Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair

by Deborah A. Thomas

In 2010, Jamaican police and military forces entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on gun- and drug-running charges. By the time Coke was detained, somewhere between 75 and 200 civilians had been killed. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation Deborah A. Thomas uses the 2010 incursion into Tivoli Gardens as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty in order to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress, and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability. In tying theories of politics, colonialism, race, and affect together with Jamaica's history, Thomas presents a robust framework for understanding what it means to be human in the plantation's wake.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Academic

368 pages, Paperback

Published November 8, 2019

Reviews

[Anna Fenzel]

Deborah Thomas outlines through affective archives and historical chronologies what it means, in Jamaica, to be human (with political agency or without) in the wake of the plantation. Especially key is that all political affects operate beyond temporal boundaries; therefore, the long-ago historical events including the Middle Passage, the Coral Gardens Massacre, and so on, are all permanently relevant in Black, Tivoli, Rastafari, or any Jamaican’s, affective register. Further, the political history of the country is integral in the institutional racialization and garrisonization of Jamaica, the performance and embodiment of sovereignty, struggles for revolutionary social change, and exploitation by imperial powers– each of which are integral in the understanding of how the Tivoli Gardens massacre came to unfold.

Thomas identifies the three affects most pertinent to the residents of Tivoli Gardens (and survivors of the incursion): Doubt, Expectancy, and Paranoia. Narratives by survivors of the Tivoli massacre are reminiscent of, and suggest a sameness with, the past – back to the Middle Passage. The public archives of garrison communities unfairly suggest homogeneity, poverty, and criminality, and that the violence performed upon Tivoli Gardens was culturally derived rather than the result of structural issues. This makes me consider governmentality and agency: who is writing these archives? Who are these archives for? I think this same question lead to the multitude of movements for revolutionary change, between Black Power movements, Rastafarianism, the International Peacemaker’s Association, and so on. It is with these political and cultural movements that the affective register of Expectancy is most clearly felt: with a criticism of the present came also either a hailing of the past or future, or a hope to produce change. However, these modalities were seen as a threat to American Imperial control. Red Scares and the War on Drugs allowed American and British intelligence to surveil and control, under the guise of providing security, Jamaican politics and life, leading to the prevalent affective register of Paranoia.

Asking questions of governmentality, and the making and ranking, of citizens and institutions is a necessary tool in discerning just how such devastating crises as the Tivoli Incursion came to be possible, and how the structural issues underlying chronic underlying problems, maybe blamed incorrectly on “culture.” Thomas calls on us all to bear active witness (Witnessing 2.0, as she dubs it) to any disparity in our line of sight, or out of it.

[celia]

In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, Deborah Thomas examines select moments in Jamaican history to connect the violences of colonization and sovereignty to questions of affect. Thomas says that this "forces us to generate more complex accounts of the historical and social relations through which notions of sovereignty are produced, experienced, and circulated across time and space." (18). The focus on affect allows Thomas to ask questions about how certain relationships and institutions feel and unpick the complicated narratives surrounding the forms of community and expectations that are produced in and through violence. For Thomas, "the unpredictability of affect, and subsequently its power, lies in its simultaneous operation at the cognitive, mediated level and at a more visceral level." (6-7).
The focus on the feeling of sovereignty and the distinct affective spheres is supported by references to a dizzying array of theorists and historians - while I found the frameworks to be quite provocative and well-thought, the sheer amount of information shared during historical moments was overwhelming.