Postmodern Caribbean Image-Text Correspondences: Visual Constructions from David Boxer and Christopher Cozier

Résumé 0

David Boxer’s The Black Books, it is proposed in this essay, is an engagement in a “midrasic” form of visual exegesis, whereby the artist, in a formal visual sense, explores and deconstructs while at the same time illuminates upon the richness of Western cultural production as it co-existed with the cruelty and dehumanizing features of the human condition within the institution of British Atlantic Slavery. The artist achieves an ongoing commentary on fragmented and discursive narratives through the modern practices of mechanical reproduction and montage. Together with this proposition, my essay will argue that despite the differences in media (text vs. the image), The Black Books correspond more with features common to the neo-slave narrative novel than with the original slave narrative as a genre. Christopher Cozier’s work, like Boxers’ is conceptual and serial in nature. His work is defined around a signature subjectivity as observed in his “picturewriting”. I argue that Cozier in collaborating with writers, collides drawing with written ideas on the postmodern Caribbean scene that become visual, creating a kind of new genre which is very hybrid and close to the “memoir”. Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Route (2007) a visual novel/commentary/memoir, comes to mind. In this sense, Cozier’s recent works, like Boxer’s also shares features in common with the neo-slave narrative as opposed to the traditional narrative.