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 1 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 2 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) 3 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). 4 Map of the Roeterseiland Campus 5 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’. 6 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.