Caribbean Subjectivity and the Colonial Archive

This essay takes up a question that Krista Thompson poses in An Eye for the Tropics about whether the highly tropicalized and touristic imagery found in colonial photographs can be used to narrate black histories. She asks: “Can postcards, the very representations that denied historicity to the black population, ever unproblematically yield ‘black history’? Can black histories ever be built on fragile postcard infrastructures?”