A Dream to Conjure

In A Dream to Conjure, Yasmine Espert considers the hopes and imaginings of Caribbean film from its beginnings. Focusing on narratives of migration from the late 1980s to the late 2010s, Espert attends to the restorative and life-affirming practices that diasporic Caribbean filmmakers conjure to assert their wellbeing, sovereignty, and sense of relation to the Caribbean. She examines how their embodied, aesthetic, and political practices set precedents for organizing efforts and continue a tradition of resistance to colonial extraction. Drawing from her own conversations and collaborations with these artists, she elevates the study with a deeper reflection on what it is like to create in, and about, lands that many said had no place in the film industry. Through an anticolonial, queer-of-color framework, Espert engages the films, dreams, and acts of Caribbean creators as multisensory, time-bending forms of collective engagement that defy colonial logic and prioritize those most vulnerable under regimes of oppression.