Danielle Roper

Lecture Abstract:

This talk attends to the function of revenge fantasies in the visual artwork Oficios de Piel Curtida (Labors of Hardened Skin) by the Afro-Colombian artist Fabio Melecio Palacios. The piece appeared in the digital exhibit Visualizing/Performing Blackface in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive in 2021. I pay close to attention to the expression of black rage in Palacios’ artwork to examine the politics of racial reckoning. I propose to treat black rage as an affective structure that black people in the Caribbean and its diasporas wield to question and reimagine the terms of racial reconciliation and reparatory justice.

Workshop Abstract:

This essay examines the function of monuments amid ongoing calls for reparations in the Caribbean and its diasporas.  It analyzes I am Queen Mary, a monument created by La Vaughn Belle, an Afro-Crucian artist of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Jeanette Ehlers, an Afro-Danish artist that was unveiled in Copenhagen in 2018. Juxtaposed with other artistic interventions in monuments in the Caribbean and its diasporas, I locate this artwork in relation to debates surrounding the role of monuments in histories of colonialism and slavery. I not only attend to the function of monuments within the politics of racial reckoning, but I also assess their place within the struggles for reparatory justice.

Biography:

Danielle Roper is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her work on racial and queer performance and feminist activism in contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean has appeared in GLQ, Latin American Research Review, and Small Axe.  Her first book Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas examines the relationship between blackface performance and the legacies of myths of racial democracy in the region. It links blackface performance in the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, Colombia, Jamaica, and the USA to show how people wield racial enjoyment to negotiate moments of new political articulation. The book is forthcoming (2025) with Duke University Press.  Her second book Racial Reckoning: Black Performance and Visual Art in the Caribbean and its Diasporas explores how black Caribbean artists engage the racial tensions of the 21^st century: the call for reparations, the failures of multiculturalism, the Covid-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd.  Roper is the curator of the digital exhibit Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive (2021).