Abstract
The chapter examines a selection of commissioned photographs that were intended to perpetuate colonial discourses and to continue the objectives of European colonial and imperial projects in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century. The positioning of black people as visual tropes and economic tools was integral to the reinvention of the region as a commercial and tourist paradise, a construction of blackness that was essential to the making of a white leisure culture in post-slavery Jamaica. The analysis of a selection of photographs commissioned for the 1891 Awakening Jamaica exhibition has been undertaken by drawing on Anibal Quijano’s (Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178, 2007) concept of the colonial matrix of power, within an interdisciplinary approach that combines semiotics with Edward Said’s and Michel Foucault’s approach to discourse. The critical discussion of the images attests to the power of the visual and its centrality in colonial discourses (Orientalism. Western conceptions of the orient. London: Penguin Books, Said, E., 1978). As an instrument of colonial knowledge production, the Awakening Jamaica exhibition demonstrates the reliance of elite white identities on representations of gendered racialised subjects that were constructed to produce leisured white identities and to serve the economic demands of the white colonial elite.
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Notes
- 1.
See Victor Patricio de Landaluze The Sugarcane Harvest 1874
http://www.akg-images.co.uk/archive/Cane-sugar-harvest-in-Cuba-2UMDHUBOJSP.html.
- 2.
Former slave owners received £20 million in compensation from British taxpayers. See the UCL research project, Legacies of British Slave-ownership, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/.
- 3.
See Wilkes (2016) for a discussion on the use of the whip as a form of control in colonial domestic settings.
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Wilkes, K. (2019). Remaking Jamaica: Tourism, Labour, and the Awakening Jamaica Exhibition. In: Esposito, E., Pérez-Arredondo, C., Ferreiro, J. (eds) Discourses from Latin America and the Caribbean. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93623-9_8
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