Postcards to History: Tourist Representations
 and the Construction of Postcolonial
 Histories in the Anglophone Caribbean

 Krista A. Thompson
 University of Chicago


 I distrusted the idea of glamour that was given us by postcards and
 postage stamps (ideas repeated by our local artists): certain bays,
 certain buildings, our mixed population.
 V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World, 1994

 Today, nostalgic wonderful and tearful archeology (Oh! those colonial
 days!) are very much in vogue. But to give in to them is to forget a
 little too quickly the motivations and the effects of this vast operation
 of systematic distortion. It is also to lay the groundwork for its return
 in a new guise: a racism and xenophobia titillated by the nostalgia of
 the colonial empire.
 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 1986



I happened upon the old postcard of the Bahamas in a box labeled "West
 Indies" in the back of an antique collectors' shop in Atlanta (fig. 1).
 Discolored by time, its once vibrant colors appeared monochrome and
marked by the geographic distance it had traveled. One tourist, who had
visited Nassau in 1936, had purchased and sent the card to Miss Isabel
Gracely, her niece, in North Carolina. What, I wondered, had caught her eye
in this particular image of a young black Bahamian on a mule-drawn pull
cart framed by an arch of blooming bougainvillea? Why had she, just as I
had pulled out this particular representation from its dusty home, chosen
this postcard?
 I paused at the old souvenir because it immediately triggered a memory.
My grandmother had once described the postcard to me with a tinge of