KRISTA A. THOMPSON


.I I.... .. .

 wlt rotuf. A VLI' t. ',A.ALC BAHA VfA.

Figure 2. Sand's Studio, Victoria Avenue Nassau, Bahamas, 1915-1930, postcard,
3 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. Collection of author.

 Postcard producers also promoted the islands as premodern to travelers.
The figure of the black island native and donkey along with his bare-footed,
tree-climbing, sugarcane-eating representational counterparts frequently
performed this role of tropical backwardness in postcards. The "Two Natives"
postcard by white Bahamian photographer James Sands, as a prime example,
imaged the black inhabitant as not far removed from animals on the Darwinian
hierarchy of social evolution. Another viewcard of Jamaica produced by the
United Fruit Company that referred to a black market woman and her beast of
burden as the "Ford of the Rio Grande," similarly cast the island as lagging far
behind the modernity, enterprise, and technology of the United States on the
scale of industrial evolution. Both place and people were imaged as aspiring to,
yet lagging behind the time and history of the "civilized world." The postcards
presented the islands not just as geographically different, another foreign and
tropical world, but as a place temporally apart, a universe trapped in the past.
 If the subject matter of viewcards did not adequately convey the islands'
tropical and premodern ideal, producers further embellished the islands'
touristic image through handpainting. This is evident again in one version of
the Two Natives postcard. Comparison to an earlier reproduction of the card
reveals that the electrical lines that tracked across the top of the photograph
were subsequently painted over. Such signs of modernity were antithetical
to the island's primordial natural reputation. The photographer also