Scarred Landscapes
Place, Trauma, and Memory in Caribbean Latinx Art

Stephanie Lewthwaite (Author)

9780816554560

Paperback / softback, published 30 September 2025

360 pages, 33 colour illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.416 kg

"[This book] breaks ground in Latinx art history as the first monograph to attend to the art of the Caribbean diaspora from a relational viewpoint that creates connections between Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican artists. Lewthwaite masterfully weaves together colonial and imperial history of the islands of origin and shared notions of belonging/unbelonging in New York, while centering art as a method of resisting the aloneness of trauma." — Tatiana Reinoza, author of Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory

Scarred Landscapes is a groundbreaking exploration of the rich and complex works of Caribbean Latinx artists. Scholar Stephanie Lewthwaite documents the work of ten influential artists of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent, based in New York City from the 1970s to the present. Through their diverse practices, including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance art, these artists confront the legacies of colonial trauma and their own experiences of diasporic unbelonging and artworld marginality.

The book combines formal analysis with artist testimony, exhibition histories, and theoretical frameworks from trauma, memory, and archipelagic studies, to offer a multifaceted examination of Caribbean Latinx art. Lewthwaite explores how these artists practice “archipelagic memory,” a generative, decolonial, and coalitional form of memory work that envisions alternative modes of belonging in difference and solidarity with others. By connecting different people, pasts, and places, Caribbean Latinx artists expose the reverberations of trauma while imagining other worlds beyond it. 

This work puts Caribbean Latinx artists at the center of debates about the exclusions of dominant memory narratives and contemporary art worlds, highlighting their contributions to a wider decolonial project of remembrance. By revealing the interconnectedness of traumatic histories and the potential for art to foster empathy and justice, Lewthwaite’s work underscores the importance of relational and decolonial thought for imagining a better society.