UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Network: Dons, Yardies and Posses: Representations of Jamaican Organised Crime
Workshop 3: Jamaican Organised Crime: Aesthetics and Style
Venue: University of Leicester
Workshop Programme
Day 1: Friday 16th November (Fielding Johnson First Floor Council Suite Room 2) 10.15-10.45 Registration and refreshments 10.45-11.00 Welcome 11.00-12.00 The Devil’s Dandruff: A Cocaine Trilogy & Modern Cautionary Tale: Work In Progress By Carol Leeming FRSA. 12.00-1.00 ‘In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue’: Bodies, Affect, and Caribbeanized Cityscapes (interactive session) 1.00-2.00 Lunch 2.00-3.30 Organised Crime and the State (panel) 3.30-4.00 Refreshment break 4.00-5.00 A Brief History of Blood Money: Reflecting on Corruption and Crime in Contemporary Jamaican Music Videos (interactive session)
Day 2: Saturday 17th November (Charles Wilson Fourth Floor SR 409 Garendon) 9.15-9.30 Registration 9.30-11.00 Urban Imaginaries and the Badman Figure (panel)
11.00-11.30 Refreshment break 11.30-12.30 Badmanism and Masculinity (interactive session) 12.30-1.30 Lunch 1.30-3.00 Affect and Aesthetics in Organised Crime (panel) 3.00-3.30 Refreshment break
3.30-4.00 Concluding discussion reflecting on the progress of the project and future directions 5.00-6.30 Representing Kingston: author reading and discussion with Kei Miller and Kerry Young (Venue: Attenborough University Film Theatre)
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Panels and interactive sessions
Day 1: Friday 16th November
11.00: The Devil’s Dandruff: A Cocaine Trilogy & Modern Cautionary Tale. Work In Progress By Carol Leeming FRSA.
A creative response to a legendary global drug using the medium of drama
12.00: ‘In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue’: Bodies, Affect, and Caribbeanized Cityscapes
Interactive session led by Faith Smith (Brandeis University) and Donette Francis (University of Miami)
2.00: Organised Crime and the State
Lucy Evans (University of Leicester), ‘Eco-noir, environmental crime and Esther Figueroa’s Limbo’
Anthony Harriott (University of the West Indies), ‘Power and accountability in the security domain: The extradition of Christopher Coke and the Commission of Enquiry as an instrument of security sector accountability’
Petrina Dacres (Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performance Arts), ‘Entangled Histories, Death and Violence in Jamaican Art’
Chair: Rivke Jaffe
4.00: A Brief History of Blood Money: Reflecting on Corruption and Crime in Contemporary Jamaican Music Videos
Interactive session led by Zakiya McKenzie (University of Exeter)
Day 2: Saturday 17th November
9.30: Urban Imaginaries and the Badman Figure
Faith Smith (Brandeis University), ‘Millennial Posturing?’
David Howard (University of Oxford), ‘The aesthetics and influence of “badmen” and banditry in contemporary Jamaica’
Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam), ‘Pathologies of Infrastructure: Abjection and Connection in Kingston’s Gullies’
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Chair: Tracian Meikle
11.30: Badmanism and Masculinity
Interactive session led by Michael Bucknor (University of the West Indies) and Lucy Evans (University of Leicester)
1.30: Affect and Aesthetics in Organised Crime
Donette Francis (University of Miami), ‘Kingston in Miami’
Michael Bucknor (University of the West Indies), ‘Criminal Intimacies: Psycho-Sexual Spatialities of Jamaican Transnational Crime in Garfield Ellis’s Till I’m Laid to Rest (and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings)’
Tracian Meikle (University of Amsterdam), ‘Memorial Murals and the Aesthetic Work of Maintaining Personhood after Death’
Chair: David Howard
3.30: Concluding discussion
Concluding discussion reflecting on the progress of the project and future directions
Chair: Lucy Evans and Rivke Jaffe
5.00: Author readings / Q&A: Representing Kingston Venue: Attenborough University Film Theatre
Author reading and Q&A with poet, novelist and broadcaster Kei Miller and novelist and short story writer Kerry Young.
