POSTCARDS TO HISTORY


perspectives on the tropicalized image world, unlike the producers' captions
on postcards or its purchasers' handwritten commentaries, would
dramatically affect how subsequent viewers would interpret the photographs,
read the narratives of these representations, and represent the past,
particularly in popular pictorial histories in the region. Or, to use historian
Rolph Trouillot's terms, because blacks did not leave "concrete traces" on
either the "making of sources" (postcards) or "the making of archives"
(collections of postcards), it would dramatically effect "the making of
narratives" and "making of history in the final instance" (26).

Contemporary Picture Books: Narrating History through the Postcard
Archive

In more recent times in publications throughout the postcolonial world
unintended consumers of postcards have become primary ones. In many
former colonies postcards have become central tools in the reconstruction
of postcolonial histories of the subaltern and the deconstruction of the
imperious imperatives of postcard makers.10 Algerian scholar Malek Alloula,
for instance, through his study of colonial postcards of Algerian women aimed
"to return this immense postcard to its sender," to use the images to explore,
explode, indeed, to exorcizee" French colonial myths about Algeria (5).
Authors in the Anglophone Caribbean have also used postcards to reflect
on the colonial past; their picture books, however, have done different work.
The publications generally have framed the old images as historically
accurate representations of the past and proffer the picturesque society
featured on postcards as visual evidence of the "better days" of colonial rule
or the "golden age" of tourism. They not only privilege and reiterate the
narrative of picturesque tropicality, originally created to appeal to tourists,
but present key features of the islands' carefully crafted touristic image as
historical fact to local audiences. This is evident even in the subtitles of the
publications that frame the postcards as transparent windows onto "the way
we were," to cite the title of a book on Jamaica (Jamaica).
 The typically brief texts that accompany the visual images in these
publications further frame the postcards and photographs as documentary
and objective representations of an earlier era. Nostalgic Nassau, for example,
promises a "nostalgic peep into the past" (1). And, Ann Yates, the author of
Bygone Barbados, offers "Barbadians and visitors ... a piece of our past"
(ix). On two occasions she describes her picture book as a "history" of
Barbados (ix). The author of The Bahamas in Black and White, Basil Smith,


10 See Alloula; Geary; Geary and Webb; Maxwell; Prochaska.