Catalog of an exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

This multidisciplinary volume chronicles the iconography of sugar, slavery, and the landscape of Jamaica from the beginning of British rule in 1655 to the aftermath of emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. It provides new perspectives on art, music, religion, and performance in Jamaican society and highlights the role of artistic culture in the resistance mounted by the enslaved. Through its central figure, Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795–1849), the book also offers new insight into the Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean. At the book’s core is Belisario’s remarkable series of lithographs, Sketches of Character (1837–38), the earliest visual representation of the Afro-Jamaican masquerade form Jonkonnu (or John Canoe). Innovative scholarship traces the West and Central African roots of Jonkonnu and its indigenization and transformation in Jamaica from the early eighteenth century through the postemancipation period to the present day. Richly illustrated with printed books, broadsides, manuscripts, prints, drawings, paintings, costumes, and musical instruments, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica presents a unique portrait of Jamaican life at a pivotal historical moment. Balancing the specificity of Jamaican socioeconomic and cultural forms with larger questions about the globalizing impact of imperialism, this groundbreaking work provides a new interdisciplinary model for interpreting the visual culture of empire.