Colouring the Caribbean

Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Bruniass intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour so called Red and Black Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Bruniass paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Bruniass work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. -- .