Camille Pissarro at the Crossroad of the Plantation

This chapter discusses Camille Pissarro's depictions of the Caribbean landscape as material embodiments of territorial tensions between ground matter, figurai presence, and visual access structured by coloniality. The author argument relates both to Pissarro's representations of a physical network of roads in a post-slavery landscape, and to the infrastructures of art production and circulation in the Atlantic world. This kind of interpretation, then, involves grappling with tensions between the situated, grounded particulars of place and an itinerant image culture that was always looking toward European metropolitan viewers. It contextualizes Pissarro's paintings within a history of infrastructural developments in Venezuela and the Danish West Indies and their representation in varied media. Ecological and landscape destruction both enabled and were made possible in turn by cartographic techniques, which traced the construction of new road networks.