This multidisciplinary collection will examine the creation and circulation of colonial visual cultures from the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The era of Caribbean slavery placed the islands at the centre of the production and movement of goods, ideas, money and peoples, as well as cultural conflicts, exchanges and hybridities which created new challenges for artists, and new ways of looking. As a cornerstone of European imperial expansion the Caribbean had an enormous imaginative influence on Europe and the wider world. Tropical vistas and diverse peoples provided new visual subjects, and the art of the Caribbean participated in the circum-Atlantic movement of aesthetics, ideas and images: from mid-eighteenth-century georgic scenes which attempted to reconcile beauty with enslaved labour, to the colonial picturesque of the 1790s which rearticulated metropolitan landscape visions, to the unique botanical and zoological images which…
