Although located within the discipline of art history, this book engages with the varied philosophies and modes of representation involved in the project of knowledge production. For the colonial Caribbean, that project dates back to the fifteenth century, its machinery fed by factors that opened up a discursive space for its “producers”: European conquest, colonization, subordination of indigenous peoples, and the expropriation of Caribbean resources, using enslaved African laborers. Some of the works denigrated African origins and promoted “Creole” as the ideal, leaving modern historians and art critics to dethrone the imperialist absolutisms.

Written history is only one of the many ways of representing the past. There are alternative or (as Kriz prefers) complementary methods: oral, pictorial, and plastic modes. The latter shift the balance to the nonverbal, but their representations have a context, and that is what this book seeks to explicate. Kriz provides a historical context within which to understand Caribbean “characters,” artfully or disingenuously “sketched” in the period spanning the height of sugar and slavery and emancipation. Like similar works (e.g., Editha Jacobs, “Visual Expressions of Slavery and Emancipation, 1700–1834” (Arts Journal 3, nos. 1–2 [March 2007]: 66–81; Gillian Forrester, Tim Barringer, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, eds., Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds [New Haven, CT, 2007]), the book fills a gap by uncovering, and critiquing, the visual representations of the cultural lives of Caribbean people, mostly of African descent, and the pro- and anti-slavery images of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Over its several chapters, Kriz takes us into the worlds of Hans Sloane and Agostino Brunias; reminds us of Josiah Wedgwood’s, Thomas Williamson’s, Isaac Belisario’s, and others’ images of the African in the Caribbean, which, as she puts it, “place[d] their subjects squarely within the imaginative geography of the Torrid Zone” (73); and interrogates the curiously turbulent free landscapes of Joseph Kidd, George Robertson, Abraham James, and others.

Conscious that using terms like “culture” and “refinement” in connection with colonial history is a potential ideological minefield, Kriz hastens to explain her title. She argues that “sometimes, refining the forced labor of African slaves into metropolitan ornaments involved suppressing the subject of empire, slavery and colonial trade altogether” (3). Like textual inventions, artistic inventions “refined” what would otherwise offend supposed British sensibilities, which could cope with refined sugar (as opposed to muscovado) but not with the harsh realities of the conditions of the people who enabled that refinement. The artistes she discusses clearly made judgments about (c)rudeness versus refinement; about where Britain and the Caribbean were located in this dichotomy; about Britain's role, even responsibility, in creating a “culture of refinement.” Naturally, this calls into question the assumption that the Caribbean represented an unrefined space; that if the Caribbean were to accommodate Europeans, it too would have to be “refined” or have “refined images” about it created.

In chapter 1, Kriz tries to unearth the intention of (and the audience for), Sloane's Voyage to the Islands, published in several volumes in 1707 and 1725, decades after his 1680s observations. Kriz questions Sloane's claim “to maintain the domain of the visual as a neutral space of pure knowledge, uncontaminated by ‘memory'” (16). Perhaps intended to be a natural history, it has been embraced by many as such. Instead, it tells a “supernatural history,” “a ghost story in which buried treasures and curious objects conjure up visions of the living, the banished, and the dead” (10). She explores the impact on his career and fortunes and tracks the accuracy and authenticity of his representations.

Chapter 2 focuses on the Windward Islands scenes of the social life of its subaltern inhabitants as painted by the Italian Agostino Brunias. She illuminates the political reasons for Sir William Young (Commissioner and Receiver for the sale of lands in the islands of Dominica, St. Vincent, and Tobago in the eighteenth century) patronizing an artist when there was little demand for professional ones in the Caribbean. Brunias's brightly colored images, happy inhabitants, bountiful resources, and well-dressed creoles are subjected to the author's critical gaze. Brunias used art to “promote the ‘cultivation’ of newly acquired sugar colonies, by artfully depicting colonial social life in the British West Indies” (40). For him colonial life was not violent, harsh, brutish, or short, but “refined, civilized and tolerable” (40). The women are not, phenotypically, those of Edward Long's imagination, and those of mixed race, bearing colorful umbrellas and wearing European fashion, are privileged. In “his” Caribbean world women were not brutalized laborers but confined to the private, domestic sphere as in all “civilized” societies. The inescapable subtext of the Caribbean “brown” woman emphasizes desirability.

As “the West Indies was central to the development of ‘scientific’ and popular ideas of race,” chapter 3 surveys the images of Africans and their “New World” descendants that validated notions about “human character and difference” (71). Besides Wedgwood's well-known kneeling subject, many others related to slavery, the trade in Africans, and “the racialized and gendered discourses on complexion and physiognomy” (72). The images conveyed proslavery arguments, portrayed humor at the expense of Africans, or fostered the antislavery movement.

Chapter 4 focuses almost exclusively on Jamaican-born Belisario's Sketches of Character, lithographs of folk life in Jamaica. Kriz juxtaposes these with other contemporaneous printed satires that portrayed freed black people entering “polite society” in the metropole. Belisario might have insisted that he faithfully depicted Jamaican folk life, but Kriz argues he drew comic figures “whose primary attribute is the capacity for mimicry” (120). Black Jamaicans would spend decades of freedom constructing their own “characters,” “customs,” and “traditions.”

The final chapter analyzes antislavery intensification and the contests of the employers and the emancipated over citizenship and a landscape still dominated by sugar plantations. Artists tried to “refine the landscape” to counter the negative image of Jamaica as an environment where only the most degenerate would wish to live. They projected instead a place that could accommodate a “polite white population,” perhaps to free it from the backwater of the British empire after 1838—images that continued to mask the social upheavals of this period of Caribbean history.

This attractive, well-produced, documented, and thoughtful book will be embraced by art historians and historians. It succeeds in provoking “new questions about paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies that were produced before, during and after the campaign to abolish the slave trade” and examining “the historical conditions of their production and reception, including the visual traditions in which they participate” (2). The impact of the images on their audiences is less clear. Were they swayed by them, or was there, as Veronica Gregg would say, “a willed ignorance” toward more positive images? (Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole [Chapel Hill, NC, 1995], 11).

While it sets out to explore the multiple meanings that are produced through visual representations, the book is also a history text that juxtaposes narrative context with visual representations and provides valuable artists biographies. What a pity that the cost (of greater concern in the “global south”) and sometimes dense academic language may prevent its adoption as a core text for university undergraduates! On the other hand, what would knowing change? Despite the efforts of scholars to contest the images—especially those that attempted “damage control” in Kriz's view, the dialectical struggle between “high culture” and “low culture,” between “refinement” and “cultural backwater,” continues.