Chairs: Lucy Evans and Rivke Jaffe
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Abstracts and Bios
Michael A. Bucknor (University of the West Indies, Mona)
Paper title: Criminal Intimacies: Psycho-Sexual Spatialities of Jamaican Transnational Crime in Garfield Ellis’s Till I’m Laid to Rest (and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings)
Abstract: On reading the first 80 pages of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, I began thinking about the relationship between criminal violence and queer intimacy. Indeed, James’s novel made me realize the importance of including the sexual body as a significant site for tracing the spatial imaginaries of Jamaican transnational crime. Yet, before James, there was Garfield Ellis’s novel of transnational crime ironically invoking Buju Banton (himself imprisoned for a transnational drug crime) in the title, “‘Till I am Laid to Rest.”” In tracking the extended terrain of Jamaica’s criminal activity beyond the inner city scenes and the shores of Jamaica to Miami, USA, dubbed Kingston 21, Ellis is less interested in the macro spatialities of the geographical landscape of crime and more interested in the micro spaces of intimacies which engender criminal activity. Antwi et al’s work on “postcolonial intimacies,” Lisa Lowe’s idea of “proximate intimacies” which can be cross-referenced with Sedgwick’s enumeration of “homosocial” intimacies and Christina Sharpe’s concept of “monstruous intimacies” have all been instrumental in my reading of criminal intimacies in these novels. While there are smaller material sites such as the car, the vault and the briefcases/bags of money that work as motifs of criminality in Ellis’ novel, the major geographical sites of Sufferer’s Heights and the cityscapes of Miami are shrouded in secrecy and the criminal enterprise is primarily registered in the sonic spaces of ghetto-grapevine gossip. By turning attention to the “emotional geographies” (Antwi) of these novels, this paper mines “rapes and coerced intimacies” as well as homosocial friendships as a way of mapping the psycho-sexual dimension of Jamaican transnational crime.
Author Bio: Dr. Michael A. Bucknor is an Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Literatures in English and the Public Orator of the Mona Campus, UWI. He serves on the editorial boards of Caribbean Quarterly, Issues in Critical Investigation and Lucayos, and is Senior Editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature. He is also co-editor with Alison Donnell of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature and carries out research on Austin Clarke, Caribbean-Canadian writing, postcolonial literatures and theory, diaspora studies, masculinities and popular culture. He is completing a book manuscript entitled, “Performing Masculinities in Jamaican Popular Culture.”
Carol Leeming FRSA
The Devils Dandruff A Cocaine Trilogy & Modern Cautionary Tale: Work In Progress
A Creative Response to a Legendary Global Drug Using The Medium of Drama
Abstract My writing project began with my interest firstly, in the Coca Plant and later Cocaine, the substance derived from the Coca plant, and how it is used in the present day, specifically the impact of its global illegal trade across the world and its affect on individual lives and society
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The Coca plant is viewed as sacred and beneficial by the peoples of South America, this attracted me as a writer of magic realism narratives. I plan to highlight the Coca plant, and its derivative Cocaine, through human stories, foregrounding legend and myth, associated with the Coca plant. Looking at the way the Coca plant is seen as primarily benign, but its derivative Cocaine is more taboo, and its centrality to the lives of diverse characters, within three dramatic narratives, set in very different contemporary locations. Highlighting the contrasting ways, in which Cocaine is interwoven in their lives, in seemingly positive but ultimately negative ways.
The three narrative dramas of the trilogy are titled as follows:
The Don The Nurse The Model
I would like to share synopsis, character descriptions, and a brief extract of the first drama, a short scene with the character of the Jamaican Don and his Wife.
Author bio Carol Leeming is a multi-disciplinary, international artist from Leicester. A polymath, she is Artistic Director/Lead Artist of Dare to Diva Company, working in Literature, Performing Arts & Digital Media. Carol is the Winner of East Midlands Women’s Award 2017, for Outstanding Woman in Arts, Media & Music. Carol is a multi-award winning writer, a published poet, recipient of Ena Young Poetry Award & Siobhan Logan Writing for Listeners Award. Her plays have been performed at Curve and Brighton Dome theatres, and broadcast on national BBC Radio 4. Carol’s roles include playwright, dramaturge, singer /songwriter, composer, performer, musician, director/film maker, cultural critic and curator. Carol also received the African Caribbean Citizens Forum Awards for contribution to Arts & Entertainment and the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 she received an MBE for Services to the Arts and to Culture in Leicester.
