SESSION: Early Modern Caribbean Material Culture, c.1600-1830

Ranging from earthenware ceramics to mahogany furniture, textiles, metalwork, oil paintings, architecture, maps, and prints — the material world of the early modern British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Afro-Caribbean (c.1600-1830) was richly layered, dynamic, and vast. Many of these objects were scattered into material archives across the Atlantic World, destroyed by earthquake and hurricane, or remain misattributed in western collections. Consequently, the study of the Caribbean’s early modern material culture constitutes a serious void in art history and the decorative arts. This panel addresses this gap. We invite papers that critically examine the material culture of the early modern Caribbean and the complex social and cultural histories these objects carry.

Objects have lives. From the extraction of raw materials to craft an object, their formation into decorative objects in a workshop, to their circulation as consumer goods, and their lasting presence in collections today, objects from the early modern Caribbean bear witness to the Caribbean’s expansive histories of artistic creativity and extractive violence. In embracing the full breadth of object lives, this panel asks: What does the study of Caribbean material culture reveal about histories of slavery, freedom, empire and the disparate lived experiences in the early modern Caribbean? What do Caribbean objects reveal about the lives of makers and consumers (enslaved and free)? Where are Caribbean objects today? What memories do these objects embody?

We invite papers that engage early modern Caribbean material culture in relation to themes of slavery, empire, historical memory, and collecting practices.

Session Convenors:

Catherine Doucette, University of Virginia

Sarah Brokenborough, Tulane University

Speakers:

Sara I. Rodríguez Rivera, Florida State University

From Surveillance to Sovereignty: Reframing Puerto Rico’s Bohío Structures Through Afro-Indigenous Memory

This paper challenges the colonial dismissal of the bohío—thatched dwelling inhabited by enslaved and free Afro-Indigenous labourers in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico—as a “primitive” hut by repositioning it through an Indigenous methodological lens grounded in relational accountability, embodied memory, and land-based knowledge. Rather than accepting the colonial archive as the definitive source, I align with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s call to reclaim, reconnect, and reframe, privileging Afro-Indigenous epistemologies preserved in story, routine, and ecological practice. Legal frameworks such as the Slave Code of 1826 and municipal ordinances sought to standardize and surveil slave housing, inscribing bohíos into regimes of architectural control, while travel accounts and colonial observers cast such dwellings as signs of disorder and racial inferiority to justify U.S. intervention and modernization. Yet when read through Indigenous accountability to ancestors and place, the bohío emerges not as a vanquished relic but as an active dwelling logic transmitted across generations. Drawing on the oral testimony of my grandmother, Martina Ríos Flores—raised in a bohío before relocating to concrete housing in the mid-twentieth century—I recognize her daily gestures, such as sweeping the hearth and tending the provision grounds, as acts that sustain an enduring connection to ancestral spatial logics rather than mere longing for a vanished childhood home. These practices, understood through Paul Connerton’s bodily memory and Bourdieu’s habitus, reveal that the bohío survives in movement, routine, and care. In centring lived testimony and intergenerational practice, this paper repositions the bohío as an enduring site of Afro-Indigenous architectural sovereignty and everyday resistance.

Alessandra Caputo-Jaffe, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile

Hammocks and Chinchorros: Appropriation and Representation of Indigenous Objects in Colonial Mainland Caribbean

Hammocks, long used throughout tropical America since pre-Columbian times, became a central element of early modern Caribbean material culture. There were many types of hammocks, broadly categorized as textile-made or net-woven. When Europeans arrived in the Americas in the late sixteenth century, they immediately adopted hammocks as a practical, portable means of sleeping and resting in warm, humid climates.

These objects soon circulated globally. They appeared as exotic curiosities in early cabinets and later in ethnographic collections, while also being commercialized and customized according to European tastes. Consequently, a wide range of hammocks emerged, from simple net-like examples to refined versions made of costly materials.

Early colonial visual sources from the Caribbean—such as the chronicles of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Theodor de Bry—depict hammocks as symbols of the “epicurean” lifestyle of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Later, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers, including Alexander von Humboldt, commented on their versatility and cultural importance across the Caribbean and the Orinoco basin.

By the end of the colonial period, hammocks had become identitarian symbols for white Creoles and appeared in domestic interiors and elite portraits alike. To this day, they remain emblematic of Caribbean distinctiveness. This paper argues that the hammock functioned as both a vehicle of colonial appropriation and a resilient marker of Indigenous identity within the material and visual culture of the early modern Caribbean.

Jade Foster, Independent Art Historian

A Practice of Fugitivity: José Antonio Aponte’s ‘Book of Paintings’ in Colonial Cuba

This paper sits with José Antonio Aponte’s lost Libro de pinturas (‘Book of Paintings’) (c.1812) as a site of fugitivity within the colonial archive of nineteenth-century Cuba. Rather than reconstructing or ‘grasping’ the book’s presumed visual content, as Digital Aponte and many scholars do, from its surviving trial record, it adopts Édouard Glissant’s notion of the ‘right to opacity’ as an ethical and methodological stance against the colonial logic of transparency.

Drawing on Black feminist and decolonial thought—particularly Tina Campt’s concept of ‘listening to images’ and Saidiya Hartman’s method of ‘critical fabulation’—the paper argues that opacity and speculation can serve as anticolonial modes of knowing when visual works have been erased. Analysing Aponte’s coerced testimony through the sonic and tactile dimensions of language, it explores how subvocalisation, quietness, and ‘compelled ekphrasis’ complicate encounters with colonial capture.

The essay proposes the concept of ‘unhanding’ the archive as a decolonial practice that resists the urge to reconstruct lost visuality and the violence that often accompanies it. Instead, it focuses on the affective and performative force of the records. By resituating
Aponte within a continuum of Black fugitivity and intellectual sovereignty, the text demonstrates how his missing book can teach us, even today, to appreciate opacity, engage in deep listening, and exercise critical caution in our research strategies to negate the endurance of coloniality.

In response to the panel’s call to examine how Caribbean objects ‘bear witness’ to histories of slavery, freedom, and empire, this paper expands the field of early modern Caribbean material culture to include not only extant artefacts but also those erased through violence and social death.

Shaheen Alikhan, University of Virginia

Tools of Slavery

Portrayed in paintings, displayed on walls, and exhibited in museums, tools of slavery during the eighteenth century are nevertheless often overlooked in the material culture of the Caribbean. The goal is to include such objects in the wider field of art history in order to engage the field within its full context.

Widely produced, dispersed, and immediately recognizable, tools of confinement became an object type which sit beside decorative arts, but are not classified as such. Yet many institutions of fine and decorative arts house collections of items whose purpose was function, not aesthetic. Shackles used for the transport and confinement of enslaved individuals, primarily throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, survive in public institutions, private collections, and underwater archaeological sites- silent but unmistakable evidence of a vessel’s purpose and the harsh realities of the trade.

This paper highlights these objects of confinement. Common, unlovely, and a glaring reminder of a history many would prefer to forget, a study of these tools and their dispersal highlights a persistent gap in the narrative. This gap, the legacy of centuries of abuse, misrepresentation, and erasure, is itself an ongoing act of violence. I seek to address this gap with extensive archival research, the available archaeological record, curated exhibits, and a study of visual representation created during the eighteenth century. By thoroughly utilizing these disparate sources, we can recreate the context in which these items were produced and used, and present a clearer picture of the material culture of the Caribbean.