The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men

by Catherine Lord

Overview

An investigation of memory, both personal and national, that broadens the dialogue on colonialism, complicity, and cultural property.

In March 2001, artist and writer Catherine Lord returned to the Commonwealth of Dominica, an island of middling size halfway along the Caribbean archipelago, one of the more insignificant of the fifty-nine colonies of the British Empire, and the place where she was born in 1949. On the last day of her stay, Lord was loaned three leather-bound ledgers, the commonplace books of Dr. Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls, a botanist, physician, and plantation owner on the island from the 1870s until his death in 1926. Throughout the ledgers, Nicholls stored quotations from his readings under headings that he invented, from abuse to coffee, errors to manners, praise to woman.

In The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, a title appropriated from an obscure eugenics tract, Lord takes Nicholls’s headings as the framework for a bellicose, mordant, and often wry critique of power relations between colonizer and colonized, public and private, image and word. In over 300 entries, she takes an unflinching look at artists like Agostino Brunias (known for his paintings of Creole society throughout the British West Indies); patrons like politician and sugar plantation owner Sir William Young (Governor of Dominica from 1768 until 1772, when he made an ignominious exit); novelists like Jean Rhys, forced to leave her home island for England; a portrait of a Creole white by a lesbian Polish Jew relocated by the British to Dominica after World War II; and a possibly bootlegged copy of Heinrich von Angeli painting of Queen Victoria. Lord also explores the mobilization of the island’s botanical specimens—Bermuda cedar, cocoa, jequirity—at the Royal Botanic Gardens and in World’s Fairs, part of what she calls botanical colonialism, as well as regional architecture and graffiti of artists largely unknown outside of Dominica. For over two decades Lord traveled to research centers and archives throughout England, New England, and Dominica studying the visual representations of her homeland by those who remembered it and those who only ever imagined it.

Catherine Lord fills her commonplace book with analyses of paintings and poems, anecdotes about her own upbringing that never quite add up to memoir, details from slave registries housed in the National Archives, and anti-racist, post-colonial, and queer texts. Eventually the entries themselves become investigations of memory, both personal and national, insisting on what José Esteban Muñoz termed a “potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” Throughout, the connection of the British Empire to a single colony is examined and challenged as Lord insists that diaspora, immigration, and displacement are central to the idea of Great Britain. Through its nuanced explorations of visual culture and novel approach to art historical study, The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men broadens the dialogue on colonialism, complicity, and cultural property.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949484106
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	7.63(w) x 12.13(h) x 1.31(d)

About the Author

Catherine Lord, Professor Emerita of Art at the University of California, Irvine, and former Dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts, is an artist and creative nonfiction writer who now lives in New York. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Anonymous was a Woman, and Creative Capital. Her books include The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (2004) and, co-authored with Richard Meyer, Art and Queer Culture (2013).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, Catherine’s newest work, with its equal aesthetic and theoretical rigor, its beauty as a physical object, and its fearlessness as settler colonial self-critique, joins the profound chorus of Jean Rhys, C. L. R. James, and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire; Frantz Fanon and Gabriel García Márquez; Lydia Cabrera, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, and Stuart Hall."
—Lorraine O’Grady, artist and essayist

"The brilliance of Catherine Lord’s project lies, in part, in its odd (albeit gorgeous) presentation. Laid out as a ledger with text and images, it invites us to imagine that we are reading an old colonial commonplace book reminiscent of slave registries."
—Diana Taylor, New York University

"Catherine Lord takes a tender knife to the archive, juicing fruit from the stones of Dominica’s wretched colonial past and muddled persistence. In brilliant flashes we are given the pieces but not the map of how a complex life intersects with a complicated place. Her anarchic and queer spirit rescues lost things and opens sparkly lines of resistance and joy."
—Matias Viegener, California Institute of the Arts

"Gorging upon Lord’s textual scholarship and dazzled by images that bemuse and beguile, the reader is lured into Dominica’s fevered and sullied history and thus into the author’s story in ways that we have never seen or thought about before."
—Polly Pattullo, publisher, Papillote Press

"The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men takes seriously the fact that the historical record, comprised as it is by a fusing of the archive and human memory, is but an accumulation of fragments that only hubris can summon into a master narrative. Lord offers her considerable talents as an essayist, a person who uses language to trouble the hauntings that constitute the self."
—Helen Molesworth, independent curator, Los Angeles