1 Dabydeen, David, “‘Word People’: A Conversation with David Dabydeen” (interview with Abigail Ward) in Atlantic Studies 11.1 (2014): 31Google Scholar.

2 I am grateful to Heidi Kaufman and Mark Phillips for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

3 Bindman, David, “‘A Voluptuous Alliance between Africa and Europe’: Hogarth’s Africans,” in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, eds. Bernardette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 260Google Scholar. Bindman observes that “Since the publication of David Dabydeen’s Hogarth’s Blacks . . . , it has been impossible to ignore the fact that Africans . . . are a substantial presence in Hogarth’s paintings and satirical prints.”

4 Dabydeen, , “Word People,” 39Google Scholar.

5 See Schamp, Jutta, “Transfiguring Black and Jewish Relations: From Ignatius Sancho’s Letters and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative to David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress,” Ariel 10.4 (2009): 30–31Google Scholar as well as Dabydeen, David, “Getting Back to the Idea of Art as Art—an Interview with David Dabydeen,” interview with Lars Eckstein, World Literature Written in English 39.1 (2001): 30Google Scholar.

6 Casteel, Sarah Phillips, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See Condé’s, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Random House, 1992)Google Scholar, Walcott’s, Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)Google Scholar, and McLeod’s, The Cost of Sugar, trans. Gerald R. Mettam (Paramaribo: Waterfront, 2010)Google Scholar. As I argue elsewhere (Casteel, ibid.), for some of these writers, repositioning Jewishness in the context of Atlantic slavery helps to prevent the slave narrative from becoming ossified in its well-established generic conventions.

8 The exhibition, entitled Joden in de Cariben (Jews in the Caribbean), ran from January to June 2015.

9 Perhaps the only other Caribbean writer to address the Sephardic Caribbean in the context of European art history is Walcott (see his Tiepolo’s Hound).

10 Jewishness notoriously blurs distinctions among racial, ethnic, religious, and national differences. Accordingly, there will be some slippage among these terms in my discussion, but I emphasize racial definitions of Jewishness in particular to reflect the eighteenth-century historical setting that Dabydeen addresses and the links that he makes between the construction of Jews and blacks during this period.

11 For a broader discussion of ekphrasis as it is employed by Caribbean writers, see Emery, Mary Lou, Modernism, the Visual and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

12 Dabydeen, David, “Preface,” Turner (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2010), 7Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 31.

14 Dabydeen, , “Word People,” 34Google Scholar.

15 The figures of the Jewish peddler and fiddler appear in plates 2 and 4 respectively of Hogarth’s Election series (1757–1758). Solkin notes that the Jewish merchant in plate 2 of A Harlot’s Progress “is the only secondary character who has the centre of a composition all to himself.” Solkin, David, “The Excessive Jew in A Harlot’s Progress” in Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, eds. Frederic Ogée, David Bindman, and Peter Wagner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 228Google Scholar.

16 Wagner, Peter, “Hogarth and the Other,” Word and Image in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, ed. Michael Meyer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 32Google Scholar.

17 See Kaufman, who argues that Hogarth’s depiction of the Jew as a poor mimic of Englishness speaks to contemporary anxieties surrounding not only Jewish assimilation and economic power but also “the racial implications of extending citizenship rights to Jewish immigrants.” Kaufman, Heidi, English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Reflections on a Nested Nation (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009), 12–13Google Scholar.

18 Dabydeen, David, Johnson’s Dictionary (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2013), 98Google Scholar.

19 Wagner, Peter, “Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality—the State(s) of the Art(s),” Icons-Texts-icontexts: Essay on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Dabydeen, David, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985; Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 11Google Scholar. Disagreeing with Dabydeen, Bindman questions whether Hogarth had a special sympathy for blacks, which “would have put him in the minority in his own time, place, and circumstances” (Bindman, 260).

21 “Hogarth and the Other,” 25.

22 Dabydeen, David, Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain (London: Hansib, 1987), 12Google Scholar.

23 Dabydeen, , “Getting Back,” 29Google Scholar.

24 See Emery’s comment that “[i]n representing, through words, another representational language—that of the visual—ekphrasis represents representation itself” (Ibid., 182).

25 Fort, Bernadette and Rosenthal, Angela, “The Analysis of Difference” in The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, eds. Bernadette Forte and Angela Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3Google Scholar. Relatedly, Hallett remarks how A Harlot’s Progress “encourages the viewer to compare each man to the other, and to satirically appreciate the continuities and correspondences between these seemingly diverse individuals.” Mark Hallett, Hogarth (London: Phaidon, 2000), 93.

26 Solkin notes that although Hogarth scholars have been hesitant to discuss the Jewish figure in A Harlot’s Progress and its relationship to popular images of the Jew, Dabydeen is an exception (Solkin, 219–20).

