Description
Book SynopsisA beautifully illustrated look at the aesthetics and implications of the visual images used to sell Jamaica and the Bahamas to tourists as "tropical paradises" from the 1880s through the 1930s.
Trade Review“In
An Eye for the Tropics, Krista A. Thompson’s guiding preoccupation is with the construction of the Anglo-Creole Caribbean within a colonial regime of visual and discursive representation. How, she asks, was the Caribbean framed within the ocular terms of a tropical paradise as a space of verdant, quasi-primitive desire? The story she tells to answer this question is at once historically detailed and theoretically acute.”—
David Scott, author of
Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment
“Krista A. Thompson masterfully uses early-twentieth-century postcards to show how social, political, and racial issues are embedded in postcard imagery, while simultaneously analyzing current collecting practices. She makes substantial new and intriguing contributions to the understanding not simply of the historical tropicalization of the islands but of the persistence of such propagandistic attitudes in the economic survival of the islands today.”—
Judith Bettelheim, Professor of Art and Art History, San Francisco State University
“One of the first studies to critically interrogate the visual culture of the Caribbean through the lens of both popular art and fine art, it’s an important book that, no doubt, will continue to force the question of an distinct Caribbean art history, singular from a similarly contentious, African American chronicle, and impacted by the parallel histories of economic underdevelopment in the region and Western nostalgia for a present-day, accessible paradise.” -- Richard J. Powell * Small Axe *
Table of ContentsIllustrations ix
Abbreviations xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Tropicalization: The Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Jamaica and the Bahamas 1
1. Framing “The New Jamaica”: Feasting on the Picturesque Tropical Landscape 27
2. Developing the Tropics: The Politics of the Picturesque in the Bahamas 92
3. Through the Looking Glass: Visualizing the Sea as Icon of the Bahamas 156
4. Diving into the Racial Waters of Beach Space in Jamaica: Tropical Modernity and the Myrtle Bank Hotel’s Pool 204
5. “I Am Rendered Speechless by Your Idea of Beauty”: The Picturesque in History and Art in the Postcolony 252
Epilogue: Tropical Futures: Civilizing Citizens and Uncivilizing Tourists 297
Notes 307
References 331
Illustration Credits 349
Index 355
