Searching for Cayenne
Cédrine Scheidig asks where the history of the Caribbean begins and ends
writting by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Format:  softback
Number of pages: 128
Publication date: 2024-03-05
Measurements: 9.25 x 12 inches

Circuits of Blackness
Writting by Serubiri Moses


Cédrine Scheidig focuses in her portraits, landscape photographs, and still lifes on the everyday life of Black people in French overseas territories, especially Guiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. She is particularly interested in questions pertaining to identity formation and belonging. As a starting point for interpreting Scheidig’s work, Serubiri Moses takes zouk— a musical style originating in Guiana and enjoying influences from the French Caribbean and Africa. He explains how the artist lends visibility and possible narratives to her own, Caribbean-influenced form of “Black experience.” She thus works to counteract established Caribbean visual narratives that focus on an exotic paradise oriented primarily to the landscape: “In her pursuit of the circuits of Blackness, from Cayenne to Paris, Scheidig reveals a strategy that relates to the origin and movement of Black culture across geography and history.”

Although syncretism emerges from the violent colonial histories and uprootedness of the Caribbean, each island-nation conjures different ways of expressing, coping, managing, and healing the fractures of conquest. Nonetheless, there still is a Pan-Caribbean identity that is perpetually evolving. This leads us to ask what defines the ‘Neo-Carib’? What does our cultural identity look like today and where is it going?