-making and the environment.
This event is part of Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation, a transnational collaborative project that seeks to shape public narratives from multiple regional perspectives about our globally entangled world. In addition to this online program, WPC’s London academy will include a curated online audio and film programme.
Organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, in collaboration with UAL’s TrAIN Research Centre (Transnational Art Identity Nation) and the TrACE network (Transnational and Transcultural Art Culture Exchange).
