#  Caribbeana’s Hybrid Muse: Creole Visual and Material Cultures in the Making, 1660-1840 

 



Rosalie Smith McCrea

This paper will show that within the colonial circum-Atlantic odyssey, as it concerned Jamaica and other English-speaking Caribbean Islands from ca. 1660 to 1840, visual and material production emerged through diasporic diffusion based on historical, political, and economic changes being created for the region from other metropoles. Groups such as Sephardic Jews played pivotal roles in Port Royal culture. Throughout the five visual case studies, the notion of Paradise as an Island Eden is a recurring motif. “Land and Landscape” came to signify social and material betterment and status for a certain Creole class, those whose forebears had aided in wresting Jamaica from Spanish colonial rule. Toward 1730, for some elites landscape also acted as a commemorative signifier in an attempt to recapture lost humanist European thinking, bringing together, for example, allegories such as the Four Corners of the Earth. From 1760 onward, the Jamaican landscape appeared to have become even more commercialized with Creoles’ desire to appropriate metropolitan aesthetic styles in order to lure potential buyers from the center as well as from within their periphery. Paradise as an Island Eden also operated as signifier for unlimited hybridization and mutation under colonial commerce and progress with the Botanical Garden. We begin to see the formations of the Afro-Creole inflections of Caribbean identity being brought forward only during the apprenticeship system (1833-1838) and after full emancipation. This came about through the commercial medium of lithography.

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