27 Galchinsky, Michael, “Africans, Indians, Arabs, and Scots: Jewish and Other Questions in the Age of Empire,” Jewish Culture and History. 6.1 (2003): 47Google Scholar.

28 As Solkin observes, “Hogarth’s Jew was hardly an original creation; he, too, was already known to his audience, if not from a single prototype, then from a multiplicity of sources rooted in a tradition of English representations of Jewishness going back centuries” (Solkin, 220).

29 Land, Isaac, “Jewishness and Britishness in the Eighteenth Century,” History Compass 3 (2005): 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Harris, Constance, The Way Jews Lived: Five Hundred Years of Printed Words and Images (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2008), 119–125Google Scholar.

31 Hogarth, Walpole, 109. Dabydeen’s interpretation would be rejected by Paulson, who in a 2001 collection engages in a polemic with Solkin regarding whether Hogarth opportunistically exploits popular anti-Jewish prejudice (as Solkin maintains) or in fact humanizes the Jew, any antisemitism being “incidental” to his real purpose of parodying Dürer’s New Testament scenes (as Paulson would have it). See Solkin, Dabydeen’s Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain, and Paulson, Ronald, “Some Thoughts on Hogarth’s Jew: Issues in Current Hogarth Scholarship,” Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, eds. Frederic Ogée, David Bindman, and Peter Wagner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 236–263Google Scholar.

32 See Felsenstein, Frank, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 54–55Google Scholar and Modder, Montagu Frank, The Jew in the Literature of England (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 66–68Google Scholar. Accordingly, Felsenstein discusses the “extraordinary cultural influence” of plate 2, which “served as a graphic prototype . . . in the reactivation of the Jew-figure in the popular imagination” (55). See also Solkin’s contention that Hogarth’s merchant is the most influential image of the Jew in early eighteenth-century British culture (221).

33 Dabydeen, David, A Harlot’s Progress (London: Vintage, 2000), 143Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., 3.

35 Ibid., 143.

36 Ibid., 250–51. Thus as Schamp observes, the novel suggests how anti-Jewish stereotypes cross both class and racial barriers (31–32).

37 Ibid., 145.

38 Hogarth’s Blacks, 21.

39 A Harlot’s Progress, 227.

40 Ibid., 227.

41 Eckstein, Lars, Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 139Google Scholar.

42 Heffernan, James, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 6Google Scholar. For Heffernan, “Ekphrasis . . . is a literary mode that turns on the antagonism . . . between verbal and visual representation . . . and often reveals a profound ambivalence toward visual art, a fusion . . . of veneration and anxiety” (7).

43 A Harlot’s Progress, 271.

44 Ibid., 53.

45 Felsenstein, 57.

46 A Harlot’s Progress, 273.

47 Ibid. See Hallett (94–95) on the commercial success of Hogarth’s series.

48 Hogarth’s Blacks, 108; 114.

49 My thanks to Michael Hoberman for supplying additional information about Rowland Gideon.

50 Johnson’s Dictionary, 21.

51 Ibid., 23–24.

52 Ibid., 26.

53 Ibid., 32.

54 Ibid., 36.

55 Ibid., 33.

56 Ibid., 34.

57 Ibid., 117.

58 See also Johnson’s Dictionary, 117: “Mr Basnett was pleased that Theodore appeared to have Portuguese in him, albeit only to the degree of an octoroon.”

59 Ibid., 118.

60 I am indebted to Heidi Kaufman for sharing this observation with me.

61 See Hogarth, Walpole, 26.

62 Johnson’s Dictionary, 120.

63 Ibid., 118.

64 Ibid., 176.

65 Ibid., 122.

66 Ibid., 119.

67 Ibid., 116.

68 Ibid., 144.

69 Ibid., 40.

70 Ibid., 139.

71 Cheyette, Bryan, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8Google Scholar. See also Linda Nochlin’s discussion of the “Jew’s representational instability” in “Starting with the Self: Jewish Identity and Its Representation,” The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, eds. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 13, as well as Solkin’s suggestion that images of the Jew stand apart from other stereotypes by virtue of being “unusually rich in meaning” (220).

72 Ibid., 11.

73 Ibid., 274.

74 Ibid., 275.

75 See Schorsch, Jonathan, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Ben-Ur, Aviva, “A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion, and Upward Mobility in Suriname’s Jewish Community,” Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, 152–169Google Scholar, eds. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Davis, Natalie Zemon, “David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’ and the Slave Mattheus,” New Essays in American Jewish History (Cincinnati, OH: American Jewish Archives, 2010), 79–94Google Scholar.

76 Boyarin, Jonathan, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 81–82Google Scholar.