POSTCARDS TO HISTORY 31

 late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from throughout the globe.
 They have published their global acquisitions in popular locally published
 pictorial history books. Nostalgic Nassau (1991), Jamaica as It Was (1991),
 Glimpses at Our Past: A Social History of the Caribbean through Postcards (1995),
 Bygone Barbados (1998), Reminiscing: Memories of Old Nassau (1999), The
 Bahamas in White and Black: Images from the Golden Age of Tourism (2000),
 and A Journey of Memories [Trinidad] (2000) are but a representative sample
 of these types of publications. This essay attempts to trace some of the
 implications of these postcards, once issued to envious recipients or collected
 as tourists' mementoes, on local memory and popular history on the islands.
 It calls attention to the consequences, contradictions, and even dangers of
 framing these cards as -to quote one publication- "our past." The conclusion
 describes an exhibition of colonial photographs and postcards I curated,
 which precisely explored the limits of reflecting on "our histories" in the
 image pool of touristic representations.
 By focusing on the afterlife of tourism-oriented photographs in
contemporary Anglophone Caribbean societies, I aim to build on prevailing
interpretations of colonial representations. While over the last thirty years
a substantial literature has developed on how "the West" imaged other
cultures and regions, few studies consider how such image worlds were
received and interpreted by the colonized.' This omission is especially
notable given that numerous scholars have called on researchers to be more
responsive to the multiple audiences and meanings of Orientalist
representations.2 These revisionists have, however, typically restricted their
own analyses to the reception of colonial imagery in Europe and Euro-
America. Even scholars who research the photographic traditions in the non-
Western world, "photography's other histories," have not interrogated the
possible interpretations and uses of colonial photographs in these societies.3
Rather historians of photography have been attentive to how colonized
peoples fashioned themselves as modern subjects in the photographic
medium in the postcolonial period,4 frequently in contradistinction to colonial
photographs. Less work has analyzed how local inhabitants reconstructed
their identities and histories precisely through the colonial photographic
archive.5 The recent republication of turn-of-the-twentieth-century colonial
era postcards in postcolonial English-speaking Caribbean societies attests
to the longevity and active social life of such objects among (formerly)
colonized populations and the need to investigate this constituency as an
audience for colonial representations.

'Two exceptions to this are T. Mitchell and Pratt.
2 See Lowe; Melman; Lewis.
3 The phrase "Photography's Other Histories" comes from Pinney and Peterson.
4 See also Appadurai; Behrend; Pinney; Bell; Brielmaier.
s See Lippard; Poole.