My essay utilizes a comparative interdisciplinary approach to read William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) alongside paintings and prints of his Jamaican estates by George Robertson. The essay considers how Caribbean people see their landscape, but more crucially how that seeing has been shaped by visual and scribal pre-texts. As Helen Tiffin argues, Caribbean people’s relation to their landscape is linked ‘with histories of transplantation, slavery and colonialism’ but also with our assimilation of ‘imported European traditions of land and landscape perception and representation’. How we see the Caribbean landscape now is largely determined by earlier ways of seeing which constructed tropical colonies. With Krista Thompson and Jill Casid, I argue that ‘imperial picturesque landscaping aesthetics’ in Beckford’s text are reinforced by the images, to naturalize colonial transplantation and mask the materialist matrix of the plantation economy by imposing a screen of picturesque composition.

The essays in this volume assess the field of early Caribbean literary studies at a moment when it is undergoing important transitions. Our contributors study genres of writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; genres of fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved and the working classes, especially women. Contributors focus on the multilingual, multi-imperial, and regional literatures of the Caribbean, in keeping with the comparative emphasis in contemporary literary studies. Our contributors infer the cultural presence of non-elite groups within the texts of the dominant classes: can the worlds made by enslaved and indentured people be reconstructed by reading texts that enslavers created? Our contributors move back and forth between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements together in ways that exceed traditional notions of literary influence. The analysis of Caribbean literature before 1920 is a vital exercise in understanding our present moment.