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
