Join us November 1 for: Visualising "The Inner Plantation"

Join us on the 1st November at 4pm in School 2 of St Salvator's Quad for Dr Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani's Research Lecture.

This talk explores literary and artistic responses of Afro-Caribbean artists to the Eurocentric conceptions of the universal underpinning the philosophies of existential-humanism that framed discourse surrounding modernist art practice in postwar Britain. More specifically, it examines how the centrality of universalism and existential-humanism in Western arts and cultural discourses were criticised in relationship to the legacy of the plantation, its colonial histories of slavery , and its multi-generational effects on cultural and artistic national and Pan-Caribbean identities, as debated by diasporic artists and intellectuals in Europe and the Caribbean, among them Denis Williams and those associated with the London-based Caribbean Artists Movement (1966-1872), including Eddie Kamau Brathwaite, Aubrey Williams, and Kenneth Ramchand. Brathwaite, in coining the phrase the “inner plantation” in 1975, referred to the psychological effects of these histories in shaping a sense of social and cultural fragmentation and “rootlessness, of not belonging to the landscape; dissociation, in fact, of art from the act of living.” The abstracted visualisation of the plantation, its environmental and existential destruction, will be considered within these and their broader anticolonial contexts.