Review: Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s–Today, edited by Carla Acevedo-Yates, and no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, by Marcela Guerrero

Writers of the greater Caribbean have observed how the history of the Caribbean traces a poetics of repeating catastrophes: from slavery and colonialism to economic exploitation and deadly calamities. These repetitions are not only historical in scope. They encircle, reveal, and animate one another in multiple temporal and geographic contexts. In the Caribbean’s “chaos-monde” (“chaos-world”), to borrow from the late Martinican poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant, historic events also weave together a set of generative potentials important to the world today, born out of the excesses of a complex natural and cultural dialectic. This is the “non-history” of the Caribbean. It is a history defined by ruptures, dislocations, and de-territorializations, as well as ancestral memories, critical fabulations, and decolonial tactics. As Glissant puts it: “The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is however, obsessively present” (quoted in Forecast Form, 255). Caribbean art history,...