Black Light Void Dark Visions of the Caribbean

In Black Light Void: Dark Visions of the Caribbean, Marsha Pearce curates a collection of paintings and short stories to explore sensations of place and identity. The anthology casts tropical place in a different light, going beyond what island sunlight renders visible - beyond what we already know, or think we know - to a space in which the imagination offers illumination. The book makes an argument for seeing the Caribbean in the dark. Expanding the discourse on opacity, it proposes darkness as a critical space for Caribbean aesthetic practices; darkness as a space that resists easy, transparent readings of the Other. Pearce asks: What stories lie beyond those experiences lit up by the sun - the light that is a defining feature of the tropics? Through a dialogic presentation of work by Trinidadian contemporary visual artist Edward Bowen, and short stories by Trinidadian, award-winning writers Kevin Jared Hosein, Barbara Jenkins, Sharon Millar, Amèlcar Sanatan, Portia Subran and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Pearce shapes a journey into the dark and unpredictable. The collection's ekphrastic format is a call and response experience in which the reader is expected to participate and make meanings - reflecting on self and responding - in the amalgam of image and word.