Research Catalog

Title

Colouring the Caribbean : race and the art of Agostino Brunias / Mia L. Bagneris.

Author

Bagneris, Mia L.

Publication

• Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2018.
• ©2018

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Brunias, Agostino

Description

xv, 256 pages : illustrations (chiefly color); 25 cm.

Summary

"Colouring the Caribbean is the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's West Indian paintings. Working primarily in St. Vincent and Dominica at the end of the eighteenth century, Brunias painted for plantocrats and the colonial elite, creating romanticised pictures featuring Caribbeans of colour--so-called 'Red' and 'Black' Carib Indians, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race. The book explores the full scope of these images, investigating their role in reifying then developing notions of race. Perceived as straightforward documents of visual ethnography, Brunias's paintings have been understood as visual field guides for reading race in the colonial West Indies. For the first time, the book investigates how the artist's images both reflected and refracted ideas about race, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. Though grounded in close visual analysis, it uses various critical lenses and an interdisciplinary array of materials, including period historical and literary texts and secondary scholarship from a variety of fields, to inform its interpretations and conclusions. Ultimately, it offers provocative new insights into Brunias's work, gleaned from a broad survey of the artist's paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. A critical addition to the bookshelves of historians working on the art and visual culture of the Anglo-American world, Colouring the Caribbean will also be of interest to scholars in race and gender studies, African diaspora studies, Atlantic world studies, slavery studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and eighteenth-century studies"--Page 4 of cover.

Series Statement

Rethinking art's histories

Uniform Title

Rethinking art's histories.

Alternative Title

• Coloring the Caribbean
• Race and the art of Agostino Brunias

Subjects

• Race relations
• Brunias, Agostino > Criticism and interpretation
• West Indies > Race relations > History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Art
• West Indies > In art
• Imperialism in art
• Race in art
• History

Genre/Form

• Art.
• Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Brunias's tarred brush, or painting Indians black : race-ing the Carib divide -- Merry and contented slaves and other island myths : representing Africans and Afro-Creoles in the Anglo-American world -- Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana : mixed-race Venuses and Vixens as the fruits of imperial enterprise -- Can you find the white woman in this picture? Agostino Brunias's 'ladies' of ambiguous race -- Coda : pushing Brunias's buttons, or re-branding the plantocracy's painter ; the afterlife of Brunias's imagery.

Call Number

Sc E 18-631

ISBN

• 1526120453
• 9781526120458

OCLC

991315916

Author

Bagneris, Mia L., author.

Title

Colouring the Caribbean : race and the art of Agostino Brunias / Mia L. Bagneris.

Publisher

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2018.

Copyright Date

©2018

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Rethinking art's histories

Rethinking art's histories.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Added Author

Container of (work): Brunias, Agostino. Paintings. Selections.

Research Call Number

Sc E 18-631