In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoret... more In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior ‘Gabu’ Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, ra...
"Slavery, Memory, and Genealogies of Diaspora" is the first in a series of two dialogue... more "Slavery, Memory, and Genealogies of Diaspora" is the first in a series of two dialogues organized by Deborah A. Thomas and Tina M. Campt as part of a project titled "Diasporic Hegemonies." In this dialogue, Jacqueline Nassy Brown and Bayo Holsey draw from their ethnographic research within Liverpool, England and coastal Ghana respectively to discuss the processes by which and places within which notions of the African diaspora are produced. They also address questions of how particular notions of diaspora are politicized, how they move between and among communities, and how they are used at specific moments in time.
A dominant idea has been that in the United States, people are socialized into a two-tier view of... more A dominant idea has been that in the United States, people are socialized into a two-tier view of race relations rooted in institutionalized segregation (the "one-drop rule"). This contrasts with a supposedly more "fluid," commonsense notion of race in Latin America as well as with the more obvious acceptance of class-color correlations that one associates with the West Indies. However, both poles of this "common sense" are not immutably true. In the United States, there has also been a longstanding sensibility (and tension) regarding the relationships between color and class, and intermediate racial categories (like mulato, quadroon, octoroon) were recognized on the census prior to the 1920s (Simmons 2009). And in Latin America and the West Indies, racial identification as "black" has also been a vector of both sociopolitical mobilization and everyday understandings of marginalization and inequality. Despite these similarities of experience, however, many still understand models of racial subjectivity and subjectification throughout the Americas in polar terms. I want to argue here that this is because race in the Americas has been theorized largely in relation to the development of models of societal integration (or the purported lack thereof), and therefore to nation-building, whether in the Hispanophone, Francophone, Lusophone, Dutch, or Anglophone Caribbean, or in the United States (Slocum and Thomas 2003). This link between nation-building and race has produced both the various models of creolization throughout the region (mestizaje, créolité, métissage, negritude, mestiçagem, afro-latinidad, hispanidad, democracia racial, and multiculturalism), and liberal projects of racial vindication,
This article draws from Leith Mullings's insights about the changing dimensions of racism, a "rel... more This article draws from Leith Mullings's insights about the changing dimensions of racism, a "relationship of accumulation through dispossession" (2020, 250), to think through contemporary realignments of global capitalism spawned by the intensification of Chinese investment overseas. I frame my analysis within the concept of epochal shift in order to draw attention not only to the novel dimensions of power within a changed global political economy, but also to the ways these novel arrangements are fitted into people's previous understandings and experiences of sovereignty and security in Jamaica. I will argue that thinking through the frame of epochal shift requires that we reconfigure the forms of intimacy and notions of scale that have been normative within anthropology, and that we reevaluate our methods and the forms of evidence we mobilize. Ultimately, I suggest that the new organization of global political power must draw our attention both to the new dimensions of racism that are emerging and to the ways people are demanding new forms of accountability. [Leith Mullings, racism, epochal shift, Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, Jamaica]
As a discipline, anthropology has long been subject to the scrutiny of critical race theorists an... more As a discipline, anthropology has long been subject to the scrutiny of critical race theorists and to questions of ethical practice with regard to ethnicity and representation. This dialogue features critical Black visual anthropologists discussing their approach to the discipline, and crucially asks, "What are the key lessons from 2020 in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests?" Each participant responds to photographs and film clips, offering provocations that challenge how we think about the discipline today. The dialogue is edited from a discussion that took place for the Royal Anthropology Institute Film Festival in 2021.
