After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary (Duke University Press, September 2025) by Erica Moiah James (University of Miami) is now available for pre-ordering. [If you order directly from Duke University Press, you may use the code E25JAMES to receive a 30% discount: dukeupress.edu/after-caliban.]
Wayne Modest (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) describes: “By thinking art history from and with the Caribbean, Erica Moiah James demands a reorientation and expansion of the theoretical toolkit used to understand the region. Her questioning of the analytical purchase of Caliban disturbs the taken-for-grantedness of earlier examinations of the Caribbean while opening up space for how we might think it otherwise. ‘After Caliban’ will be of great significance, having an important impact on the field of art history, especially in this moment as attempts are being made to decolonize the discipline.”
Description: 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.
James shows how visual artists such as Marc Latamie, Janine Antoni, Belkis Ayón, Edouard Duval-Carrié, and Christopher Cozier followed Césaire’s model by employing a range of practices and methodologies that refused marginalization. Just as Césaire decolonized The Tempest, so too did these artists, who crafted a decolonial aesthetic that redefined their own cultural and historical narratives and positioned art as a key pathway toward a postcolonial future. By providing the foundation for a postcolonial, post-Caliban art world, these artists redefined the critical and popular notion of contemporary Caribbean art. At the same time, James argues, they fulfilled Césaire’s dream for a postcolonial Caribbean while creating a nonhegemonic art historical practice that exists beyond modern binaries and borders.
Erica Moiah James is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami and Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg.
For more information, see https://www.dukeupress.edu/after-caliban