UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Network, Dons, Yardies and Posses: Representations of Jamaican Organised Crime
Workshop 2: Spatial Imaginaries of Jamaican Organised Crime
Venue: B9.22, University of Amsterdam, Roeterseiland Campus.
Workshop Programme
Day 1: Monday 11th June 8.45-9.00 Registration 9.00-9.15 Welcome 9.15-10.45 Organised Crime in Fiction and (Auto)Biography 10.45-11.15 Refreshment break 11.15-12.45 Organised Crime in the Media and Popular Culture 12.45-1.45 Lunch 1.45-2.45 Interactive session: The Spatial Imaginaries of Organised Crime in Post-2000 Jamaican Films 2.45-3.15 Refreshment break 3.15-5.30 Film screening / Q&A 6.30 Evening meal (La Vallade)
Day 2: Tuesday 12th June 9.15-9.30 Registration 9.30-11.00 Mapping City Spaces
11.00-11.30 Refreshment break 11.30-12.30 Interactive session: Telling True Crime Tales. The Case of the Thom(p)son Twins? 12.30-1.30 Lunch 1.30-2.45 Crime and Visual Culture
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2.45-3.15 Refreshment break
3.15-4.15 Visualizing violence: An interactive session on representing crime and protection in Jamaican visual culture 4.15-5.15 Concluding discussion reflecting on the progress of the project, and future directions for the research 7.00 Evening meal (Sranang Makmur)
Panels and interactive sessions
Day 1: Monday 11th June
9.15. Organised crime in fiction and (auto)biography
Kim Robinson-Walcott (University of the West Indies, Mona), ‘Legitimate Resistance: Drug Dons and Dancehall DJs as Jamaican Outlaws at the Frontier’
Lucy Evans (University of Leicester), ‘The Yardies Becomes Rudies Becomes Shottas’: Reworking Yardie Fiction in Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings’
Michael Bucknor (University of the West Indies, Mona), ‘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)’
Chair: Rivke Jaffe
11.15. Organised Crime in the Media and Popular Culture
Ronald Cummings (Brock University), ‘The Graveyard’
Jovan Scott Lewis (University of California, Berkeley), ‘The Jamaican Lotto Scam: Crime, Capital, and Citizens Reconfigured’
Sonjah Stanley Niaah (University of the West Indies, Mona), ‘Representing ‘Incarcerated’ Desires and Organised Crime: Vybz Kartel and Tupac Shakur’
Chair: Lucy Evans
1.45. The Spatial Imaginaries of Organised Crime in Post-2000 Jamaican Films
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Interactive session led by Emiel Martens (University of Amsterdam)
3.15. Film Screening / Q&A
There will be a screening of Storm Saulter’s 2010 feature film Better Mus’ Come, followed by a Q&A with the film’s writer and director (via Skype)
Chair: Emiel Martens
Day 2: Tuesday 12th June
9.30. Mapping City Spaces
Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University), ‘Gendered City Spaces, Gender Violence and Socio-spatial Maps of Crime in the Fictions of Contemporary Kingston’
Faith Smith (Brandeis University), ‘Dread Intimacies’
Alana Osbourne (University of Amsterdam), ‘On a Walking Tour of Trench Town: Sensing Violence in Downtown Kingston, Jamaica
Chair: Patricia Noxolo
11.30. Telling True Crime Tales. The Case of the Thom(p)son Twins?
Interactive session led by Karim Murji (University of West London)
1.30. Crime and Visual Culture
Wayne Modest, ‘Aesthetics of Complicity: Contemporary Art and the and the (In)Visibility of Crime in Jamaica’
Patricia Noxolo (University of Birmingham) ‘Exhibiting Caribbean In/Securities’
Chair: Ronald Cummings
3.30. Visualizing violence: An interactive session on representing crime and protection in Jamaican visual culture
Interactive session led by Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam)
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4.15. Concluding discussion
Concluding discussion reflecting on the progress of the project, and future directions for the research.
Chair: Lucy Evans
Workshop location
The workshop will take place at the University of Amsterdam, Roeterseiland Campus. The campus is easy to reach by public transport. The nearest metro station is Weesperplein, all metros from Central Station pass here. Trams 7 and 10 stop at Korte ‘s Gravesandestraat, trams 9 and 14 stop at both Artis and Plantage Lepellaan.