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2022
If the Caribbean was (and remains) central to modern processes of extraction, labor organization,... more If the Caribbean was (and remains) central to modern processes of extraction, labor organization, and racial hierarchy, and if it has also been a space of conceptual mining, then it is worth asking about the status of the Caribbean (in anthropology) today. As anthropologists continue to reorient the field away from "coloniality" (Wynter 2003) and toward something like "radical humanism" (Jobson 2020), what might research in the Caribbean teach us? In this essay, I will focus on recent work on sovereignty emerging from ethnographic research in the region in order to argue that focusing on the ephemeral, the performative, and the affective charts sovereignty as something that is constantly in process, something that emerges through dialogue and practice. In doing so, contemporary ethnographies raise questions about the afterlives, and new lives, of imperialism and slavery, and about the potential for reparation and repair. [sovereignty, affect, afterlives of imperialism, coloniality, repair] R e s u m e n Si el Caribe fue (y sigue siendo) central en los procesos modernos de extracción, organización laboral y jerarquía racial, y si también ha sido un espacio de búsqueda conceptual, entonces vale la pena preguntarse sobre la situación del Caribe (en la antropología) hoy. A medida que los antropólogos continúan reorientando el campo lejos de la "colonialidad" (Wynter 2003) y hacia algo como el "humanismo radical" (Jobson 2020), ¿qué nos puede enseñar la investigación en el Caribe? En este ensayo, me enfoco en trabajos recientes sobre soberanía que emergen de la investigación etnográfica en la región, para argumentar que centrarse en lo efímero, lo performativo y lo afectivo traza la soberanía como algo en constante desarrollo, algo que emerge a través del diálogo y la práctica. Al hacerlo, las etnografías contemporáneas plantean preguntas sobre las vidas posteriores y las nuevas vidas, del imperialismo y la esclavitud, y sobre el potencial de reparación.
Framed around a set of questions, this article traces the scholarly, institutional, and geopoliti... more Framed around a set of questions, this article traces the scholarly, institutional, and geopolitical trajectories shaping the shifting locations of Caribbean Studies within US cultural anthropology over time. Drawing in part on ideas developed through their collaborative project on ...
Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the proces... more Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the processes that many have come to label globalization. Although attempts within the social sciences have considered globalization processes in relation to articulations among ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, processes of racialization have only recently been taken up as central issues. In this article, we observe several new strategies of governance that emerged in the late twentieth century and onward and their implications for approaches to and understandings of race in the twenty-first century. These strategies have created new institutional spheres through which processes of racialization have proliferated, while still recalling earlier organizations of social division and classifications of human value. We reflect on significant spatial and temporal moments in an attempt to reanimate the way that economic and political processes not only have been managed through ideas about race but also...
For some scholars the Caribbean has become an area that 'repeats' (Benitez-Rojo 1992) or, as the ... more For some scholars the Caribbean has become an area that 'repeats' (Benitez-Rojo 1992) or, as the argument goes, prefigures the more recent analytical attention given to colonialism, modernity, creolization, and globalization (
Objectives: Racial disparities in health present a challenge to public health because of the comp... more Objectives: Racial disparities in health present a challenge to public health because of the complexity of interacting social forces. The Harlem Birth Right Project sought to improve understanding of these forces by using qualitative and community participatory methods. In this paper we 1) describe the process of qualitative inquiry and community involvement, 2) evaluate the impact of community participation, and 3) present a brief summary of the findings on social context as it relates to pregnancy outcomes of women in Harlem. Methods: We operationalized the qualitative method by combining participant observation, longitudinal case studies, and focus groups. An ethnographic survey was used to verify and triangulate findings across methods of data collection. We involved the community in the design, implementation, and analysis by collaborating with community-based organizations, setting up a community advisory board, and the use of dialogue groups and community meetings. Results: The use of qualitative methods and community partnership uncovered important aspects of the social context of women's lives that may not have emerged through traditional epidemiologic research. We found that pregnancy may serve as a catalyst to increase perception of the magnitude of preexisting social stressors. Several stressors and chronic strains associated with structural forces were identified. For example, the high percentage of households headed by women is seen as one consequence of larger structural forces. While social support networks serve as an important coping mechanism to buffer against the stress caused by these structural forces, the types of support women seek differs by social strata, and some strategies were identified as being substantially more effective than others. Conclusions: Qualitative and community participatory research can be successfully conducted to support public health goals and can derive important new information on the social context of women's lives.
