In October of 2010 the second iteration of the Lubumbashi arts biennial, Rencontres Picha, took the city as its stage. This paper examines how the biennial unified theories of memory and mapping via an artistic commentary on Lubumbashi’s past and present as capital of the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the first section of this paper I take a phenomenological approach to memory to explain how the lived experience of the biennial was itself an act of remembering. Next I provide a brief overview of the history of Lubumbashi, which celebrated the centennial of its founding in 2010. With this history in mind, one can understand how the act of walking through the city grounded the artistic event in a specific place and history. Through the interactions between bodies, works of art, memory and places, the curators and visitors can be seen as participating in an act of mapping, in fact remapping new meanings onto the preexisting grid of Lubumbashi. Finally, with the decision to call the presentation of works of art a “biennial” (rather than a festival or exhibition), its creators placed Lubumbashi on a global art map of biennials.

For Western audiences the appeal of Haitian art often lies in how it represents exoticism, tropicality, and "primitivism." Both in Haiti and throughout the world, works of Haitian art are bought and sold as souvenirs, decorative art objects, and fine art. This thesis will demonstrate how writers, artists, art dealers, curators, and collectors have shaped and advanced narratives that define Haitian visual culture in terms of Haiti's otherness. It sheds light on the entangled relationships between those in the Haitian arts community and foreign travelers. Interactions between these two groups shaped dominant narratives concerning art and culture in Haiti. This thesis will examine two key periods: the U.S. Marine occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and the "Haitian Renaissance" that began in the 1940s. I will frame Haiti in these periods as a "contact zone" in which cross-cultural negotiations and interactions occurred between Haitians and those visiting the country for myriad purposes.

By examining the uses to which the pan-African water goddess Mami Wata is put in Eve Sandler's art installation entitled "Mami Wata Crossing" (2008), Kimberly Mullen's dance Yemanja, Mother of the Deep (2012), and Chris Abani's novel GraceLand (2004), I present these mediums as important but overlooked means of history-making and expressions of diaspora that are often excluded from written histories. Through attention to three specific works, this thesis attends to the roles that the iconography of Mami Wata and her Caribbean sister Yemanja play in framing "artistic genealogies." I employ oral interviews with textual and performance analysis to explore Mami Wata as a sign for intercultural exchange. This thesis begins with an examination of how worship practices honoring Mami Wata intervene in current scholarship on the black Atlantic. In chapter two I consider Mami Wata as a complex, shifting deity through which traumatic histories can be reexamined. In my third chapter I focus on the ways that artists continue to negotiate racial and cultural identity by integrating images of African and Afro-Caribbean water deities into embodied performances. In my last chapter I use a fictional text to reveal ways that artists combine and transform local and foreign images as a means of exploring gender, genealogy, and globalization in an African context. My work convenes a dialogue across artistic mediums and between the disciplines of Dance Studies, Black Atlantic Literature, and Cultural Studies by demonstrating ways contemporary artists are imagining and inscribing themselves into specific canons through embodied and aesthetic practices.