An excerpt from Islands , Richard Fung's experimental art film that deconstructs a film by John Huston to comment on the Caribbean's relationship to the cinematic image. The piece explores questions of visibility, desire, and authenticity, asking whether it is possible to actually see the Caribbean while our vision is so shaded by tourism and other mediating lenses.

Note: This is a preliminary bibliography with no claims to comprehensiveness. Please feel free to contact the colloquy curators with reading recommendations. Our aim is to collaboratively create a robust bibliography.

Jenny Sharpe considers the visual power of the imperial picturesque. Analyzing touristic photography of Indian field workers in the Caribbean, Sharpe argues that a “coolie picturesque” simultaneously reveals and conceals the permanent settlement of Indians and their racial mixing with Afro-Jamaicans.

Thousands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work side by side with African Americans on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. Though now a largely forgotten episode in history, their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

One of the agendas of Caribbean studies has been to create archives—or, more accurately, counterarchives—in order to make claims about the modern world and the significance of the region to the global processes that have shaped it over the past five centuries.

Maligned in popular conceptions of the history of medicine, Afro-American religious healers in early modern Cartagena played a constructive role in the development of an science that privileged empiricism over dogma in Pablo Gómez's new study, The Experiential Caribbean.