The Caribbean, with its transnational diaspora stretching to all the shores of the Atlantic and beyond, is one of the liveliest cultural landscapes in the world today. It is also one of the most troubled. This volume presents contemporary perspectives on the challenges facing Caribbean communities. It shows how the arts can play a crucial role in improving sustainability by creating a shared ground of experience, enjoyment and understanding.

The book promotes the view that visual art in particular has an important contribution to make in enhancing the Caribbean's networks and reflecting on the nature of its connections. It addresses a topic that spans the scholarly, artistic, curatorial and professional fields of art and heritage, exploring constructive comparisons between key linguistic regions - namely the Anglophone and the Dutch - and identifying new parallels and contrasts in global-local relations, capital, patronage, morality, sustainability and the benefits of knowledge exchange. Ultimately, it makes the case for social justice in the arts within a complex and little-studied global geography.

Based on a major international project funded by research councils and arts organisations in Europe, Sustainable art communities is a milestone in the collaboration between artists, policymakers, arts organisers, art historians and critics. It draws from such diverse settings as Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, Suriname, Curaçao, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States.

Leon Wainwright is Reader in Art History at The Open University, UK
Kitty Zijlmans is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory/World Art Studies at Leiden University

Sustainable art communities: creativity and policy in the transnational Caribbean - Leon Wainwright
Part I: Histories and theories
1 Dreams of utopia: sustaining art institutions in the transnational Caribbean - Erica Moiah James
2 Criticality and context: migrating meanings of art from the Caribbean - Therese Hadchity
3 Notes on imagining Afropea - Charl Landvreugd
Part II: Visual investigations
4 Kolonialismo di Nanzi: Anansi colonialism - Tirzo Martha
5 Art and agency in contemporary Curaçao: Tirzo Martha's Blijf Maar Plakken - Kitty Zijlmans
6 Between a rock and a hard place: local-global dynamics of funding and sponsorship in Caribbean art -Winston Kellman
7 Randnotizen: notes from the edge - Nicholas Morris
Part III: Collaborations
8 Policy entrepreneurship: expanding multimodality in Caribbean practice through Caribbean Intransit -Marielle Barrow
9 Champagne tastes and mauby pockets: towards healthy cultural eco-systems - Annalee Davis
10 Sustainable art communities: an afterword - Mimi Sheller
Index