Recently, there has been an upsurge in the critical attention directed toward the area studies re... more Recently, there has been an upsurge in the critical attention directed toward the area studies research paradigms that were institutionalized after World War II. This upsurge comes at a time when anthropologists are also developing increasingly sophisticated accounts of the intersections of global and local processes. Yet there has been less engaged consideration of the agendas propelling global studies over area studies curricula. In this essay, we argue that an analysis of the Caribbean and Caribbeanist anthropology allows us to trace the global in the local, thus illustrating the benefits of local area analyses for understanding global dynamics. We draw on theoretical assertions regarding global-local interactions in order to assess the relation of anthropology to Caribbean studies and to explore the implications of analytical trajectories and theoretical developments within Caribbeanist anthropology for social and cultural processes on a global level.
In April 2019, Small Axe convened the symposium "The Jamaican 1950s" at the University of Pennsyl... more In April 2019, Small Axe convened the symposium "The Jamaican 1950s" at the University of Pennsylvania. As with the two prior conferences-on the Jamaican 1960s and the Jamaican 1970s, convened in Miami and New York, respectively-the conference on the Jamaican 1950s was meant to contribute to our ongoing overall concern to rehistoricize the Jamaican cultural-political modern. Our aim in the series of symposia has been less about producing new substantive facts about these (or any) historical periods and more about inquiring into the frames of history through which we tell the stories of our pasts for our presents. Here, Jamaica has been mobilized as an "instance," one Caribbean geopolitical and historical terrain on which to carry out a methodological exercise. Our intention was not to reify Jamaica but to use it as the paradigmatic basis on which to reconsider the conceptual idioms appropriate to the demand of contemporary intervention. We were preoccupied, therefore, with a number of questions: How does our excavation of particular archives open new questions about Jamaica-and about the postcolonial Caribbean more generally-in particular moments? How do we question our received wisdoms, and what are the stakes of doing this? How does this help us reconceptualize the modern Caribbean?
In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoret... more In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior 'Gabu' Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, race, politics and what it means to be human from the space of the Afro-Caribbean allows a critical reorientation of modern ideologies of tem-porality that are inexorably linked to linear teleologies of progress, development, and improvement, and which therefore require the erasure of the forms of racial prior-ness that have been central to the making of the Caribbean as a material and ideological space.
There are two stories Haiti opens for political anthropology. The first has to do with the kinds ... more There are two stories Haiti opens for political anthropology. The first has to do with the kinds of politics that have and have not been possible in the region, and the kinds of sovereignty that have and have not been recognized and valued. The second, related, story has had to do with the links between cultural alterity and nation-building or national identity. Both these stories, of course, are not bounded regionally, but reflect broader modernist imperatives. In this
One of the agendas of Caribbean studies has been to create archives-or, more accurately, countera... more One of the agendas of Caribbean studies has been to create archives-or, more accurately, counterarchives-in order to make claims about the modern world and the significance of the region to the global processes that have shaped it over the past five centuries. 1 Scholars have been inspired by historical, literary, and ethnographic evidence to generate arguments about the region's centrality to the development of mercantile, and later industrial, capitalism; to a system of racialized labor management and contemporary class and cultural stratifications; to ideologies and practices linking gendered and racialized subjectivities to patterns of state formation and imperialism; to the development of "new" and creatively creolized social and expressive cultural practices; to revolutions and modern social movements; and to contemporary processes of transnationalism. If, as David Scott has argued, an "archive is not merely a collection; rather, it is a generative system . . . that governs the production and appearance of statements," then we must think about the process of developing archives as one that creates new possibilities, possibilities for seeing connections previously unexamined and for reordering our ontological taken-for-granteds. 2 Caribbean Studies, Archive Building, and the Problem of Violence 28 | Some have seen the process of archive creation as simultaneously a process of black memory making (memories, in this case, of things not directly experienced). Black memory, it is claimed, and more specifically New World black memory, constitutes something of a special case because it is produced and reproduced within a context often characterized by "an absence of ruins." This phrase, which is the title of Orlando Patterson's second novel, is meant to foreground experiences of rupture, pastlessness, and fragmentation-legacies of the transatlantic slave trade-that are often seen as constituting the historical and discursive context for the majority of New World African populations. Indeed, three generations of writers and literary critics have attempted, in different ways, to reconstruct the lives of those who were or would become slaves, to glean insight into their aspirations, their imaginations, and their day-to-day movements by putting together a mention in a diary here, a list in a log there. 3 These acts of reconstruction are oriented toward the creation of an historical consciousness, one that often stands in opposition to forms of state memory, and this is why they constitute a counterarchive, or what Anthony Bogues calls a "dread history." This is a history of radical utopian desire that "attempts to excavate from the practices and ideas of the subaltern resistance movements in the Caribbean a worldview in which hope is rooted in a conception of the bourgeois colonial world turned upside down." 4 Of course, the project of mining diverse spaces in order to generate this kind of historical consciousness not only counters dominant tropes about the region and the people who have inhabited it, it also potentially provides the basis for claims "about the relationship between present inequalities and past injustices." 5 As this is the structural-historical framework used by reparations activists, we might also profitably consider the impetus for archive creation in relation to projects of reparative justice.