Petrina Dacres (Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performance Arts)
Paper Title: Entangled Histories, Death and Violence in Jamaican Art
Abstract This paper considers how visuality mediates state authority by analysing the artworks of several contemporary artists in Jamaica such as: Michael Robinson, Camille Chedda, Ebony Patterson, Omari Ra, Stanford Watson, Christopher Irons and Phillip Thomas. In the immediate decades after Independence in Jamaica visuality was used to disseminate political authority through history. This was exemplified by the heroic sculptures and history paintings of the 1960s and 1970s. The work of the artists in review in this paper subvert the heroic iconography and demonstrate the complexity and limitations of state authority and leadership. The paper considers how their works offer up what Mirzoeff (2011) describes as a “counterhistory of visuality.” The works under consideration engage themes of power, death and violence. The paper examines the form and content of the images in relation to the recent history of (state) violence and a vernacular and diasporic visual economy of death and memory. Earlier 1960s anxieties over the role of violence in the constitution of the politico-historical subject are also
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Author Bio Petrina Dacres is the Head of the Art History Department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performance Art in Kingston, Jamaica. She has served as a curator at the campus art gallery, the Cage, and at the National Gallery of Jamaica and National Museum, Jamaica. Her ongoing research is on public sculpture, memorial practices and Caribbean Art. Her publications include “Monument and Meaning” (2004), “‘But Bogle was a Bold Man’: Vision, History and Power for a New Jamaica” (2009) and “Gerard Hanson: Fashioning Self” (2011). For the 2016-2017 academic year she is the inaugural Stuart Hall fellow at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University.
Lucy Evans (University of Leicester)
Paper Title: Eco-noir, environmental crime and Esther Figueroa’s Limbo
Abstract Esther Figueroa’s Limbo(2014) portrays a contemporary Jamaica damaged by various forms of environmental harm which threaten the island’s future. The devastating effects of tourism and resource extraction, including coral reef destruction, beach erosion, deforestation, toxic waste, and water and air pollution, are framed in the novel as criminal acts concealed and protected by state and corporate interests. Featuring dons and gunmen operating alongside and in collaboration with developers and politicians, the novel presents eco-crime, state- corporate crime and organised crime as overlapping, emphasising the fine line between ‘legitimate’ government and business enterprises and criminal activity; as a blacklisted lawyer character puts it, ‘[i]t’s a very frothy mix of organized crime and unorganized, or should we say disorganized, crime’. Drawing on definitions of eco-crime in the field of green criminology as well as postcolonial ecocritical approaches to environmental justice, this paper considers how the novel’s form contributes to the ways in which it conceptualises and responds to eco-crime in Jamaica. I look at how the novel both references and adapts the conventions of classic noir and feminist hardboiled detective fiction. In addition, engaging with Timothy Morton’s notion of ‘dark ecology’ and Rob Nixon’s ideas on the representational challenge of slow violence, I position Limbo within the emerging crime fiction tradition of eco-noir. I argue that Figueroa’s darkly satirical novel extends and nuances definitions of both eco-noir and eco- crime, and in doing so demonstrates the potential of this crime fiction sub-genre to intervene in wider debates on environmental crisis and ecological futures in the Caribbean and beyond.
Author Bio Lucy Evans is Associate Professor in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leicester, UK. Her monograph, Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2014. She has also co-edited The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives (Peepal Tree Press, 2011), a special issue of Moving Worlds, ‘Crime Across Cultures’ 13:1 (2013), and a symposium, ‘Crime Narratives and Global Politics’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47:2 (2012). She is currently leading two research networking projects: ‘Crime and its Representation in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1834-2018’, funded by the British Academy, and ‘Dons, Yardies and Posses: Representations of Jamaican Organised Crime’, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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Donette Francis (University of Miami)
Paper Title: Kingston in Miami
Abstract How do we think seriously about the geopolitical entanglements of Kingston as a global capital city that traverses multiple nation-states? This paper takes up questions of the gendered and geographic sensibilities of 'Jamaican organised crime: aesthetics and style' from the position of Miami. Simultaneously a hemispheric city, a southern Jim Crow city and a historically-rooted Caribbean city, Miami’s relative youth, multi-directionality and synchronicity asa gateway to the urban US north and the global south shape its artistic sensibilities. Situating narratives of young black males coming-of-age in inner city Miami— Eric A. Kelly’s The Dark Side of South Beach (2017) and Dr. Carl Hart’s High Price (2014)—alongside Garfield Ellis’ 2007 female-centered novel, Till I’m Laid to Rest, I explore the transnational politics of incarceration to offer new considerations about the affective and political economies of crime.
