A trace of law

This chapter examines the criminalization of buggery in two key moments of state building in Jamaica. The first period comes in the decades after the end of slavery in Jamaica in the second half of the nineteenth century. Modernizing post-slavery criminal law and the penal justice system utilized corporal punishment to index the ungovernable black man as a subject prone to sex crimes such as buggery and rape and a necessary site of physical punishment. Criminal laws modelled on UK legislation, including the “abominable crime of buggery,” were critical in governing a race-based political system and provided legitimacy for the colonial state. Second, the paper turns to waning years of colonization in the 1950s and 1960s which were marked by mass migration of West Indians to Britain, political negotiations, and debates about law and morality with transatlantic resonance that helped define male homosexual identity through and as buggery. Jamaica’s new independence constitution of 1962, and its interpretation by the UK-based Privy Council, constructed a sphere of higher order law comprised of constitutions and colonial law—including sexual offenses law—in which the latter became sacrosanct and exalted “as part and parcel of this country,” drawing on a mythical tradition of colonial law’s civilizing mission

Linguistics · Political science · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · Law · Philosophy

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  Mary Jane Alexander, Jack Halberstam et al.•Pedagogies of Crossing•2005

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