The room for both days is B9.22. This is the political science common room, on the ninth floor of the B-building. The entrance of the building is via the A building, located along the canal (Nieuwe Achtergracht 166), from where you can walk to the elevator in the B-building. A map of the Campus is included on the next page.
Evening meals
All participants are welcome to attend the evening meals on both days. If you plan not to attend, please let us know in advance.
Monday 11 June, 18.30 - La Vallade Ringdijk 23 1097 AB Amsterdam Public transport: tram 9, stop ‘Pretoriusstraat’ (same stop as the Manor hotel).
Tuesday 12 June, 19.00 - Sranang Makmur Wyttenbachstraat 14 1093JB Amsterdam Public transport: tram 3, 7 or 9, stop ‘Wijttenbachstraat’ (one stop before the Manor hotel).
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Map of the Roeterseiland Campus
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Abstracts
Wayne Modest (Tropenmuseum)
Paper title: Aesthetics of Complicity: Contemporary Art and the (In)Visibility of Crime in Jamaica
Abstract: This presentation invites speculation on what I want to call an aesthetics of complicity. Focusing on art practice in Jamaica, I am interested in the (near absence of an) engagement with crime and violence among contemporary artists, despite Jamaica’s reputation as a country with one of the highest levels of crime and violence globally. Crime looms large in the Jamaican consciousness, amongst citizens and politicians alike, with successive governments implementing new strategies to abate violent crime rates. International popular culture and mainstream media also contribute to an imaginary of Jamaica as marked by corruption and violent crime. Indeed, Jamaican musicians have often engaged with the issues of crime and violence, both contributing to such an imaginary and contesting it in various ways. Yet very few Jamaican visual artists have addressed this issue in their work. Focusing on the works of those contemporary artists who have addressed the topic, including Roberta Stoddart and Ebony Patterson, I want to speculate on the reasons for such a silence. I will compare how Jamaican contemporary art and popular culture, and especially popular music, have addressed the topic, proposing that this silence is intricately bound up in the nexus between race, class and the arts in Jamaica, that seek to normalize crime as something that is perpetrated by, and happens to, the poor.
Bio: Wayne Modest is head of the Research Center for Material Culture, the research institute for the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, the Africa Museum and the Wereldmuseum. He is also Professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Modest was previously head of the curatorial department at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in London, and Director of the Museums of History and Ethnography in Kingston, Jamaica. His recent publications include Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, with Tim Barringer).
Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University)
Paper title: Gendered city spaces, gender violence and socio-spatial maps of crime in the fictions of contemporary Kingston.
Abstract: Using two short stories in the edited collection Kingston Noir (2012), and Kei Miller’s novel Augustown (2016), this paper focuses on representations crime, violence and masculinity as they are mapped on to specific locations in contemporary Kingston, Jamaica. The fictional work used is set in a realistically depicted Kingston, with characters whose movements across, even beyond material and symbolic borders produce contact zones that create terror, fear but also, through an affective remapping of the city’s gates and garrisons, the opportunity for a ‘new humanism’.
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This selected work is used as a means of interrogating the reproduction of and representational collusion with 'heteropatriarchy...a system of subordination that burdens not only women and sexual minorities but also the straight-identified men that it purports to privilege' (Harris, 2011: 17). It examines the work’s own participation in the perpetuation of gender violence, that is, violence that is the product of an assertion of a masculinity that depends on the subordination and violent subjection/destruction of both women and men. Though focusing on a literary analysis, I compare the urban criminality of the texts’ imaginary to echoes in the narrative of “real” crime, and in this way I examine the works’ potential as an intervention into discourses of gender violence and the works’ effectiveness as a means of disrupting prohibited, gendered urban spaces.