Author Bio Donette Francis directs the American Studies Program at the University of Miami, where she is Associate Professor of English and founding member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective. She is the author of Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature. Dr. Francis is currently working on two book projects: Illegibilities: Caribbean Cosmopolitanisms and the Problem of Form, an intellectual history of the Anglophone Caribbean’s transnational literary culture, 1940-1970; and Creole Miami: Black Arts in the Magic City, a sociocultural history of black arts practice in Miami from 1980s to present. She specializes in transnational American Studies, Caribbean literary and intellectual histories, African diaspora literary studies, globalization and transnational feminist studies, and theories of sexuality and citizenship.
Anthony Harriott (University of the West Indies)
Paper Title: Power and accountability in the security domain: The extradition of Christopher Coke and the Commission of Enquiry as an instrument of security sector accountability
Abstract
In 2010, the Jamaican security forces conducted an “internal security” operation in Western Kingston with the objectives of arresting Christopher Coke and “restoring law and order.” Seventy persons were killed during this operation (69 civilians and 1 soldier). This essay assesses the efforts of the West Kingston Commission of Enquiry (WKC 2014-16) to investigate the conduct of the security forces and to bring about some accountability for the unjustified use of violence against the residents of this gang-dominated area of the city. It is an essay that is about how the security establishment and the political elite manage the abuses of their power to minimise the legitimacy draining effects of these abuses. This process involved a tension between two strategies: (a) symbolic manipulation via the dramaturgy of a commission of enquiry that would provide a façade of accountability; and (b), an effort at real accountability and internal state self-corrective changes to make the security institutions more respectful of the rights of all citizens, more responsive to redress and, in general, more democratic.
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The experience of the WKC 2014-16 shows the possibilities of commissions as instruments of meaningful accountability. As an investigative process, the WKC 2014-16 gave voice to victims of the abuse of power and forced redress. Its imperfections are many, but nevertheless as instruments of operational accountability, commissions can and do serve as a self-corrective devise of the security system of the state. Used honestly and effectively, they may build citizens’ trust and confidence in the system of police accountability. The experience of the WKC 2014-16 shows that there is scope for auto-correction by the state. However, for this correction to come about, in ways that deepen democracy, considerable external pressure had to be exerted on the state system. The structures and processes of accountability are not ossified and completely unresponsive to democratic demands but, left to their own devices, they tend to be closed and self-protective. Pressures for accountability inevitably collide with these centralizing self-protective tendencies in the security sector and political administration. The resort to commissions (which are ad hoc) are indicative of prior system defects. If the democratic deficits in policing are to be reduced, similar incidents avoided, more robust police oversight structures are required.
Author Bio Anthony Harriott is a Professor of Political Sociology and Director of the Institute of Criminal Justice and Security at the University of the West Indies. He is the author/co-author of several books, scholarly articles and technical reports - primarily on the issues of violence, organised crime and policing in Caribbean societies. His current research interests include a mapping of the processes that are associated with the development of persistently high rates of homicide and conditions of chronic violence and, police reform. He serves on a number of boards and committees that are engaged with matters of public safety and justice including the Police Oversight Authority of Jamaica. He was also a member of the recently concluded commission of inquiry into the Christopher Coke extradition matter in which the armed conflict between Coke’s organized crime network and the security forces of the Jamaican state resulted in the deaths of 69 persons.
