The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde

Therese Kaspersen Hadchity was born in Denmark and studied art history and modern culture at the University of Copenhagen. In 1990, she relocated to Barbados, where she worked as a freelance curator and visual arts commentator until 2000, when she opened the Zemicon Gallery in Bridgetown. After its closure a decade later, she returned to academia to reflect on the critical dynamics she had witnessed and participated in. She presently teaches art history, contemporary art, and aesthetics at the Barbados Community College and the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill. Her research has been centered on the changing conceptual foundations for the region's visual art and criticism, as well as the institutional dynamics and policies framing that transition.

Preface Introduction Section 1: Discourse Chapter 1: Shaping Up the Past: The Critique of Cultural Nationalism Chapter 2: The Next Generation Chapter 3: Diasporic Connections Section 2: Spaces Chapter 4: The Origin of Alternative Spaces, the Troubled Museum and Cultural Policy in the Caribbean Chapter 5: Three Spaces in Context Chapter 6: Stronger Together: The Creative Network Section 3: Encounters Chapter 7: Through the Eye of the Needle Chapter 8: The Caribbean Contemporary in the United States Chapter 9: Three Barbadian Artists and Their 'National Situation' Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

"A work of subtle distinction, which also packs a powerful critical punch. Focusing on art and art criticism in the Anglophone Caribbean, Hadchity drives a coach and horses through the currently influential avant-gardist dogma that seeks to consign modernist and nationalist artistic production to history. Her book's demolition of the postmodernist representation of Creole modernism does not merely set the record straight--it brings an interventionist political edge to its argument. The author proposes that the postmodern critique has the unintended effect of stripping cultural production in the Caribbean of some of the resources that it arguably needs urgently in order to secure its autonomy in the cruel, contemporary environment of neoliberal globalism."