Broken Tropics

Broken Tropics examines contemporary installations, performance, photography, and street art from three primary sites of compounding vulnerability: Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Guillermina De Ferrari poses two central questions: How does contingency affect our humanness? And what does art say about it? With the understanding that being human is a praxis, as Sylvia Wynter notes, and that art is a practical philosophy, De Ferrari introduces the notion of an “art of contingency.” This situated praxis engages with the accidental and the unexpected in the creative process, highlighting two contradictory facts: that uncertainty is a predictable feature in Caribbean life; and that, nonetheless, misfortune does not have to be fate. Putting long-standing concerns about social, political, and economic injustice on a continuum with the concerns of disaster studies and ecocriticism, Broken Tropics shows how external pressures intervene in the construction and disruption of the collective, how people reshape and reinvent the social world in response, and how the arts envision new forms of living in a broken world.