Monuments and Racial Reckoning in the Caribbean and its Diasporas

• In Event: Performance and culture keeping

Description for Program

This essay examines the function of monuments amid ongoing calls for reparations in the Caribbean and its diasporas. It analyzes La historia nuestra, caballero (2008-2013) by Nelson Fory, a black artist from Cartagena whose interventions in the monuments of the founding fathers of the Colombian nation sought to address the white-washing of national heroes in Colombia. I juxtapose Fory’s work with Joiri Minaya’s The Cloaking Series that intervened in the statues of Christopher Columbus in the Dominican Republic to discern how such interventions challenge the foundational fictions of the nation. Theorizing monuments as a performance of endurances, this essay assesses the role of such artistic intervention in the fight for reparative justice

Author

• Danielle Roper, The University of Chicago