Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Summary:PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince is at once a portrait of Haiti's capital, a celebration of its arts, and a visionary re-mapping of culture in the world's first Black republic. Published to celebrate a landmark 2018 exhibition at Pioneer Works, PÒTOPRENS comprises the first major survey of contemporary artists of urban Haiti. Printed in both English and Haitian Kreyòl, PÒTOPRENS is a map-like reflection of the urban landscape and a new geography of popular production. The city of Port-au-Prince is a polyphonic metropolis that declares its past via multiple voices; in this volume, the city's complex present is evoked through artworks, images, testimonies, and essays. These contents are organized around distinct zones of artistic production--urban neighborhoods identified with particular subjects, materials, and forms. Focusing on 14 of these areas' exemplary artists, PÒTOPRENS mirrors the geography of the city that inspired it. Contextualized by leading writers on Caribbean history and culture, these artists' stories are situated within Port-au-Prince's rich heritage of "majority class art." As cities everywhere grow ever-more critical to our changing global environment, catalyzing cultural, social, political, and economic transitions of all kinds, this book articulates urban Haiti's unbroken link with its revolutionary past. It also issues an insistent call to relocate that past, and the vital forms of expressive culture its echoes still feed, within the contemporary record. -- Publisher's website

"From the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa Maria's deck in 1492 at what he mistook for an island off Asia, the Caribbean has been subjected to fantasies projected from without by the West, and viewed as a place to be consumed. It stood at the center of the transatlantic slave trade for more than 300 years. Its societies were shaped by mass migrations and forced labor from the 16th century onwards, imposed by European or latterly-American imperial masters. Scattered across a vast arc of islands and in some instances separated by the languages and cultures of their colonizers, the more than 40,000,000 Caribbean people today are countering their imperial history by shaping cultural conversation the world over: through literature, music, art, and religion in an era when cultures everywhere are contending with "rootlessness.""--

"What makes a place?" Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning, culture and history in one locale, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers and cartographers, Solnit has compiled twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates San Francisco and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants..." (From the paperback jacket.)