The St. Thomas Graphics Collection

June 19th, 2021, 2:00pm AT

The Body of the Virgin Islands Woman: Queens, Debutantes and Virgins
A panel discussion by the Virgin Islands Studies Collective:
Dr. Hadiya Sewer, Dr. Tami Navarro, Prof Tiphanie Yanique, and La Vaughn Belle

A recording of the event on CGL's Youtube channel is found HERE,

The Virgin Island Studies Collective will present a round table conversation on the St. Thomas Graphics Collection. In this presentation philosopher Dr. Hadiya Sewer, anthropologist Dr. Tami Navarro, novelist Prof. Tiphanie Yanique and visual artist La Vaughn Belle, will bring their individual expertise to explore the St. Thomas Graphics Collection as a historical catalog of how Virgin Islands women's bodies were understood, celebrated, explored and used during the 1980s and 1990s. For discussion will be rebel queendom, pageant queendom, debutantes and the ubiquitous use of Virgin Islands women as models on the cover of tourist guide books. In general, the panel will ask what these representations tell us about the Virgin Islands woman. In particular they will interrogate the range and limits of Virgin Islands woman's beauty and power; as well how the Virgin Islands woman has balanced native/local ideals of strength and beauty while beneath the tourists gaze, and even while under American and European ideals of femininity.

Presenter Biographies

Dr. Tami Navarro is the Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), a Visiting Scholar at the University of the Virgin Islands, and Editor of the journal Scholar and Feminist Online. She is a Cultural Anthropologist whose work has published work in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Transforming Anthropology, Small Axe Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Social Text, and Feminist Anthropology. She serves on the Board of the St. Croix Foundation and is a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is the co-host of the podcast, "Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean" and her book, Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands will be published by SUNY Press in November 2021.

Ms. La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. She is a visual artist working in a variety of disciplines that include: video, performance, painting, installation, writing and public intervention projects. She explores the material culture of coloniality and her art presents countervisualities and narratives. Borrowing elements from history and archeology Belle creates narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and invisibility. She has exhibited in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe in institutions such as the Museo del Barrio (NY), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (CA) and Kunstahl Charlottenborg(DK) and recently finished a solo exhibition at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. Her artwork has been featured in a wide range of media including: the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, The Guardian, Time magazine, Caribbean Beat, the BBC and Le Monde. Her work with colonial era pottery led to a commission with the renowned brand of porcelain products, the Royal Copenhagen. She is the co-creator of "I Am Queen Mary", the artist-led groundbreaking monument that confronted the Danish colonial amnesia while commemorating the legacies of resistance of the African people who were brought to the former Danish West Indies. She holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and an MA and a BA from Columbia University in NY. She was the 2018-2020 fellow at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women. Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.

Professor Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom's 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Tiphanie is also the author of the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2014. Land of Love and Drowning was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. She is the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation's 5Under35. Her writing has won the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet's Prize. She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and her writing has been published in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is an associate professor at Emory University. Her novel, Monster in the Middle, will be published in October 2021.

Dr. Hadiya Sewer is a Research Fellow in the African and African American Studies Program at Stanford University and a Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. Dr. Sewer's work uses a non-sovereign territory in the Caribbean, the United States Virgin Islands, as a case study for tracing the conceptions of freedom and the human that exist under contemporary colonialism. Sewer earned their Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Their scholarship focuses on environmental justice and Africana decolonial, feminist, queer, and political theories. They are currently working on two monographs titled, "(De)Colonial Desires: AntiBlackness, Aporia, and the Afterlives of the Dead", and "Meditations on Disaster: Climate Injustice, Covid-19, and the Coloniality of Power." Dr. Sewer's research, teaching, and advocacy provide phenomenological, ethnographic, and historical examinations of anti-blackness, colonialism, imperialism, and the climate crisis. As a community-engaged scholar, Sewer is also the President and Co-Founder of St.JanCo: the St. John Heritage Collective, a land rights and cultural heritage preservation nonprofit in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.


Made possible in part by a CFVI and NEH