Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands’ tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the late nineteenth century, tourism promoters, backed by British colonial administrators, began to market Jamaica and the Bahamas as picturesque “tropical” paradises. They hired photographers and artists to create carefully crafted representations, which then circulated internationally via postcards and illustrated guides and lectures. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, including many in color, An Eye for the Tropics is a nuanced evaluation of the aesthetics of the “tropicalizing images” and their effects on Jamaica and the Bahamas. Thompson describes how representations created to project an image to the outside world altered everyday life on the islands. Hoteliers imported tropical plants to make the islands look more like the images. Many prominent tourist-oriented spaces, including hotels and famous beaches, became off-limits to the islands’ black populations, who were encouraged to act like the disciplined, loyal colonial subjects depicted in the pictures. Analyzing the work of specific photographers and artists who created tropical representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas between the 1880s and the 1930s, Thompson shows how their images differ from the English picturesque landscape tradition. Turning to the present, she examines how tropicalizing images are deconstructed in works by contemporary artists—including Christopher Cozier, David Bailey, and Irénée Shaw—at the same time that they remain a staple of postcolonial governments’ vigorous efforts to attract tourists.

A beautifully illustrated look at the aesthetics and implications of the visual images used to sell Jamaica and the Bahamas to tourists as "tropical paradises" from the 1880s through the 1930s.

Since he was first elected in 1999, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías has reshaped a frail but nonetheless pluralistic democracy into a semi-authoritarian regime—an outcome achieved with spectacularly high oil income and widespread electoral support. This eye-opening book illuminates one of the most sweeping and unexpected political transformations in contemporary Latin America. Based on more than fifteen years' experience in researching and writing about Venezuela, Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold have crafted a comprehensive account of how the Chávez regime has revamped the nation, with a particular focus on its political transformation. Throughout, they take issue with conventional explanations. First, they argue persuasively that liberal democracy as an institution was not to blame for the rise of chavismo. Second, they assert that the nation's economic ailments were not caused by neoliberalism. Instead they blame other factors, including a dependence on oil, which caused macroeconomic volatility; political party fragmentation, which triggered infighting; government mismanagement of the banking crisis, which led to more centralization of power; and the Asian crisis of 1997, which devastated Venezuela's economy at the same time that Chávez ran for president. It is perhaps on the role of oil that the authors take greatest issue with prevailing opinion. They do not dispute that dependence on oil can generate political and economic distortions—the "resource curse" or "paradox of plenty" arguments—but they counter that oil alone fails to explain Chávez's rise. Instead they single out a weak framework of checks and balances that allowed the executive branch to extract oil rents and distribute them to the populace. The real culprit behind Chávez's success, they write, was the asymmetry of political power.

Beautifully illustrated throughout with color plates, photographs, and drawings, this volume is a comprehensive introduction to the natural history of the tropics worldwide. 59 color photos. 21 maps.

From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism" -- a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

Opera in the Tropics is an engaging exploration of theater with music in Brazil from the mid 1500s to the early 1820s. Author Rogério Budasz delves into the practices of the actors, singers, poets, and composers who created and performed Jesuit moral plays, Spanish comedias, and Portuguese vernacular operas and entremezes during the colonial period, as well as the Italian operas that celebrated the new independent nation in 1822. A Brazilian producer claimed in 1825 that the goal of music-theater was to instruct, entertain, and distract the population. Budasz argues that this threefold goal had in fact been present throughout the colonial period, in different combinations and with different purposes, at the hands of missionaries, intellectuals, bureaucrats, political leaders, and cultural producers. While Budasz demonstrates a continuity from Portuguese theatrical practices, primarily through the circulation of artists and repertory, he also examines a number of localized departures from the metropolitan model, particularly in the ethnic and gender profile of theatrical workers, in the modifications determined by local tastes, priorities, and materials, and in the political use of theater as an ideological and civilizing tool within the paradoxical context of a slave society. An eye-opening narrative of the transformations and uses of a colonial art form, Opera in the Tropics will be essential reading for all interested in the music and theater in Iberian and Latin American culture.

In this volume distinguished historian Kenneth Maxwell collects some of his most significant writings, following Portugal's imperial journey from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and from the coast of Asia to the mouth of the Red Sea. Maxwell takes the reader on a lively journey from Macao to the Amazon forests-each piece in the collection is a reflection of the authors driving passions. Major themes he examines are: the peopling of the Americas, the shaking up of continents, the spirit that took a precocious Portugal into its imperial venture, the play between Portugal's' extensive imperial reach into Africa and Asia and the Americas, and the rise of Brazil and its tumultuous history.