Capture land as abolition geography: The mutuality of placemaking and flight

Abstract

Capture land is a Jamaican colloquialism for land that is (or is presumed to be) occupied without the authorization of the landowner. Working through two quotes, “just to make life for a time,” and, “we’ve always been here,” this article examines how the practice of capture indexes abolitionist spatial practices of varied temporalities: rooted in belonging to place, but also alighting provisionally. Through ethnographic research, this article reveals the use of capture for both placemaking and flight, parallel but in tension with the fixity and fluidity inhered in the liberal property regime. Compared with earlier ethnographies of land tenure in Jamaica, this points to an epistemology that is less preoccupied by ownership. What takes primacy is the care for generations of plants, children, rebels, and futures unfolding through “the plot” and its multiple agendas—sustenance (plot of land), refusal (plot to rebel) and the plotting of alternate futures. While here emerges through the spatiotemporalities of life in the interstices of racial capitalism, it also challenges us to reimagine how to think land after colonialism and beyond property. From here, we might imagine simultaneity of apparently discrepant temporalities of Black freedom dreams and speculate on the spacetimes of “freedom is a place.”