Black Water Ecologies: Guyanese Women's Artistic and Political Practices

• In Event: Aesthetics and waterways

Description for Program

Through an exploration of Dominique Hunter's collage series, “Black Water Remedy,” which captures this opacity and signals a history intertwined with Guyana’s rivers, this paper places Guyanese feminist collage art focused on migrations in conversation with Guyanese river histories to trace the political and artistic influence of fresh and saltwater in the region. Hunter’s visual meditations on movement and extraction are part of larger transnational feminist considerations and provide a framework to engage Guyana's sociopolitical and ecological position. This paper centers on a Guyanese ecofeminist analysis to highlight how extractive practices and geographic intersectionality impact women’s art practices materially and conceptually. Historically and contemporarily, Guyana’s rivers are sites where capitalist accumulation and gendered labor take place. Along Guyana’s Atlantic coast, the fresh and salt waters, or the black waters, take on a murky brown color caused by organic matter, or tannis, dissolving into the liquid. The waters are a hue unrepresentative of the Caribbean “as paradise and as a product.” In light of Guyana's recent international fame due to booming oil reservoirs, we must trace the connected histories of racialization, gendered violence, and ecological erosion that are mitigated on and within Guyana’s black waters.

Author

• Junika Hawker-Thompson