Victorian Jamaica

"The many contributors give a detail and depth unachievable in a single-authored book, and one thing that makes Victorian Jamaica special is the picture it begins to make visible of Jamaican life as a whole." -- William Ghosh * TLS *
"The volume illustrates in graphic and rigorous detail how visuality and material objects helped embody rapidly transforming racial and gendered subjectivities." -- Utathya Chattopadhyaya * Victorian Literature and Culture *
"Victorian Jamaica is a striking achievement. This hefty tome goes a long way toward filling a significant historiographical gap on the nineteenth century history of this Caribbean island." -- Stephen G. Hague * Itinerario *
"Victorian Jamaica is a must-read for anyone interested in the complex negotiations over freedom, citizenship, economic agency, and cultural production in the period that followed the legal abolition of slavery in Jamaica." -- Sasha Turner * Social History *
"With its emphasis on material culture, Victorian Jamaica extends significantly the conventional archive of sources for studying nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jamaica and its transnational contexts, and serves to counteract many of the silences of the written archive. . . . This superb collection, emphasizing constraint, accommodation, and transformation, contributes significantly to postcolonial studies and to rethinking pasts and presents on both sides of the Atlantic." -- Charles V. Carnegie * New West Indian Guide *
"The contributors to this volume weave a complex and multitextured picture of Victorian Jamaica, and it must be said that the book is much more coherent than many such collections. It makes an extremely important contribution to our understanding of Jamaica—both in and of itself and within the wider contexts of the British empire and Atlantic region. . . . Victorian Jamaica provides a visually compelling engagement with the period, evoking a manysided portrait of this unique Caribbean colony in a time of social conflict, political upheaval, and economic transformation." -- Christer Petley * History *
"Barringer and Modest’s Victorian Jamaica is a big, brilliant, beautiful attempt to render Jamaican history outside of the big, empire-scaling events that courted and court the attention of observers elsewhere. . . . It renders the ordinary rhythms of this full world in elegant, beautifully reproduced detail. Victorian Jamaica should become an important resource for researchers in, and teachers of, Caribbean history and culture, visual culture and race, and global Victorian studies." -- Chris Taylor * Nineteenth-Century Contexts *
"Bursting with gorgeous, high-quality images throughout its many pages, Victorian Jamaica is itself a stunning repository of nineteenth-century sources on the island. It documents the many facets of daily life, and it produces a rich sense of the colonial experience. . . . Perhaps more than any other book on the subject, Victorian Jamaica reveals the messiness of categories in a colonized space, at all levels of society." -- Daniel Livesay * The Historian *
“Victorian Jamaica is far more than a collection of essays; it is at once an encyclopedia and a box of delights, and like both objects it is likely to include in its contents something that will appeal...to anyone interested in the intertwined histories of Britain and the Caribbean in a politically volatile yet culturally rich era.” -- Natalie Zacek * Victorian Studies *