Bio: Suzanne Scafe is an Associate Professor in Caribbean and Postcolonial Literatures at London South Bank University. Her recent work includes essays on violence in the spatial imaginary of Kingston fictions (ZAA, 2016), and essays and book chapters on Black British women’s autobiographical writing and Caribbean women’s fiction. She is the co-editor of a Special Issue on Caribbean Women’s short fiction (2016), a collection of essays, I Am Black/White/Yellow: The Black Body in Europe (2007), two Special issues of Feminist Review, Creolization and Affect (2013) and Black British Feminism (2014). Suzanne Scafe is the Principal Investigator for an Arts and Humanities Council (UK) Research Network grant entitled African-Caribbean Women’s Mobility and Self-Fashioning in Post-Diaspora Contexts.
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.
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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.”
Karim Murji (University of West London)
Session title: Telling true crime tales. The case of the Thom(p)son twins?
Session outline: This participative session opens the way to analysing another form or genre of crime writing – books written by journalists/writers. As ‘non-fiction’ but also non-academic works they presumably have a general or popular audience orientation. The two sources we will read are the chapter on Yardies in Tony Thompson’s 1996 book Gangland Britain, and some extracts from Ian Thomson’s The Dead Yard (2009). Apart from the time difference between their publication they are quite different in their orientation and location – the former is in the tradition of true crime tales, largely focussed on Britain and concerned with a range of ‘ethnic’ organised crime gangs that are depicted as ‘heirs to the Krays. The latter is a wider travelogue across, and social and cultural history of, Jamaica in which crime is often present but central in only a few places. Thus the books can be seen as being about ‘here’ and ‘there’, as well as ways those are interconnected. Yet underneath these differences, as well as stylistic ones – The Dead Yard being a more obviously literary work – it could be argued that the books say very similar things about Yardies/organised crime. I would like to invite participants to consider these keys questions: 1. Are these texts closer to fiction, or to social and cultural, quasi-anthropological, research, or a unique and/or hybrid form of their own? 2. How these texts are performative in establishing modes of ‘truth telling’ about organised crime, about Yardies, and about Jamaica? 3. Does the identity and positionality of the author(s) matter, what difference does it make, how do we take account of that, and relatedly, how and whether we draw on it to critically assess these texts? 4. We can also ask whether or to what extent they relate organised crime in similar ways, and, moreover, what it means to treat these kinds of texts as explanatory? Participants are asked to read the extracts before the session. The extracts will be circulated by email. For anyone interested in reading about how I see ethnicity/race configured and constructed in academic works on drugs trafficking I suggest: Murji, Karim (2007) ‘Hierarchies, markets and networks: ethnicity/race and drug distribution’. Journal of Drug Issues, 37 (4). pp. 781-804. ISSN 0022-0426. This will also be circulated in advance of the session.
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Bio: Karim Murji is a Professor based in the Graduate School at the University of West London and was previously at the Open University, UK. He has written widely on culture, ethnicity and racism as applied to fields such as race equality, policing, public sociology, and diaspora and identity. His latest book is Racism, Policy and Politics (Policy Press, 2017) and other books include, edited with John Solomos, Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and edited with Gargi Bhattacharyya, Race Critical Public Scholarship (Routledge 2014). From 2013 17 he was on the editorial team of Sociology, and, with Sarah Neal, he is the Editor of Current Sociology.
Faith Smith (Brandeis University)
Paper title: Dread Intimacies
Abstract: “Dread Intimacies,” focuses on the quotidian and the intimate rather than on the more public, visible, heroic, and tragic accounts of the past and future that have engaged neoliberalism’s radical critics, including the project of Postcolonial Studies itself. Neo-liberalism’s hold over most of the region’s political regimes prompts frustration, weariness and cynicism with regards to the foreclosure of an earlier era’s revolutionary expectancy. But we should attend keenly to the registers of those who had not been included in liberal or more radical decolonizing projects and thus for whom disappointment in the failure of these to come to fruition is irrelevant. Kei Miller, for instance, carefully curates August Town and Beverly Hills as intimately entangled, and then refuses to consecrate the “failure” to sustain a relationship between the two worlds as a failure, or as tragic, as the clientilist-patronage narrative or cross-class structure of sentiment of an earlier generation of writers would have required. In the fiction of Miller and of Marlon James, responsibility for so-called “criminality” is spread across class and across town, the entire city and its suburban attachments stitched together in often secret connections of complicity. This is affective as well as geographical mapping, and I read Kingston in relation to two other artistic explorations of organized crime: Doris Salcedo’s sculptural engagements with Bogotá’s streets and cemeteries; and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw’s fictional portrait of Port of Spain.
