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Imagining the Tropics is a history of the development of tourism in the Caribbean from the 1910s through the 1970s that focuses on the ways women’s labors of hospitality, writing, and advocacy built the industry and its ubiquitous imagery of tropical island relaxation, escape, and romance. By examining a range of sources, engaging an array of women protagonists, and looking broadly across multiple Caribbean island-states including Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, it seeks to understand how the region came to be sold as a romantic escape from the “troubles” of the modern world. By putting women at the center of Caribbean tourism history—as both its ambassadors and objects of desire—it seeks to explain some of the complicated contradictions that plague the business of pleasure but also to point toward ways of building alternative models to its present and past extractive realities.

Inglorious Artists traces the origins of the image of the starving artist to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, where practicing and aspiring visual artists mobilized the emerging genre of graphic satire to publish hundreds of satirical images that satirized the Paris art world. By examining many of these images, which have never before been studied or published, this book provides a new social history of the status of the artist, revealing the ways in which the starving artist trope was used to protest the emergence of an early capitalist art market and to distinguish artists and their work from an increasingly commercial world. During this period, a series of political revolutions brought the possibility of radical change in the French art world. Parisian artists struggled to keep pace with the emergence of modern financial speculative capitalism, transitioning away from an art system dominated by guild and corporate interest. We have neglected the complaints visual artists made about these changes, expressed in the medium most accessible to them: the graphic image. In examining this imagery for the first time, Inglorious Artists reveals that the emergence of our modern conception of the artist is far more conflicted than has been considered.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.