Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana: mixed-race Venuses and Vixens as the fruits of imperial enterprise
Brown-skinned booty, or colonising Diana: mixed-race Venuses and Vixens as the fruits of imperial enterprise
Brunias is most famous for his images of mixed-race women. This chapter considers the virtual omnipresence of the ‘mulatress’ in the artist’s Caribbean pictures. K. Dian Kriz has argued that the ambiguous racial and social status of the mulatress figures served as a visual metaphor allowing Brunias to capture the state of the colonial West Indies – a locale popularly associated with laziness, leisure, luxury, licentiousness, and other forms of moral laxity. Building on Kriz’s work, the chapter asserts that the mulatress appealed to Brunias because of her ability to represent both the baser pleasures and profits to be taken in the Caribbean and the islands’ potential to conform to British ideals of societal refinement.
Keywords: Mulatress, Mixed race, Female body, K. Dian Kriz
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