CONCLUSION: The Black Body, Tropicality, and the Black Speculative

Black Atlantic artists and performers of the Caribbean and the United States created imaginative art that responded to colonial and hegemonic regimes using a tropicalist oeuvre. Their creative manifestations privileged the land and how a sense of place was critical in their early twentieth-century identity formations. Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou, and masqueraders and designers of Trinidad Carnival unquestionably contributed to the development of modernism. Tropicality encourages a new understanding of the African diasporic experience, one that connects the Black Atlantic with Africa. Tropicality therefore reorients the Pan-African world as one that is inherently modern. Early twentieth-century