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What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965
Erica Moiah James
Erica Moiah James is an Art Historian and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Miami. Before arriving at Miami, she taught at Yale University and was the founding Director and Chief Curator of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. Her writing, research, teaching and curatorial work focuses on the modern and contemporary art of the Global Caribbean and African Diaspora, and she has published widely in her field. Forthcoming publications including the chapter “Prismatic Blackness”, in the new volume Image of the Black in Latin American And Caribbean Art (Harvard UP, 2019) and Decolonizing Time: Nineteenth Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art (NKA, May 2019). Her forthcoming book is entitled After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary.
University of Miami, Professor