Image: Firelei Báez, How to slip out of your body quietly, 2018. Acrylic and oil on paper. Collection of Alyssa and Gregory Shannon, Houston, Texas

Inspired by our current exhibition, Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox which looks at the legacy of European colonialism in the Caribbean through the work of 10 contemporary artists -- whether connected to the Caribbean by birth or focused on the region by choice, the exhibiting artists use their work as a means of examining the relationship between the power structure: those who are controlled by it, those who benefit from it, and those who actively seek to liberate themselves from it.

Our panelists all examine the postcolonial social and cultural world of the Caribbean through different lenses -- the economy, visual art, and literature. Using the exhibition as its reference, this panel will look at questions of power, resilience and resistance in the postcolonial Caribbean in a conversation moderated by artist and writer Nan Collymore and including Professor Jovan Scott Lewis (Geography/African Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley), Professor Kathleen DeGuzman (English, SFSU), and Ph.D. Candidate Indie A. Choudhury (Art History, Stanford University).

Jovan Scott Lewis is a professor of Geography and African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on post-colonial formations of race and repair through illicit economic practices. His forthcoming book examines these themes through the Jamaican Lottery Scam.

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Kathleen DeGuzman is an assistant professor of English at San Francisco State University. Her research examines Anglophone Caribbean literature, with particular interests in the novel, archipelagic studies, and the Caribbean's links to the literary cultures of imperial Britain and the Asian Americas. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Asian Diaspora Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), and Small Axe.

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Indie A. Choudhury is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Stanford University and a 2019-2020 Dissertation Fellow at the Stanford Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Race and Ethnicity. Her dissertation project is the first extended study of postwar African American and Afro-Caribbean abstract painting, focusing on its relationship to black subjectivity and the representation of pain. She also works as a curator, educator, and consultant and she has held posts at the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), National Maritime Museum, and Tate.

Nan Collymore is a writer and independent scholar in visual culture, specifically art, cinema and fashion. She writes for Contemporary& magazine, The September Issues and is an Editor at Teeth Mag. She has lectured at Goldsmiths College, CCA and Roehampton Institute and teaches fashion and jewelry construction at NIAD as well as being the founder of small conceptual art project NN.

‍This program is presented in conjunction with the current exhibition Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox on view May 8 - August 11, 2019.Public programs at MoAD are supported in part by Target.

This program is made possible by the generous support of