In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoret... more In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior ‘Gabu’ Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, ra...
"Slavery, Memory, and Genealogies of Diaspora" is the first in a series of two dialogue... more "Slavery, Memory, and Genealogies of Diaspora" is the first in a series of two dialogues organized by Deborah A. Thomas and Tina M. Campt as part of a project titled "Diasporic Hegemonies." In this dialogue, Jacqueline Nassy Brown and Bayo Holsey draw from their ethnographic research within Liverpool, England and coastal Ghana respectively to discuss the processes by which and places within which notions of the African diaspora are produced. They also address questions of how particular notions of diaspora are politicized, how they move between and among communities, and how they are used at specific moments in time.
A dominant idea has been that in the United States, people are socialized into a two-tier view of... more A dominant idea has been that in the United States, people are socialized into a two-tier view of race relations rooted in institutionalized segregation (the "one-drop rule"). This contrasts with a supposedly more "fluid," commonsense notion of race in Latin America as well as with the more obvious acceptance of class-color correlations that one associates with the West Indies. However, both poles of this "common sense" are not immutably true. In the United States, there has also been a longstanding sensibility (and tension) regarding the relationships between color and class, and intermediate racial categories (like mulato, quadroon, octoroon) were recognized on the census prior to the 1920s (Simmons 2009). And in Latin America and the West Indies, racial identification as "black" has also been a vector of both sociopolitical mobilization and everyday understandings of marginalization and inequality. Despite these similarities of experience, however, many still understand models of racial subjectivity and subjectification throughout the Americas in polar terms. I want to argue here that this is because race in the Americas has been theorized largely in relation to the development of models of societal integration (or the purported lack thereof), and therefore to nation-building, whether in the Hispanophone, Francophone, Lusophone, Dutch, or Anglophone Caribbean, or in the United States (Slocum and Thomas 2003). This link between nation-building and race has produced both the various models of creolization throughout the region (mestizaje, créolité, métissage, negritude, mestiçagem, afro-latinidad, hispanidad, democracia racial, and multiculturalism), and liberal projects of racial vindication,
This article draws from Leith Mullings's insights about the changing dimensions of racism, a "rel... more This article draws from Leith Mullings's insights about the changing dimensions of racism, a "relationship of accumulation through dispossession" (2020, 250), to think through contemporary realignments of global capitalism spawned by the intensification of Chinese investment overseas. I frame my analysis within the concept of epochal shift in order to draw attention not only to the novel dimensions of power within a changed global political economy, but also to the ways these novel arrangements are fitted into people's previous understandings and experiences of sovereignty and security in Jamaica. I will argue that thinking through the frame of epochal shift requires that we reconfigure the forms of intimacy and notions of scale that have been normative within anthropology, and that we reevaluate our methods and the forms of evidence we mobilize. Ultimately, I suggest that the new organization of global political power must draw our attention both to the new dimensions of racism that are emerging and to the ways people are demanding new forms of accountability. [Leith Mullings, racism, epochal shift, Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, Jamaica]
As a discipline, anthropology has long been subject to the scrutiny of critical race theorists an... more As a discipline, anthropology has long been subject to the scrutiny of critical race theorists and to questions of ethical practice with regard to ethnicity and representation. This dialogue features critical Black visual anthropologists discussing their approach to the discipline, and crucially asks, "What are the key lessons from 2020 in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests?" Each participant responds to photographs and film clips, offering provocations that challenge how we think about the discipline today. The dialogue is edited from a discussion that took place for the Royal Anthropology Institute Film Festival in 2021.