David Howard (University of Oxford)
Paper Title: The aesthetics and influence of ‘badmen’ and banditry in contemporary Jamaica
Abstract The role of the ‘badman’ is explored in relation to place, in particular to the low-income urban neighbourhoods of Kingston, Jamaica, where evolving narratives and impacts of gangs and gangsters have merged geographies of fear, violence, and poverty over the last six decades. The terror of gunmen and violent gangs is a major security issue in the Caribbean, and arguably has become a regional signature which forms part of the current ‘age-defining phenomenon of terrorism’ (Griffith, 2004). The alarm of the gangster’s threat confirms mixed sentiments of security for those protected under his or her realm, with the uncertainties of possible victimhood for those in that turf or demesne, whether as target or unfortunate witness. The image of the gunmen and gunwomen, whether fictional or real, has fused terror, risk and respect in the aesthetic of the Rude Boy, ‘badman’ or gangster. This paper develops the notion of social banditry in the Jamaican context, where the ‘badman’ or bandit acts as both person and symbol. Such a figure can shape contemporary histories and localities, acting on the one hand as a ‘concrete locus for nostalgia’, reflecting a longing for lost adventure, ‘freedom, heroism, and the dream of justice’ (Hobsbawn 1969); and on the other, exposing inequality, subservience, and ancillary existence.
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Author Bio Dr David Howard is an Associate Professor in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. He is Director of the Sustainable Urban Development Programme at the University of Oxford, which promotes lifelong learning for those with professional and personal interests in urban development. David co-ordinates the Urban Knowledge Exchange forum, hosting public debates on key urban issues affecting society today, with the aim to provoke discussion and constructive action, linking current best practice in urban development and emerging areas of research. He was previously a Senior Lecturer in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, following postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, the City University of New York and the University of Melbourne. His research relates to the contemporary Caribbean, with a specific focus on urban neighbourhoods, migration, socially sustainable development, and housing. His current research interests focus on access to basic services and social innovation in low-income, informal neighbourhoods in Jamaica.
Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam)
Paper Title: Pathologies of Infrastructure: Abjection and Connection in Kingston’s Gullies
Abstract Kingston’s gullies – an extensive system of open drains meant to quickly channel rainwater to the harbor – occupy an important if largely unexamined space in the Jamaican capital’s urban imaginary. Combining analyses of popular film and dancehall and reggae music with urban ethnography, this paper explores how the gully as often features a space of pathology, associated with poverty, crime, dirt, and sexual deviance. For many wealthier Kingstonians, the gully symbolizes the city’s underbelly, a space to be avoided and disparaged. For some low-income residents, in contrast, the gully has been resignified as a badge of honor, its stigma inverted to indicate authentic “badness”. Yet the gully not only marks the divisions between urban spaces and populations, it also works to connect the city’s disparate segments. As a key form of infrastructure, crisscrossing different parts of Kingston and facilitating the circulation of various human and non-human flows between them, the gully serves to mark both abjection and integration. Drawing on recent anthropological and geographical literature on the politics and poetics of infrastructure, the paper seeks to understand the material and the symbolic work that the gully does in the imagination and lived reality of urban Jamaica.
Author Bio Rivke Jaffe is Professor of Cities, Politics and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Her anthropological /geographical research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political, and includes an interest in topics such as organized crime, popular culture and environmental pollution, drawing mainly on fieldwork in Jamaica. Her current work studies public-private security assemblages and the associated transformations of governance and citizenship. Her publications include Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution and the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean (Oxford, 2016) and Introducing Urban Anthropology (with Anouk de Koning, Routledge, 2016).
Tracian Meikle (University of Amsterdam)
Paper Title: Memorial Murals and the Aesthetic Work of Maintaining Personhood after Death
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Abstract Murals that are created to commemorate the dead are a part of the visual landscape of many inner city neighbourhoods in Kingston. In this presentation, I argue that memorial murals go beyond commemorating the life of the individual and extend to a desire to continue the person’s life after death. The individual is made real in different ways – the accurate representation of facial features and body, the stories that are told about them and the position of the mural. The memorial mural succeeds as a material form of the person after death through the avenue of realism. Re-creating reality in this material form goes beyond painting resemblance, however, it extends to the material-spatial context in which the mural is placed, which must in some way also reflect the life that the person lived. The elements of the wider mural frame into which the person is placed is also used to fill in the personhood of the individual in this new material afterlife. This ‘filling in’ is augmented by more non-material processes such as the discursive and performative work of narratives and memorial events, which elicit emotions by excavating the feelings that accompany different memories or those related to grief which aid in creating a more full animated image of the individual. Through an exploration of these processes, I delve into the aesthetic practice of memorial murals and how they function as a means of maintaining personhood after death.
