Band of the Jaw-Bone John-Canoe

~Through public performance across the Caribbean, African cultures found common ground to express both their varied origins and shared experiences. Public art became an outlet for the ever-changing identities of the region’s populations and the traditions they sought to preserve. Jonkonnu is the Jamaican reformulation of the tradition of the masquerade, a...

~~After his return to Kingston from London in the early 1830s, Isaac Mendes Belisario seems to have focused primarily on making commissioned...

Sketches of Character

When Isaac Mendes Belisario returned to his native Jamaica in the early 1830s from London, where he had grown up and trained as an artist, he was entering a colony preoccupied...

Stuart Hall has observed that the Caribbean “is a place where nobody is, in the obvious sense, ‘at home,’ where everybody is to some extent dislocated, and that sense of being ‘not at home,’ or...