In this episode, Erica Moiah James talks with Roshini Kempadoo, media artist, photographer, and scholar, whose book Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence, and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, has been critical to Erica's work in theorizing the Caribbean archive. Roshini discusses working in the archives at the University of the West Indies, and the particularity of archives in Trinidad and Guyana. They also discuss a common theoretical model in African diaspora scholarship, critical fabulation, which originally indicated the ethical demand for scholars working within archives marked by colonial violence and absence to use tools of fiction and imagination to return embodied existence to individuals, reduced to numbers. Yet this tool of critical fabulation has taken on a life of its own. Erica and Roshini discuss the complications of working in colonial archives and think about the possibilities of limits of presence and absence within these archives.

In the second episode of this miniseries, Portrait of a Young Woman, Erica Moiah James discusses the importance of fashion in understanding this portrait and the life of this woman. She speaks with historian of fashion, Amelia F. Rauser, Charles A. Dana Professor of Art history at Franklin and Marshall College, whose book The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s was critical for Erica’s research. As Amelia has importantly argued in her text, the “objection of the enslaved Black body and the plantation culture and inhabited, stalked neoclassical dress, which could not escape the material traces of its manufacturer.” Erica’s research on the young Black woman in this portrait draws on Amelia’s work on Caribbean dress, and they will discuss the role that fashion had on the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. In particular, they explore the ways in which women and particularly women of color use fashion to claim power through self-representation.