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. “Dread Intimacies,” from which this seminar paper is taken, examines sovereignty, intimacy and violence in twenty-first-century fiction and visual culture.
Patricia Noxolo (University of Birmingham)
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Paper title: Exhibiting Caribbean in/securities
Abstract: This paper reflects upon the impacts and visual effects of the Caribbean In/securities and Creativity (CARISCC) travelling exhibition, which has been touring the UK and has also been available online (https://cariscc.wordpress.com/exhibition/) for the past year (2017/2018). The paper reflects on the launch events and on audience feedback, to think about the exhibition space as one in which negotiations become available amongst Caribbean diaspora audiences, exhibition spaces (both in art galleries and in community venues), and artists/artworks. The paper also contemplates the visual effects of the exhibition itself, as it has adapted for each of the exhibition spaces, and in its blurring of boundaries between research images and artwork. Ultimately the paper asks what the exhibition’s consumption and representation tell us about the specific modes by which Caribbean in/security is negotiated, both as meaning and as aesthetics.
Bio: Dr Patricia Noxolo is a senior lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham. Her work brings together insights from development geography, postcolonial geography, cultural geography, literary studies and security studies: she seeks to understand how people in the Caribbean and its diaspora, as well as in the UK, theorise their relationships with space and place. Recent publications include: (forthcoming) 'Fleshy textualities: laughter in Caribbean literature', Liverpool University Press; (2017) 'Decolonial theory in a time of the re- colonisation of UK research', in Transactions of the institute of British Geographers, 42, pp. 342- 4; (2016) 'A shape which represents an eternity of riddles: fractals and scale in the work of Wilson Harris', in Cultural Geographies, 23, 3, pp. 373-385
Ronald Cummings (Brock University)
Paper title: The Graveyard
Abstract: In his song “Graveyard” Tarrus Riley declares “the wickedest man dem live down in graveyard/ Deh so dem dead/ Graveyard, graveyard”. Riley’s focus on the graveyard situates it as one site we must necessarily engage with when exploring the spatial imaginaries of Jamaican crime. His repetition of word “graveyard” in the song functions as a warning to the rude boy of impending demise but also arguably performs and replays the cycles and histories of death that mark the history of organized crime in Jamaica. This paper engages with Riley’s work and offers a reading of the lyrics and the song’s music video (directed by Nile Saulter). I also invoke Riley’s structure of repetition to situate his own invocation of the graveyard alongside earlier texts such as Laurie Gunst’s Born fi Dead (1995) and Ian Thomson’s The Dead Yard (2009). I examine the ‘graveyard’ as one recurring space that has dominated popular accounts and histories of organized crime in Jamaica. I also move beyond this to raise questions about the ideological, affective and spiritual function that this return to the graveyard might accomplish through an examination of Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work”. I read Riley’s song as one instance of wake work but also call attention to the representations of genealogies, loss, memory, mourning that often structure these various narrative accounts of organized crime in modern Jamaica.
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Bio: Ronald Cummings is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Brock University in Canada. He teaches and researches Caribbean Literature.
