Abstract

This thesis explores the paradox of what it means to live Blackness within a world founded upon its destruction through a critical art historical analysis of Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis’ exhibition Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls (T.A.U.B.I.S.) (2020). Adopting a Black feminist framework rooted in methods of opacity, I interrogate the racist visual, cultural, and social economies that have continuously objectified and dehumanized Black people since the transatlantic slave trade. In doing so, I illuminate how Lewis’ work navigates structures of anti-Black violence and reimagines Black diasporic life beyond white supremacist patriarchal capitalist impositions of negation. Drawing from Black studies scholar Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the afterlife of slavery, I establish Lewis’ work within a larger legacy of Black diasporic practices of Black refusal, care, relation, and radical imagination that grapples towards liberatory ends. At the same time, I consider how T.A.U.B.I.S.’ interdisciplinary nature—which includes poetry, speculative fiction, and hand-sewn textile sculptures which represent imagined Black motherly ancestors—emerges as an expansive site of Black diasporic possibility that transcends reductive constructs of biological determinism. Ultimately, this thesis argues that with T.A.U.B.I.S., Lewis not only tends to present-day Black diasporic subjectivities, but further prompts vital strategies for knowing and living Blackness otherwise in the still unfolding aftermaths of slavery.