As part of the World Bank’s project About Change, the exhibition Wrestling with the Image, on view at the Art Museum of the Americas from January 21 – March 10, 2011, investigates how the Caribbean region and its populations have been defined by conquest, colonialism, the tropical, narratives of struggle and national sovereignty, emigration, and recently, industrial tourism. Although the Caribbean provided essential migrant labor to much of the world as an important player in international trade treaties, and in the procurement, production, and distribution of raw materials, it remains as an exotic other in conversations about cultural production. It is a tense relationship in which the Caribbean is part of the cultural engine while remaining largely on the outside. This symposium will highlight U.S.-based scholarship on Caribbean artistic production in the 20th and 21st centuries, characterized by artists who are investigating and reconsidering how the region is understood. It is to be a conversation about movement in the Atlantic world – a dialogue about dispersal rather than displacement.