Kim Robinson-Walcott (University of the West Indies, Mona)
Paper title: Legitimate Resistance: Drug Dons and Dancehall DJs as Jamaican Outlaws at the Frontier
Abstract: In the five-plus decades since Jamaica was granted independence, the country has struggled with different ideologies in an effort to grapple with the socio-political legacies of colonialism in forging a new national path. Following an early disenchantment with the gains of independence in the 1960s, Ideology was at its height in the explosive seventies, but the costs were dear; with the victory of capitalism over socialism at the end of that decade, the disillusionment of the population with politics and politicians, the failure of structural adjustment, the stresses of globalization and now, the disillusionment with the ideology of the world’s superpower, politicians and academics alike seem to be acknowledging that there are many more questions than answers in terms of resolving the country’s problems. Meanwhile, violence continues to grow exponentially, corruption is entrenched, and definitions of right versus wrong are highly subjective. The figure of the anti-hero or outlaw in Jamaican culture has long been prominent – we think of 18th-century rebel leaders such as Three-finger Jack or Tacky; indeed, to go back further in history, the pirate Henry Morgan was an outlaw of the highest order until he was legitimised when he was appointed governor of Jamaica. More recently, the rebel rude bwoys of the sixties moved to the beat of the spaghetti Westerns that predominated their imaginations, personified by the character Ivan in the iconic 1972 film The Harder They Come. These 1960s rebels without a cause morphed into rebels with a cause in the politically fraught 1970s; and morphed again into the born-fi-dead nihilistic shottas, rankings and drug dons of the eighties, who have attained and retained the status of outlaw/hero/anti-hero up to today. Errol McDonald’s novel Legitimate Resistance, published in 2006, disturbingly promotes violence and illegal activities as a legitimate solution to society’s wrongs. Using this as a starting point, this paper will explore the published writings on some of Jamaica’s dons which seemingly seek to legitimise their activities: for example, Duane Blake on his father Vivian Blake, leader of the notorious Shower Posse (2003); and K.C. Samuels on Tivoli don and international drug kingpin Dudus, “Jamaica’s First President” (2011). Both texts are fascinating in many ways, not least in the transnational, international scope of the dons’ activities, as well as their suggested respectability. Meanwhile, the outlaw figure, from rude bwoy to rebel to ranking, has always been reflected in Jamaican popular music; and of particular interest to this paper is the infamous gangster DJ Vybz Kartel’s 2012 Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto in which he positions himself as a Malcolm X-type radical leader and social activist; while his often inflammatory and anarchic lyrics again assert that in the frontier society of Jamaica, new paradigms of order/disorder, of morality/immorality/amorality, of right/wrong, prevail.
Bio: Kim Robinson-Walcott, PhD, is editor/head of Caribbean Quarterly, University of the West Indies, Mona. She is also the editor of Jamaica Journal, published by the Institute of Jamaica.
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Her publications include the scholarly work Out of Order! Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing (UWI Press, 2006), Jamaican Art (Kingston Publishers, 1989, 2011) which she co-authored, The How to Be Jamaican Handbook (Jamrite Publications, 1988) which she co- authored and illustrated, and the children's book Dale's Mango Tree (Kingston Publishers, 1992), which she also illustrated. Her scholarly articles, book chapters, short stories and poems have been published in a number of journals and anthologies.
Jovan Scott Lewis (University of California, Berkeley)
Paper title: The Jamaican Lotto Scam: Crime, Capital, and Citizenships Reconfigured
Abstract: Popular narratives of Jamaican lottery scamming presented in U.S. media are portrayals of elderly Americans being conned out of their hard-earned savings. Highlighting the appalling inhumanity of scammers, these pieces feature stories of elderly white Americans losing their savings to the predations of criminal Jamaicans. Scammers, by contrast, are shown to have built mansions from their ill-gotten gains. These pieces edit the narrative of stolen wealth alongside emotional accounts of elderly victims and their families’ giving an account of the ruinous effect of the scam. This visual juxtaposition made all the more dramatic through the use of perilous background soundtracks, shows multiple binaries of youth and the aged, of black and white, of citizenships in both developing and developed worlds, all of which remain fixed as categories of characterization and definition throughout the reports. What becomes troubled in these presentations is the wealth/poverty binary, through which we are offered the problematic contrapositions of young, black, and rich to elderly, white, and poor. In this paper, I will explore what this disruption proffers through its mediatization. Additionally, through analyzing the configuring of these racial and spatial disparities, and also how their configuration is reconciled through the mobilizing of criminal discourses, I will ask what role criminality plays in postcolonial relations more broadly.
Bio: Jovan Scott Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Geography and African-American Studies as the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics. Through his research, Jovan thinks about the interrelation between blackness and socio-economic conditions. His current book project focuses on the Jamaican lottery scam and its use as a reparative practice.