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2022
If the Caribbean was (and remains) central to modern processes of extraction, labor organization,... more If the Caribbean was (and remains) central to modern processes of extraction, labor organization, and racial hierarchy, and if it has also been a space of conceptual mining, then it is worth asking about the status of the Caribbean (in anthropology) today. As anthropologists continue to reorient the field away from "coloniality" (Wynter 2003) and toward something like "radical humanism" (Jobson 2020), what might research in the Caribbean teach us? In this essay, I will focus on recent work on sovereignty emerging from ethnographic research in the region in order to argue that focusing on the ephemeral, the performative, and the affective charts sovereignty as something that is constantly in process, something that emerges through dialogue and practice. In doing so, contemporary ethnographies raise questions about the afterlives, and new lives, of imperialism and slavery, and about the potential for reparation and repair. [sovereignty, affect, afterlives of imperialism, coloniality, repair] R e s u m e n Si el Caribe fue (y sigue siendo) central en los procesos modernos de extracción, organización laboral y jerarquía racial, y si también ha sido un espacio de búsqueda conceptual, entonces vale la pena preguntarse sobre la situación del Caribe (en la antropología) hoy. A medida que los antropólogos continúan reorientando el campo lejos de la "colonialidad" (Wynter 2003) y hacia algo como el "humanismo radical" (Jobson 2020), ¿qué nos puede enseñar la investigación en el Caribe? En este ensayo, me enfoco en trabajos recientes sobre soberanía que emergen de la investigación etnográfica en la región, para argumentar que centrarse en lo efímero, lo performativo y lo afectivo traza la soberanía como algo en constante desarrollo, algo que emerge a través del diálogo y la práctica. Al hacerlo, las etnografías contemporáneas plantean preguntas sobre las vidas posteriores y las nuevas vidas, del imperialismo y la esclavitud, y sobre el potencial de reparación.
Framed around a set of questions, this article traces the scholarly, institutional, and geopoliti... more Framed around a set of questions, this article traces the scholarly, institutional, and geopolitical trajectories shaping the shifting locations of Caribbean Studies within US cultural anthropology over time. Drawing in part on ideas developed through their collaborative project on ...
Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the proces... more Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the processes that many have come to label globalization. Although attempts within the social sciences have considered globalization processes in relation to articulations among ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, processes of racialization have only recently been taken up as central issues. In this article, we observe several new strategies of governance that emerged in the late twentieth century and onward and their implications for approaches to and understandings of race in the twenty-first century. These strategies have created new institutional spheres through which processes of racialization have proliferated, while still recalling earlier organizations of social division and classifications of human value. We reflect on significant spatial and temporal moments in an attempt to reanimate the way that economic and political processes not only have been managed through ideas about race but also...
For some scholars the Caribbean has become an area that 'repeats' (Benitez-Rojo 1992) or, as the ... more For some scholars the Caribbean has become an area that 'repeats' (Benitez-Rojo 1992) or, as the argument goes, prefigures the more recent analytical attention given to colonialism, modernity, creolization, and globalization (
Objectives: Racial disparities in health present a challenge to public health because of the comp... more Objectives: Racial disparities in health present a challenge to public health because of the complexity of interacting social forces. The Harlem Birth Right Project sought to improve understanding of these forces by using qualitative and community participatory methods. In this paper we 1) describe the process of qualitative inquiry and community involvement, 2) evaluate the impact of community participation, and 3) present a brief summary of the findings on social context as it relates to pregnancy outcomes of women in Harlem. Methods: We operationalized the qualitative method by combining participant observation, longitudinal case studies, and focus groups. An ethnographic survey was used to verify and triangulate findings across methods of data collection. We involved the community in the design, implementation, and analysis by collaborating with community-based organizations, setting up a community advisory board, and the use of dialogue groups and community meetings. Results: The use of qualitative methods and community partnership uncovered important aspects of the social context of women's lives that may not have emerged through traditional epidemiologic research. We found that pregnancy may serve as a catalyst to increase perception of the magnitude of preexisting social stressors. Several stressors and chronic strains associated with structural forces were identified. For example, the high percentage of households headed by women is seen as one consequence of larger structural forces. While social support networks serve as an important coping mechanism to buffer against the stress caused by these structural forces, the types of support women seek differs by social strata, and some strategies were identified as being substantially more effective than others. Conclusions: Qualitative and community participatory research can be successfully conducted to support public health goals and can derive important new information on the social context of women's lives.
