Texture

This part includes six essays that explore Caribbean blackness. It begins with “Blackness,” an overarching treatment of the concept described as “a swallowing whole” that defines Caribbean experience and, more specifically, the interpretation of visual culture. The essays that follow elaborate on this idea. “Shade” is a treatment of blackness that traverses visual and sonic spectra to make meaning, providing an active, experiential grammar described as “prismatic action.” The discursive value of this visual convergence foregrounds the subsequent eponymic essays: “Form,” on the tropic dissipation of visual and literary form; “Texture,” a brief autobiographical essay on the role of silence in the author’s creation of a portrait of his grandfather; “Self,” a series of self-portraits and accompanying reflections that interrogate the notion of the “self” in portraiture; and “Looks,” a meditation on family and single portraiture and the disruptions that occur both in the historical context of the “post-colony” and the notion of an emergent Caribbean visual theory.