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Since the fifteenth century, the Caribbean has been a site of confluence, exchange and circulation. As debates regarding the independence of Spanish, French, British, and Dutch territories spread throughout the nineteenth century, it became increasingly important for locals to consider the ways in which the autochthonous and new national cultures contested, assimilated, or related to that of the metropole. Fine art and exhibitions, along with mass media including magazines, photographs, cinema, and other printed images were central to the formation of divergent definitions of the nascent independent and regional identities.

This panel seeks papers that examine the visual culture of the Caribbean as a nexus point within transnational networks of communication during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are especially interested in papers that address the role of images in the intersections between the global and local, or ‘glocal,’ and that explore the new ways of looking generated at the juncture of metropole and Caribbean. We welcome presentations that respond to an array of questions, including: How did images represent the local and transnational Caribbean identities or contest ideas of national boundaries, of both colonial and of recently created nations? How did the visual culture challenge or renegotiate the dichotomies of colonized/colonizer, resistance/assimilation, periphery/center? How were notions of the local, national, and cosmopolitan renegotiated in light of the mass-produced image? What meanings did reproduced images from capitals or from the peripheries acquire in local contexts, unofficial networks, or private spaces?