Author Bio Tracian Meikle is a PhD Candidate in the Governance and Inclusive Development research group in the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development at the University of Amsterdam. She is part of the research team that looks at ‘The Popular Culture of Illegality: Criminal Authority and the Politics of Aesthetics in Latin America and the Caribbean’. Her wider research interests include culture and identity formation, urban spaces, systems of power and social inequality, and community development.
Kei Miller and Kerry Young
Representing Kingston: Author Reading and Discussion
Poet, novelist and broadcaster Kei Miller and novelist and short story writer Kerry Young will read from and talk about their fiction. The readings and discussion will focus on Miller’s Augustown (2016) and Young’s Pao (2011, the first in a trilogy), two novels which convey Jamaica’s past and present through their portrayal of particular Kingston neighbourhoods. Challenging perceptions of inner-city Kingston as a criminogenic ghetto, these novels foreground the city’s multiple identities and histories.
Kerry Young is a British novelist born in Kingston, Jamaica who came to England at the age of ten. She is the author of three novels, Pao (2011), Gloria (2013) and Show Me A Mountain (2016), and her writing has been nominated for the Costa First Novel and Commonwealth Book Prize. She is a reader for The Literary Consultancy, a tutor for the Arvon Foundation and a Fellow on the Royal Literary Fund Fellowship Programme where she is writer-in- residence at The University of Sheffield.
Kei Miller is an award-winning Jamaican poet, fiction writer, essayist and blogger. His poetry has been shortlisted for awards such as the Jonathan Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Phyllis Wheatley Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First book and has won the Una Marson Prize. He is also the editor of New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (2007) and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter.
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Faith Smith (Brandeis University)
Paper Title: ‘Millennial Posturing?’
Abstract Some of the most resonant postures of the 2010 Tivoli Incursion in Jamaica – a sovereign don making his getaway in a woman’s wig; his followers dressed in white chanting for their President – test the assumptions of what is “legitimate” and “illegitimate” about authority, loyalty, obligation. Songs, sermons, and call-in programmes question these distinctions in Jamaican everyday life: what is the difference between the criminality of the drug lord and the politician, or again, how is criminality wrongly ascribed in discussions of reparations and the aftermath of enslavement and emancipation? Drawing on Alan Sekula’s notions of the honorific portrait, this paper examines postures of outlaw masculinity in Jamaican film and fiction, with detours to adjacent contexts such as Moonlight (Jenkins/McCraney 2016), to ask about our investments in categorizations of organised crime, or in crime itself. Whether in terms of a “post-revolutionary present that has nowhere to go” in David Scott’s terms, or Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s “reckoning with the ruinous now,” this meditation on postures and posturing is ultimately also an engagement with postcolonial sovereignty in our present moment.
Author Bio Faith Smith teaches at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, USA. She studies the aesthetic strategies of writers and artists contending with the legacies of slavery and indentureship, feminist engagements with the state in the wake of globalization, and the resonance of archival histories of intimacy and loss in the present. She is completing "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century," a reading of the imperial present just before the First World War. Another book manuscript, “Dread Intimacies,” examines sovereignty, intimacy and violence in twenty-first-century fiction and visual culture.
Faith Smith (Brandeis University) and Donette Francis (University of Miami)
Interactive session title: ‘In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue’: Bodies, Affect, and Caribbeanized Cityscapes
Session description This session uses Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Moonlight as a defamiliarizing lens to think about Jamaica, about bodies, and their shifting meanings in various diasporic locations. Situating the context of the gaze, we ask, in what light is the body being read and evaluated, and by whom? How do we read race, ethnicities, class and gender both intersectionally and relationally? How do we account for the significance of different temporalities—the moment of independence, postcolonial exhaustion and the attendant reordering of the global neo- liberal state in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as our contemporary age of Trump, Brexit, anti- globalization, and a weariness/wariness of and with the Caribbean nation-state? We want to track the work that the discourse of sovereignty performs, recognizing that its very conjuring by political leaders is often at the precise moment when there is an implicit recognition of the loss of power and control. Ultimately, we hope that these historical and geopolitical frames will help us to parse “crime,” affect and aesthetics more forcefully.
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We ask that participants read M. Jacqui Alexander’s “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen” (attached) to prepare for our discussion.
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