Colouring the Caribbean

Mia L. Bagneris is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Art History and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Tulane University.

• Introduction 1 Brunias’s tarred brush, or painting Indians black: race-ing the Carib divide2 Merry and contented slaves and other island myths: representing Africans and Afro-Creoles in the Anglo-American world3 Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana: mixed-race Venuses and Vixens as the fruits of imperial enterprise 4 Can you find the white woman in this picture? Agostino Brunias’s ‘ladies’ of ambiguous raceCoda – Pushing Brunias’s buttons, or re-branding the plantocracy’s painter: the afterlife of Brunias’s imageryIndex

‘In her lush visual analyses, Bagneris artfully deploys twenty-first century language to describe eighteenth-century pictures—a mixed-race planter is “dressed to beat the heat”; skin tones range from “dark chocolate” to “vanilla cream”; and some figures may be “pale, but, then again, not as pale as all that” (1, 157, 2–3)—as if to remind us that Brunias’s paintings belong as much to our present as they do to the past. As scholars continue to explore his works and the visual culture of which they were a part, Bagneris’s text is sure to become a key point of reference and departure.’Meredith Gamer, Columbia University, Collage Art Association, March 2019'Bagneris's study of Brunias is energetic and stimulating.'New West Indian Guide'Bagneris’s purpose … is to complicate the univocal reading of these images and to interpret them as pro-slavery statements … the paintings manifest all the complexity and ambivalence of the system of racial classification of late-eighteenth-century British colonialism.'Perspective'Bagneris’ text expands our understanding of Brunias’ paintings and is a praiseworthy publication on the relationship between visual culture and imperial expansion. […] Colouring the Caribbean will not only stand as the definitive text on Brunias, but will also serve as a model for future scholarship on race and representation in the colonial world.'Association for Art History