Fragments and Photographs Available to Purchase

Chapter 3 begins with a series of orchestrated fragments and suggests that the scopic metaphors that prevail in scholarship on colonialism only serve the illusion of archival plenitude. The chapter then turns to the story of Francis Simmons, a railway guard from Trinidad stranded in London, to describe the seductive but ultimately fragmentary forms of colonial archives. The chapter closes with examples of Caribbean administrators creating new geographical alignments amid exclusion and alienation. These examples provide a platform for the remaining four chapters, which offer detailed case studies of African-Caribbean exchanges.