Enfilade

The following review appeared at caa.reviews in December (I’m sorry it slipped my notice earlier — C.H.).

Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008), 288 pages, ISBN: 9780300140620, $75.

Reviewed by Stephanie Shestakow, College of New Jersey; posted 15 December 2009.

A statue of Sir Hans Sloane stands at the center of London’s Chelsea Physic Garden where all variety of plants vie for attention. Sloane demonstrated his talent for gathering specimens (like those over which his statue presides) in his resplendently detailed title, ‘Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles Etc. of the Last of those Islands’ (vol. 1, 1707; vol. 2, 1725) which serves as both travel log and visual natural history, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century desire to index the world. Kay Dian Kriz begins ‘Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840’ with Sloane’s folio in order to explore the visual strategies used to represent the West Indies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In contrast to the abundance of scholarship addressing icons like the kneeling slave and the slave ship, Kriz’s study is aimed at the imagery designed to promote the colonial project in the West Indies, and it makes a remarkable new contribution to this area of study.

Through five chapters plus an introduction and afterword, Kriz charts both high and low artistic attempts to convey competing views of the Caribbean to the English public. She draws on a rich array of glossy color and black-and-white images ranging from graphic satires to natural history illustrations (and other images generally categorized outside the realm of “art”) as she discusses paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies that were produced around the campaign to abolish the slave trade. Just as raw sugar cane was refined into white crystals, artists portrayed island inhabitants as an often savage, overly sexualized, and unruly people who could be refined through colonials. Yet Kriz’s work also transcends the binary of metropolitan center and colonial outpost (the polite society of London versus the impolite colonial settlement) by addressing representations that confirmed and contested what she deems the dominant spatial model. These include paintings and prints that “proffered the possibility of social refinement in these British island colonies, not just economic profit and sexual pleasure” (4). . . .

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