Citizenship and Social Exclusion

I HAVE BEEN INTERESTED IN how the legacies of imperialism and racial slavery have generated long-term patterns of social exclusion that have operated on many levels - political, social, economic, and cultural. Most particularly these days, I have been concerned with how violence - itself foundational to the processes that created what we know as the New World - has delimited the ways Jamaicans have been able to make claims, legally and otherwise, on the state over time, and in how patterns of exclusion have operated in relation to historically specific conjunctures of race, class, gender, and sexuality. I have just three points to make here:1. Violence in the Caribbean has a longer history than is usually acknowledged.When we talk about violence in Jamaica, for example, we typically attribute the high rates of murder and violent crime to the various failures of the Jamaican economy and the development of political partisanship during the mid-twentieth century. However, I want to argue that as we mark the fiftieth anniversary of independence, we must focus on the longue duree, outlining the networks of power across time and space that created the conditions for the continuation of circulating repertoires of exceptional violence. In the case of Jamaica, this means recognising that the story of contemporary violence is one that has a longer history than that which is usually told, and that the obscuring of this history masks the centrality of violence as an organising principle of both personhood and colonial and postcolonial state formation. In other words, in order to understand the complex ways violence works to produce contemporary social life, we must probe the relationships between colonialism and post/neo-colonialism, especially in relation to patterns of land use, configurations of socio-political authority, forms of punishment, systems of racial hierarchy, and projects of gendered and sexualised disciplining over time. History, thus, has to be both an analytic category and a method, a way to parse the place of the past in the present on multiple levels.Seeing the past in the present, however, does not mean that we can argue for direct continuities between then and now. Instead, I have wanted to think about how we might position historical patterns palimpsestically in relation to postcolonial state formation, to understand contemporary processes as emerging from a layered entanglement of temporalities to paraphrase Achille Mbembe, or, in Benitez-Rojo's classic formulation, a repeating across space and time.2. We must also think deeply about the effects of overlapping imperialisms throughout the New World.One of the ongoing features of public critique in Jamaica is the assertion that most social ills - and in particular, the consumerism and commodity fetishism of youth - are attributable to US dominance, especially in the realms of media and popular culture. The accusations, both academic and popular, that the United States is the source of all slackness in Jamaica rely on two presuppositions. The first has to do with a notion of boundedness that seems to always predate a sort of contagion by what is outside (where Britain already exists on the inside). Yet, after 1776 there is really no point at which we cannot speak of an American cultural, economic, and political influence in the Caribbean, despite the fact that this only becomes dominant in the second half of the twentieth century. And secondly, there is the sense that there is some kind of baseline where British influence is merely civil and institutional. This is a presupposition that leaves no room to explore the real institutional and ideological legacies of colonial violence.We should instead think about contemporary violence in Jamaica as having emerged from layered histories, and therefore as having layered, and sometimes unexpected, effects. On one hand, the legacy of British imperial slavery provides a template of spectacular techniques through which conquest over the bodies of others is either literal, as in both the expected and the arbitrary forms of punishment meted out to slaves, or symbolic, as in the practices of displaying tortured and dismembered bodies in order to discourage breaches of the hegemonic order

Citizenship · Colonialism · Criminology · Genocide · Independence (probability theory · Personhood · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · State (computer science · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · Law

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