Published by University of California Press, Guillermina De Ferrari’s Broken Tropics: Contingency in Contemporary Caribbean Art will be “on the shelves” in December 2026.
In her review of the book, Yolanda Martínez San Miguel (University of Miami) writes, “Broken Tropics is a profound and timely intervention into the field of Caribbean visual studies, to reveal how art making becomes a radical act of life making. Centering Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Haitian ‘arts of contingency,’ Guillermina De Ferrari moves beyond the binary of structural oppression and individual resistance to mediate on how we remain human in an increasingly broken world.”
Description: Broken Tropics examines contemporary art installations, performances, photography, and street art from three primary sites of compounding vulnerability: Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Guillermina De Ferrari poses two central questions: How does contingency affect our humanness, and what does art making under duress say about being human? With the understanding that being human is a praxis and that art is a practical philosophy, De Ferrari introduces the notion of an “art of contingency.” This creative practice engages with the accidental and the unexpected to highlight two contradictory facts: that uncertainty is a predictable feature of Caribbean life and that, nonetheless, misfortune does not have to be fate. Placing long-standing concerns about social, political, and economic injustice on a continuum with the concerns of disaster studies and ecocriticism, Broken Tropics shows how people reshape and reinvent the social world in response to external pressures, and how the arts envision new forms of living in a broken world.
Guillermina De Ferrari is Halls-Bascom Professor of Caribbean Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is author of Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction; Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba; and Apertura: Photography in Cuba Today.
For more information, see https://www.ucpress.edu/books/broken-tropics/hardcover
Published by University of California Press, Guillermina De Ferrari’s Broken Tropics: Contingency in Contemporary Caribbean Art will be “on the shelves” in December 2026. In her review of the book, Yolanda Martínez San Miguel (University of Miami) writes, “Broken Tropics is a profound and timely intervention into the field of Caribbean visual studies, to reveal how