Recently, there has been an upsurge in the critical attention directed toward the area studies re... more Recently, there has been an upsurge in the critical attention directed toward the area studies research paradigms that were institutionalized after World War II. This upsurge comes at a time when anthropologists are also developing increasingly sophisticated accounts of the intersections of global and local processes. Yet there has been less engaged consideration of the agendas propelling global studies over area studies curricula. In this essay, we argue that an analysis of the Caribbean and Caribbeanist anthropology allows us to trace the global in the local, thus illustrating the benefits of local area analyses for understanding global dynamics. We draw on theoretical assertions regarding global-local interactions in order to assess the relation of anthropology to Caribbean studies and to explore the implications of analytical trajectories and theoretical developments within Caribbeanist anthropology for social and cultural processes on a global level.
In April 2019, Small Axe convened the symposium "The Jamaican 1950s" at the University of Pennsyl... more In April 2019, Small Axe convened the symposium "The Jamaican 1950s" at the University of Pennsylvania. As with the two prior conferences-on the Jamaican 1960s and the Jamaican 1970s, convened in Miami and New York, respectively-the conference on the Jamaican 1950s was meant to contribute to our ongoing overall concern to rehistoricize the Jamaican cultural-political modern. Our aim in the series of symposia has been less about producing new substantive facts about these (or any) historical periods and more about inquiring into the frames of history through which we tell the stories of our pasts for our presents. Here, Jamaica has been mobilized as an "instance," one Caribbean geopolitical and historical terrain on which to carry out a methodological exercise. Our intention was not to reify Jamaica but to use it as the paradigmatic basis on which to reconsider the conceptual idioms appropriate to the demand of contemporary intervention. We were preoccupied, therefore, with a number of questions: How does our excavation of particular archives open new questions about Jamaica-and about the postcolonial Caribbean more generally-in particular moments? How do we question our received wisdoms, and what are the stakes of doing this? How does this help us reconceptualize the modern Caribbean?
In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoret... more In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior 'Gabu' Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, race, politics and what it means to be human from the space of the Afro-Caribbean allows a critical reorientation of modern ideologies of tem-porality that are inexorably linked to linear teleologies of progress, development, and improvement, and which therefore require the erasure of the forms of racial prior-ness that have been central to the making of the Caribbean as a material and ideological space.
