POSTCARDS TO HISTORY 35

enhanced the image by adding color to the bougainvillea. The card evinces
a visual formula of Anglophone Caribbean postcard aesthetics, the subtraction
of elements of modernity (electrical wires) and addition of signifiers of
tropicality (tropical nature). The circulation of the same postcards over
decades further contributed to the notion of an unchanging and eternally
primitive Caribbean, arresting the region in a temporal representational stasis.8
The various stages of production and post-production -selecting subjects,
captioning, and overpainting- betray postcard makers' continual struggles
to assert the tropical picturesque narrative through postcards and their
attempts to control, stabilize, and contain the meaning of the cards, and the
image of the islands generally for travelers.
 While some postcard producers aimed to carefully cultivate the islands'
tropical image and steer the meaning of the postcards, travelers' handwritten
remarks on the representations reveal the inevitable instability of the islands'
tropically picturesque image. Although some purchasers confirmed the validity
of this tropical ideal through their written commentaries, others continued to
view the islands as places of tropical danger. One handwritten remark, scrawled
on a postcard of Nassau's Royal Victoria Hotel gardens in 1906, for instance,
claimed that the island had "alligators, crocodiles, sharks- and niggers to bum."
The postcard sender listed (on an image representing "tropical orderliness"
no less) an inventory of tropical hazards, classing the man-eating amphibians
together with "the niggers." Thus from early on postcards became sites where
competing ideas and ideals of the islands and their inhabitants were prescribed,
inscribed, and destabilized. The postcard form, while enlisted in the service
of various touristic or colonial agendas, inherently and literally left a space
open on the bottom or back of the image for alternate interpretations.

The West Indies Postcards at Home: Local Uses and Interpretations of the
Postcard

Although many viewcard producers imagined travelers as their primary
consumers, the islands' black inhabitants, the people most frequently
pictured in postcards, formed an inadvertent audience for these
representations. At the cost of one pence each, however, few black workers
could afford to purchase and send postcards, much less collect them.9 Hence,

8 The James Valentine Company, for example, first came to Jamaica in 1891. Twenty
years later they advertised the same series in the local newspapers.
9 "The usual cost of a picture postcard in the Caribbean was probably the same as it
was in Britain in the early years of the twentieth century: 'Penny plain, or two pence
coloured'- two cents or four cents. It might cost only half penny to send a postcard
locally, or a penny to send it anywhere else in the world (1 or 2 cents), but for a labourer
[sic] who was lucky to get 24 cents for a day's work, the cost of a card and mailing it
would have seemed a lot of money" (Gilmore p. viii). Ads in local newspapers offer "12
Selected varieties sent postfree for tenpence" (DG 13 January 1905).