The Pioneers of TransAmerican Art

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The cosmopolitan aesthetics of the great TransAmerican Diaspora is, at its core, the diasporic repository of a millennial heritage, the bearer of a rich and complex civilization encoded in the mangrovian culture of the Greater Caribbean. Being part of a diasporic continuum, it is based on an oral, iconic, textual and performative literature which is itself a carrier of traditions. The fact that these symbolic, semiotic, mythological, teleological (inherent to Mesoamerican art), and experiential dimensions may have seemed abstruse to the eyes of the first Western chroniclers in no way obviates their intrinsic and primary quality, as the growing interest in native art studies attests today. The TransAmerican aesthetic that the peoples of the Americas have created, recreated, and transmitted for centuries aspires to discursive autonomy and generic authenticity. It supports the march of a civilization that has been progressing for millennia, despite all the obstacles that one would like to oppose it, as testified by recent connections between arts and reparation movements in the Americas. It founds the raison d'être and the daily heritage of the peoples of the Greater Anglophone Caribbean.Contributors to this thematic issue of Angles were invited to underline the connection to these ancestral memories and explore their current resurgence in the visual and living arts. Contributions can bear on scientific, fictional, and secular literature, the genius of dance and music, and the visual, scenic, culinary, performing, visual and ritual arts. Themes of interest could include but are not limited to, decoloniality, body politics, representation, restorative justice, Caribbean indigenous thought and practices, and diasporic art spaces. In the spirit of collegiality that animates this publication project, we intend to create the same dynamic between the communities of researchers and artists of the Greater Anglophone Caribbean. This dynamic is therefore open to all those who want to maintain a constructive dialogue to advance the knowledge and sharing of Caribbean aesthetics in the footsteps of the pioneers of TransAmerican art.