There are two stories Haiti opens for political anthropology. The first has to do with the kinds ... more There are two stories Haiti opens for political anthropology. The first has to do with the kinds of politics that have and have not been possible in the region, and the kinds of sovereignty that have and have not been recognized and valued. The second, related, story has had to do with the links between cultural alterity and nation-building or national identity. Both these stories, of course, are not bounded regionally, but reflect broader modernist imperatives. In this
One of the agendas of Caribbean studies has been to create archives-or, more accurately, countera... more One of the agendas of Caribbean studies has been to create archives-or, more accurately, counterarchives-in order to make claims about the modern world and the significance of the region to the global processes that have shaped it over the past five centuries. 1 Scholars have been inspired by historical, literary, and ethnographic evidence to generate arguments about the region's centrality to the development of mercantile, and later industrial, capitalism; to a system of racialized labor management and contemporary class and cultural stratifications; to ideologies and practices linking gendered and racialized subjectivities to patterns of state formation and imperialism; to the development of "new" and creatively creolized social and expressive cultural practices; to revolutions and modern social movements; and to contemporary processes of transnationalism. If, as David Scott has argued, an "archive is not merely a collection; rather, it is a generative system . . . that governs the production and appearance of statements," then we must think about the process of developing archives as one that creates new possibilities, possibilities for seeing connections previously unexamined and for reordering our ontological taken-for-granteds. 2 Caribbean Studies, Archive Building, and the Problem of Violence 28 | Some have seen the process of archive creation as simultaneously a process of black memory making (memories, in this case, of things not directly experienced). Black memory, it is claimed, and more specifically New World black memory, constitutes something of a special case because it is produced and reproduced within a context often characterized by "an absence of ruins." This phrase, which is the title of Orlando Patterson's second novel, is meant to foreground experiences of rupture, pastlessness, and fragmentation-legacies of the transatlantic slave trade-that are often seen as constituting the historical and discursive context for the majority of New World African populations. Indeed, three generations of writers and literary critics have attempted, in different ways, to reconstruct the lives of those who were or would become slaves, to glean insight into their aspirations, their imaginations, and their day-to-day movements by putting together a mention in a diary here, a list in a log there. 3 These acts of reconstruction are oriented toward the creation of an historical consciousness, one that often stands in opposition to forms of state memory, and this is why they constitute a counterarchive, or what Anthony Bogues calls a "dread history." This is a history of radical utopian desire that "attempts to excavate from the practices and ideas of the subaltern resistance movements in the Caribbean a worldview in which hope is rooted in a conception of the bourgeois colonial world turned upside down." 4 Of course, the project of mining diverse spaces in order to generate this kind of historical consciousness not only counters dominant tropes about the region and the people who have inhabited it, it also potentially provides the basis for claims "about the relationship between present inequalities and past injustices." 5 As this is the structural-historical framework used by reparations activists, we might also profitably consider the impetus for archive creation in relation to projects of reparative justice.
BAD FRIDAY is a documentary film that chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the e... more BAD FRIDAY is a documentary film that chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community – Rastafari – and shows how people use their recollections of the Coral Gardens “incident” in 1963 to imagine new possibilities for the future.
Part art installation, part memorial, and part call to action, this new exhibition sheds light on... more Part art installation, part memorial, and part call to action, this new exhibition sheds light on the “Tivoli Incursion” through compelling video and audio footage featuring firsthand accounts of people directly impacted by the violence (the three stories below are a few among several others featured in the exhibit). The exhibition is co-curated by Dr. Deborah Thomas, the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn of AV Productions and Deanne M. Bell, Senior Lecturer Psychology, Nottingham Trent University.
A collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker Deborah A. Thomas, musician and composer Jun... more A collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker Deborah A. Thomas, musician and composer Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, and psychologist Deanne M. Bell, this experimental documentary explores the archives generated by state violence by focusing on the 2010 State of Emergency in West Kingston, Jamaica. In May of that year, the military and police force entered Tivoli Gardens and surrounding communities by force in order to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States to stand trial for gun and drug-related charges. This resulted in the deaths of at least 75 civilians. The film features community residents talking about what they experienced during the “incursion,” and naming and memorializing loved ones they lost. Through the use of archival film and photographs, footage from the U.S. drone that was overhead during the operation, and contemporary hyper-realist film photography of the “garrison” of Tivoli Gardens, it encourages viewers to think about how people negotiate the entanglements among nationalist governments, imperialist practices, and local articulations with illicit international trades.
A collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker Deborah A. Thomas, musician and composer Jun... more A collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker Deborah A. Thomas, musician and composer Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, and psychologist Deanne M. Bell, this experimental documentary explores the archives generated by state violence by focusing on the 2010 State of Emergency in West Kingston, Jamaica. In May of that year, the military and police force entered Tivoli Gardens and surrounding communities by force in order to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States to stand trial for gun and drug-related charges. This resulted in the deaths of at least 75 civilians. The film features community residents talking about what they experienced during the “incursion,” and naming and memorializing loved ones they lost. Through the use of archival film and photographs, footage from the U.S. drone that was overhead during the operation, and contemporary hyper-realist film photography of the “garrison” of Tivoli Gardens, it encourages viewers to think about how people negotiate the entanglements among nationalist governments, imperialist practices, and local articulations with illicit international trades.
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