Emiel Martens (University of Amsterdam)
Session title: The Spatial Imaginaries of Organized Crime in Post-200 Jamaican Films
Session outline: Following up his presentation at the previous AHRC Research Network workshop in Kingston last year, where he reviewed the representation of Jamaican (organized) crime in Jamaican and Jamaican diasporic feature films, Martens will now further explore the spatial imaginaries of organized crime, drug trafficking and their attendant violence in these films. He will do so by showing clips from several post-2000 Jamaican (diasporic) films, from Shottas (2002) to Home
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Again (2012), and open the discussion on the representational discourses about spaces and places – and people’s negotiation of identities in these spaces and places – in Jamaican (diasporic) cinema.
Bio: Dr. Emiel Martens
Lucy Evans (University of Leicester, UK)
Paper title: The Yardies Becomes Rudies Becomes Shottas’: Reworking Yardie Fiction in Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings
Abstract: The transformation of politically affiliated Jamaican gangs into transnational criminal organisations in the 1980s generated media reports which criminalised black masculinity and associated Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora in Europe and North America with a ‘culture of violence’ (Scott, 1997; Thomas, 2007). Representations of ‘yardies’ in film, popular music, fiction and investigative nonfiction have similarly often reinforced cultural, racial and sexual stereotypes (Murji, 2009). This paper explores the various ways in which Marlon James’ 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings dismantles the ‘yardie myth’ circulating in European and North American media discourse (Small, 1998). The article also makes a case for reading the novel as yardie fiction, a form of gangster fiction which, according to Grant Farred (2001), depicts ‘the spread of crack cocaine, the proliferation and intensification of gang warfare’ and the formation of a black urban ‘criminal subclass’ in late twentieth century Britain. Bearing in mind the various and shifting meanings of the term ‘yardie’, I emphasise the diasporic dimensions of yardie fiction, reconsidering it as a highly mobile genre which – like the criminal organisations which constitute its primary subject matter – extends beyond Britain to Jamaica and North America. I argue that James’s novel examines and complicates models of masculinity associated with yardie and gangster narratives, and in the process intervenes in current critical debate on Caribbean masculinities.
Biography Lucy Evans is Lecturer 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 PI on 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 AHRC.
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Alana Osbourne, (University of Amsterdam)
Paper title: On a Walking Tour of Trench Town: Sensing Violence in Downtown Kingston, Jamaica
Abstract: Tourists who visit Trench Town, the “inner-city community” in downtown Kingston where Bob Marley grew up, are drawn in by the neighbourhood’s rich musical heritage. But music alone doesn’t explain why there is an increasing number of travellers interested in visiting the low- income, high-crime community, where the small Culture Yard museum is located. The neighbourhood is repeatedly portrayed by popular culture and (inter)national media as a dangerous, lawless and gang-controlled area. These spatial imaginaries are part of the reasons outsiders venture to the Culture Yard: they want to experience first-hand the struggles and strife that fuelled Bob Marley’s music, in a “real”, corporeal way. However, local tour guides and residents ensure that outsiders are shielded from the spectacular incidents that sometimes punctuate life in Trench Town. Instead, violence is alluded to, brushed against, toned down, infusing the backdrop of tours in the community. In this paper, I present the gap that exists between touristic expectations of violence and the way in which violence is addressed and felt by local guides and residents. By highlighting the notions of (in)visible and (in)audible violence, I explore how the area’s visitors and locals sense this violence. Here I argue that the way violence is sensed and narrated shifts existing discourses around the nature of the violence that affects Trench Town, and its perpetrators.
Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam)
Session title: Visualizing violence: An interactive session on representing crime and protection in Jamaican visual culture
Session outline: This interactive session focuses on how issues of crime and protection are represented and negotiated in Jamaica visual culture. As crime has become an increasing concern across the region, music video clips, films, popular murals and other forms of visual expression have focused on violence, vulnerability, policing and protection. These visualizations represent a form of creative negotiation of insecurity and fear, involving a range of imaginaries of causality, responsibility and culpability. Connected to but also resonating beyond textual narratives, visual representations of crime and protection are important ways of engaging with social realities of crime and fear. How might we understand the affective impact of different visual media and different styles and genres? And how do these various aesthetic practices relate to specific urban spaces? Following a brief introduction by Rivke Jaffe, workshop participants are invited to discuss particular examples of relevant images or video clips, and to propose different ways of interpreting these examples.
Bio: Rivke Jaffe is Professor of Cities, Politics and Culture in the Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her anthropological research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political, and
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