In this paper, I investigate digital device users and their relationships with devices in order to tease out the ways human and computer interactions are shaping concepts of personhood by utilizing Alfred Gell’s concepts of the art nexus and the distributed person as frameworks for examining digital applications that are being incorporated by some users in processes of remembrance and mourning. First, I consider the metaphorical vocabulary and terminology applied to technical tools and their use, which ascribe a level of agency to the technological objects or systems. Secondly, I dissect two applications that were developed to run in tandem with the social networking platforms Twitter and Facebook, and designed to directly address processes of death, loss, and remembrance through the digital social network. I evaluate the two digital applications, called ifidie.net and LIVESON, to consider the ways in which people are incorporating digital devices and digital media into critical cultural practices, particularly those related to death and remembrance.

This dissertation discusses how residents, governments, and the international community continue to transform and recast two colonial port cities, Elmina in Ghana and Fort Kochi in India, as heritage sites and museums in order to represent particular histories. These sites act as repositories of memory, venues for community rituals, spaces for exhibitions, and backdrops for artistic productions. This exploration of these ports demonstrates the continued relevance and resonance of colonial heritage in postcolonies and exposes how knowledge of colonialism are produced and disseminated through the media of heritage and museums.

Elmina and Fort Kochi are ideal case studies in part because of their similar historical trajectories, but principally because of their parallel contemporary existences. Both of these towns have been reconstituted as heritage destinations and are now exhibitionary landscapes with multiple museums, heritage homes, and archeological ruins. Furthermore, both are venues for recurring cultural performances and festivals. Their urban landscapes simultaneously exhibit colonial struggles, modern aspirations, and postcolonial predicaments. By analyzing the revitalization of history in Elmina and Fort Kochi, I show how these cities function as alternative archives that harbor submerged narratives of migration and cultural exchange through unique modes of museum display, both within and beyond the walls of the gallery spaces.

In October of 2010 the second iteration of the Lubumbashi arts biennial, Rencontres Picha, took the city as its stage. This paper examines how the biennial unified theories of memory and mapping via an artistic commentary on Lubumbashi’s past and present as capital of the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the first section of this paper I take a phenomenological approach to memory to explain how the lived experience of the biennial was itself an act of remembering. Next I provide a brief overview of the history of Lubumbashi, which celebrated the centennial of its founding in 2010. With this history in mind, one can understand how the act of walking through the city grounded the artistic event in a specific place and history. Through the interactions between bodies, works of art, memory and places, the curators and visitors can be seen as participating in an act of mapping, in fact remapping new meanings onto the preexisting grid of Lubumbashi. Finally, with the decision to call the presentation of works of art a “biennial” (rather than a festival or exhibition), its creators placed Lubumbashi on a global art map of biennials.

For Western audiences the appeal of Haitian art often lies in how it represents exoticism, tropicality, and "primitivism." Both in Haiti and throughout the world, works of Haitian art are bought and sold as souvenirs, decorative art objects, and fine art. This thesis will demonstrate how writers, artists, art dealers, curators, and collectors have shaped and advanced narratives that define Haitian visual culture in terms of Haiti's otherness. It sheds light on the entangled relationships between those in the Haitian arts community and foreign travelers. Interactions between these two groups shaped dominant narratives concerning art and culture in Haiti. This thesis will examine two key periods: the U.S. Marine occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and the "Haitian Renaissance" that began in the 1940s. I will frame Haiti in these periods as a "contact zone" in which cross-cultural negotiations and interactions occurred between Haitians and those visiting the country for myriad purposes.

By examining the uses to which the pan-African water goddess Mami Wata is put in Eve Sandler's art installation entitled "Mami Wata Crossing" (2008), Kimberly Mullen's dance Yemanja, Mother of the Deep (2012), and Chris Abani's novel GraceLand (2004), I present these mediums as important but overlooked means of history-making and expressions of diaspora that are often excluded from written histories. Through attention to three specific works, this thesis attends to the roles that the iconography of Mami Wata and her Caribbean sister Yemanja play in framing "artistic genealogies." I employ oral interviews with textual and performance analysis to explore Mami Wata as a sign for intercultural exchange. This thesis begins with an examination of how worship practices honoring Mami Wata intervene in current scholarship on the black Atlantic. In chapter two I consider Mami Wata as a complex, shifting deity through which traumatic histories can be reexamined. In my third chapter I focus on the ways that artists continue to negotiate racial and cultural identity by integrating images of African and Afro-Caribbean water deities into embodied performances. In my last chapter I use a fictional text to reveal ways that artists combine and transform local and foreign images as a means of exploring gender, genealogy, and globalization in an African context. My work convenes a dialogue across artistic mediums and between the disciplines of Dance Studies, Black Atlantic Literature, and Cultural Studies by demonstrating ways contemporary artists are imagining and inscribing themselves into specific canons through embodied and aesthetic practices.

The dissertation that follows is an inter-disciplinary study of the ways in which a range of individuals with varying stakes and motivations have constructed a category called “Haitian Art” during a period beginning prior to World War II and extending to the present day. Haitian Art, like any cultural product ascribed to a group of people, is a taxonomic construction that subsumes a diverse and complex set of artistic and cultural practices under a limited and often questionable rubric. Over decades, international connections between Haiti and the US have consistently influenced and directed visual arts production in Haiti. Historically, tourism has played an outsized role in facilitating these cross-cultural contacts and exchanges between Haitian artists and expatriate visitors to Haiti. More recently, “traditional” forms of tourism have given way to visitors who travel to Haiti, not for purposes of leisure, but in response to the myriad crises that have afflicted the country. For this thesis, I argue that movements of people, ideas, and art objects have contributed to narratives of “Haiti” that have circulated throughout the United States vis-�-vis the production, acquisition, and exhibition of works made by Haitian artists. While the geographic focus of this dissertation is primarily on Haiti and the United States, I argue that entangled international networks of circulation and exchange rooted in deeper historical models reveal broad, globalized iniquities and imbalances in which individuals with varying degrees of agency and input interact cross-culturally within the realm of visual arts.