Stars and Strife, Memory and Futurity: Édouard Duval-Carrié in North Florida

Abstract

This article reads the work of Haitian artist Édouard Duval-Carrié as a form of visual translation between the Francophone Caribbean and North America, specifically Florida, the liminal space that he presents as a borderland, a site of conflict and possible creative conciliation, a creolized world that bears the traces of the common history of the plantation. The article draws mainly on selected works featured in his 2018 exhibition at Florida State University, Decolonizing Refinement, a show that drew parallels between processes of production and commodification across the plantation Americas, and which pulls North Florida into this sphere, dredging up aspects of its history that lie restless, and that are part of the “living history” that Anthony Bogues traces in Duval-Carrié’s work.