James Madison University & Duke Hall Gallery of Art
ISBN- 987-1-63944-270-6
See Article “Conjuring Through Spirituality, Ethnobotany and Ancestor Veneration” by Yndia Lorick-Wilmot
Catalog Contributors: Beth Hinderliter, Kinitra Brooks and Yndia Lorick-Wilmot. The catalog is based on the 2020-2021 virtual exhibit “7 Works to Bend Time” at the Duke Hall Gallery of Art in Harrisonburg, VA. Exhibit curated by Beth Hinderliter.
The artists in this exhibition sought to repair the damage wrought by colonial models of time. As they conjure forth the future they need, they can be said to bend time, reaching backwards to the strength and wisdom of ancestors to craft a better future. The exhibition asks what practices and ways of being opposed settler-colonial temporality in the past- and what new forms of non-hegemonic time might emerge? It refuses to craft yet another plea to the dominant culture for justice, and instead offers windows into worlds where time is not a colonizing device.
The artists offer multiple viewpoints on what scholar Kinitra Brooks has called conjure feminism – the political, social and spiritual practices that marginalized women have developed in the face of discrimination and adversity. According to Brooks, conjure feminism “liberates the diasporic knowledge and folkloric practices of spirit work. Its cosmological framework provides Black folks with the fluidity necessary to survive and thrive in a constantly shifting, perilous world.”
To learn more about the exhibit, visit https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/bendtime/
Springer International ISBN-13: 978-3319622071
Told mainly through vignettes, Lorick-Wilmot shows how her Black Caribbean middle class respondents’ filter (gender, sexual, ethnic) identity through specific geographies, and distinct front- and back-stage personas that guide how Afro-Caribbeans “move through the world.” Avoiding the more common assimilationist to studying immigrants, she melds postcolonial, intersectional, and double consciousness frames as she checks still-resonant assumptions (á la Moynihan and his ilk) of what it means to be black in the USA.
Vilna Bashi Treitler, PhD, University of California at Santa Barbara. (Race and Africana Studies)
Building on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Lorick-Wilmot formulates the notion of triple identity consciousness and mounts a compelling critique of the endurance of white supremacy and finds among respondents a palpable commitment to the advancement of “positive human excellence for all”.
Steven J. Gold, PhD, Michigan State University (American Immigration and Social Inequality)
In an engaging, self-reflexive style of oral history, Lorick-Wilmot uses undervalued but necessary frameworks of class, post-colonial theory, transnationality, and the diaspora to show that the middle-class Caribbean second generation is also the Black American experience.
Nadia Y. Kim, PhD, Loyola Marymount University (Ethnic identity and Asian American identity)
Lorick-Wilmot offers a compelling account from a decolonized perspective, which refuses to accept the one-dimensionality of white imperial supremacy as the only reality to understand adult children of Caribbean immigrants.
Silvia Dominquez, PhD, MSW, Northeastern University. (Latino/a Studies and Human Services)
Palgrave Macmillan ISBN-13: 978-1-137-46252-7
Book Chapter in an Edited Volume. Part III, Internarrative Identity and the Black Caribbean Diaspora
“Narrating Negotiations of Racial-Ethnic Identity and Belonging Among Second-Generation Black Caribbean Immigrants in the United States.”
LFB Scholarly Publishing, LLC
ISBN-13: 978-1-59332-408-7
Part of the book series: The New Americans: Recent Immigration and American Society, Edited by Steven J. Gold and Ruben G. Rumbaut
Lorick-Wilmot explores the complexities of Black Caribbean ethnic identity by examining the role a community-based organization plays in creating ethnic options for its first-generation Black Caribbean immigrant clients. Her case study particularly focuses on a Caribbean-identified organization’s history, culture and climate, and the kinds of resources staff and community leaders provide that, ultimately, supports the maintenance of Caribbean ethnicity and Black ethnic identities and slows the rate of acculturation. Her case study points to the ways ethnic identity formations feed into the American construction of ethnic “others” that, in contradictory ways, empower some Black Caribbean immigrants but also perpetuate racial and ethnic tensions and challenges within the broader African American and Caribbean community.
Choice magazine and the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries recognized Creating Black Caribbean Ethnic Identity as a “Recommended Read for nonprofits, community organizers, undergraduate and graduate students.”