Archives of Refusal: Illegibility and Self-Making in a Caribbean Family Album

Abstract “Archives of Refusal” builds on Black and Caribbean visual culture studies scholarship to consider how colonial violence is made manifest in Caribbean familial photographic archives. Across the region, family albums and photographs take on added complexity as they bear the markings and weight of centuries of colonial and imperial intervention. Drawing on a family archive from Corn Island on the Miskitu, or Mosquitian, Coast of Caribbean Central America (present-day Caribbean Nicaragua and northeastern Honduras), I argue that Mosquitian practices of familial recordkeeping and album-making constitute a powerful form of historical memory and anticolonial refusal that not only counters the centuries-long colonial silencing of the region, but also recasts its history from a community-based lens and perspective. In highlighting and drawing on the labor of Afro-Mosquitian community members and cultural historians from the Mosquitian community of Corn Island, including members of my family, I also piece together my own version of a critical, transgenerational Mosquitian family album.