Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias

Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias
ISBN-10
152612047X
ISBN-13
9781526120472
Category
Art
Pages
272
Language
English
Published
2017-12-04
Publisher
Manchester University Press
Author
Mia L. Bagneris

Description

Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias’s 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 Brunias’s 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 Brunias’s work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.

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