36 KRISTA A. THOMPSON

generally the class transcendence often attributed to the mass-produced
postcard (Schor 211), the so-called "poor man's art form," in Europe and the
United States, was not a feature in the region. Yet, despite the seemingly
prohibitive costs, some black inhabitants did acquire postcards and put them
to new uses. In 1908, for instance, a traveler to Nevis documented that local
masqueraders wore costumes made out of postcards (Williams). In this
artistic appropriation, the masquerade participants co-opted and
personalized the postcard for their own purposes. The "poor man's art form"
literally became the poor black man's art form in Nevis, a Christmas
masquerade costume.
 While some residents creatively displayed the cards, others denounced
the representations as thoroughly offensive. Sustained critiques of postcards,
and touristic images generally, throughout the first half of the twentieth
century reveal how local black audiences constantly surveilled the
presentation of the island in the miniature universe of postcards, being
particularly vigilant of the construction of the black race in these
representations. A speaker at the grassroots Universal Negro Improvement
Association (U.N.I.A.) organization in Jamaica in 1915, for instance, critiqued
the singular focus in postcards on the most economically disadvantaged
and uneducated segments of the black population. He called attention to
the deliberate "methods employed by a good many people in this island in
making up [the] advertisements," noting how photographers paid the island's
inhabitants "to pose," in essence to perform an image of black backwardness,
in postcard representations. Contemporaneously, E. Ethelred Brown, a
member of the Jamaica League, advocated a boycott of the offending
producers of postcards purporting to be "native scenes" and declared it
"the duty of those of us who are unfavourably and unfairly advertised to
protest . ." (DG January 18, 1915). While postcard producers constructed
the islands' picturesque image and naturalized this ideal through several
devices, black critics of these representations constantly called attention to
and protested the artifice of these representations the singular focus of
their subject-matter (black backwardness, poverty, tropicalness) and the
constructed character of their form.
 To recap, postcards of the West Indies were originally produced to meet
the specific needs of the islands' tourism industries at the turn of the
twentieth century and were consumed primarily by travelers. This
tropicalized image world was, however, from early on inherently open to
alternate and even opposing meanings, as the changing captions and
handwritten commentaries testify. The cards, as publicly displayed images,
were also viewed by unintended audiences. While black inhabitants "wrote
back," protesting the visual narratives of these representations, these
critiques and contestations left no traces on the visual archives archives
that centrally pictured the islands' black population. The absence of these