42 KRISTA A. THOMPSON

surprising that white collectors would be attracted to images of the colonial
era and the heyday of tourism and would position these representations as
"the good days." Of course, not all collectors and compilers of these books
aim consciously to venerate the colonial past. Indeed, they may simply
organize the books, their recollections, based on their own experiences and
understandings of the past (their "private albums"), revisiting, visualizing,
and even celebrating their histories from their own perspectives. Through
their published postcard collections they can recreate the social world that
they, or their families before them, once inhabited. In this respect, the
publications may be viewed very literally as private albums, personal visual
records, of the past. Author of a postcard book on Trinidad, Joseph Abdo
Sabga, concedes as much when he prefaces his publication with the words:
"I hope that you will find this selection to be an interesting one, bringing
back fond memories, and acting as a personal album on a Journey of
Memories" (xii).
 Typically, this private commemoration of the good old colonial days,
however, is seldom presented as a select view of the history of the islands,
but rather as a journey of memories on which all viewers can personally
embark. As such, the books often posit that socially and economically society
as a whole was better off during colonialism. Regardless of the various
authors' motivations, when most of the publications seem to re-present
history from similar (white elite) perspectives, this version of history has
become reified. In this way, as Farmer points out, many of these publications
engage in and authorize a kind of "romantic amnesia, for in fact 'the good ole
days' weren't that good for many members of these societies."
 The picturesque ideal, which many postcards of the islands conjure, was
created both as parts of and against the backdrop of social and political
repression of the majority of the population. The images presented on
postcards obviously gloss over the conditions of segregation and
discrimination under which much of the islands' inhabitants suffered during
colonialism, and in the name of tourism. The same hotel that Malone and
Boyd picture, for example, and recall nostalgically with the words "thanks
for the memories, dear lady" was described by black Bahamian suffragette,
Doris Johnson, as "the symbol of white superiority" in her recollections (10).
The hotel was one of the last establishments to be desegregated in Nassau.
Thus the colonial nostalgia in which many of these books engage proffers a
very select version of history that can naturalize and neutralize the violence
of colonialism and tourism, presenting it to contemporary audiences as an
ideal period in their history. In this process, the same images used to sell

had social cache for local whites; they brought modernity to the colonial outposts.
During the winter tourist season elites enjoyed rubbing shoulders with metropolitan
travelers and took advantage of the modern entertainments and amenities in hotels.
These hotels were frequently off limits to blacks until the mid twentieth century.