Eye of the Hurricane: Politics of Art, Architecture, and Climate in the Modern Caribbean

FAIN: FT-286342-22

Joseph Ressler Hartman
University of Missouri, Kansas City (Kansas City, MO 64110-2235)

Research leading to a book about the impact of hurricanes on the art and architecture of the Caribbean in the twentieth century.

The history of the Caribbean traces a poetics of catastrophe. “Eye of the Hurricane” examines an interrelated politics of catastrophe, which uniquely transformed the urban and visual landscapes of the region during the modern era. Due to major shifts in climate caused by El Niño-Southern Oscillation weather effects, the decade of the 1920s and into the 1930s witnessed the most hurricane activity known in the Caribbean for the past 500 years. Those storms, I argue, allow for critical reassessments of Caribbean visual and spatial cultures, past and future. The monumental building projects and visual works that followed devastating storms in Havana (1926), San Juan (1928), and Santo Domingo (1930) demonstrated how Caribbean modernity has constructed “natural disasters”-- particularly hurricanes and their aftermath. Today, as the region faces new threats due to human-made climate change, this study offers critical insights into the visual, material, and cultural politics of natural disasters.

Associated Products

“Temporal Visions: Hurricanes as Chronotopes in Caribbean Art History.” (Article)
Title: “Temporal Visions: Hurricanes as Chronotopes in Caribbean Art History.”
Author: Joseph R Hartman
Abstract: Hurricanes reveal chronotopes that inform the linked histories of transculturation, colonialism and decoloniality in art. This article traces the cultural-political iconography that has grown over generations with the occurrence and destructiveness of hurricanes in Caribbean art. By taking the longue durée of artistic representations of hurricanes into account, he aims to demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of art and art history as a means of responding to climate catastrophes, associated repair and prevention in the context of colonial history. State-sponsored art produced after meteorological disasters has historically reinforced the colonial “matrix of power,” while modern and contemporary artists suggest the need for decolonial solutions to ongoing ecotrauma. However, like the hurricane itself, the processes and visualizations of decolonization cannot only be observed in the present or only predicted for the future. There are also many historical references to this in the visual culture, art and songs of Caribbean peoples. Tracing hurricanes across different periods of Caribbean art history helps us rethink decolonial narratives.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/miradas/article/view/96492
Primary URL Description: Journal website with link to article
Access Model: Open access
Format: Journal
Publisher: Miradas-Zeitschrift für Kunst-und Kulturgeschichte der Amérikas und der iberischen Halbinsel

“Hurricanes in Havana: El Ciclón de 26 as Cultural Agent in Machado’s Cuba” (Article)
Title: “Hurricanes in Havana: El Ciclón de 26 as Cultural Agent in Machado’s Cuba”
Author: Joseph R. Hartman
Abstract: Hurricanes are much more than devastating meteorological events in Havana's history. They made the modern city. Like scrapes on the surface of an ancient palimpsest, those annual storms exposed older layers of history while clearing space for new inscriptions. This article reassesses hurricanes' material and visual role in Havana's modernization in the early twentieth century. A devastating storm known as the Ciclón del '26 made ruins of central Havana on October 20, 1926. The storm's destruction spurred creative responses, including photography, poetry, and architectural monuments. Those visual, spatial, and literary objects demonstrated how natural disasters—hurricanes especially—were also cultural artifacts in Havana's urban history. This was especially so in the case of the hurricane of 1926, which catalyzed new public works and visual culture in Havana under the leadership of Cuba's president, then years later dictator, Gerardo Machado y Morales (in power 1925–1933). The regime leveraged the storm to its advantage. They pointed to reconstruction efforts and international collaborations as proof of political goodwill. The architecture and visual cultures that accompanied the Machado era thus culturally constructed the "natural disaster" of 1926. In so doing, the hurricane transformed modern Havana.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/899795
Primary URL Description: Journal website with link to article
Access Model: Project Muse
Format: Journal
Publisher: Cuban Studies

“Hurricane Hybridty: Migration, Transculturation, and the Art History of Hurricanes.” (Article)
Title: “Hurricane Hybridty: Migration, Transculturation, and the Art History of Hurricanes.”
Author: Joseph R. Hartman
Abstract: This essay examines the cultural politics, art, and architecture of catastrophe, which uniquely transformed the urban and visual landscapes of the Caribbean across generations. Natural disasters are cultural artifacts, I argue, which participate in interrelated histories of migration, transculturality, hybridity, and decoloniality in the Caribbean context throughout time and space (as outlined by writers like Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Édouard Glissant, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and others). Drawing from the writings of Fernando Ortiz on the visual anthropology of hurricanes, this discussion begins with the visual works and buildings of the Carib and Taíno peoples, and later depictions, expressions, and built environments related to hurricanes by European colonizers and descendants of enslaved Africans during the colonial period. It then projects forward to the interweaving histories of revolution, emergent democracies, imperialism, modern art, and hurricanes that defined the greater Caribbean during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. This longue durée look at hurricanes in visual and material culture ultimately aims to demonstrate the productive possibilities of visual and material culture in our current geologic era, the Anthropocene, an age marked by human-made climate ruin.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: http://www.ciha.org/content/motion-migrations-proceedings-35th-world-congress-art-history
Primary URL Description: Link to publication of conference proceedings for the 35th World Congress of Art History. Mine is under Session 13, pages 1498-1516.
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Format: Other
Publisher: Motion: Migrations - Proceedings of the 35th World Congress of Art History

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