Colonial Jamaica Research Articles

Literacy, hegemonic mediation, and “spiritual” liberation in colonial Jamaica

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the presence and performance of Arabic literacy, its use, and emancipatory dimension among Muslim slaves on colonial plantations in Jamaica as well as the complex and ambivalent position of the Irish abolitionist R.R. Madden in the translation, interpretation, and dissemination of some of their writings. Overall, Madden’s texts suggest a sense of agency granted to his literate Muslim interlocutors from West Africa due to his commitment to abolition. However, a careful analysis of his responses suggests that colonial subjects remain “untranslatable” to the Western mind without the active intervention of Madden, a process that echoes his collaborative translation of Manzano’s poetry in Cuba. As a translator, a proponent of the value of literacy for emancipation, Madden not only occupies a contentious mediatory site but also embraces a conflicted sense and advocacy of emancipation which he later connects to Christian spiritual liberation when faced with “critical literacy.”

The Postcolonial Jamaican Outlaw Hero in Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come

Abstract: Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1972, Jamaica) shows the harsh realities of Jamaica, an island that, since colonization, has been a compartmentalized, divided world. This article looks at how Henzell represents postcolonial Jamaica as a small place where there are two distinct social classes inhabiting the same island in the sun. After a brief history of cinema, both filmed and shown, in Jamaica, this article uses The Harder They Come to show that postcolonial Jamaica is just colonial Jamaica going by a new name. It also looks at Ivan Martin as an outlaw hero who belongs in the pantheon of other Jamaican outlaw heroes and freedom fighters such as Queen Nanny, Apongo and Tacky, Sam Sharpe, and Paul Bogle. The article further shows that, as an outlaw hero, Ivan becomes a living idea: he becomes something that, even after the last reel, cannot be killed.

Re-Reading Morant Bay: Protest, Inquiry, and Colonial Rule

Abstract The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion figures prominently in scholarship on modern Britain, colonial Jamaica, and the British Empire, as a milestone of post-emancipation protest, a turning point in British race-thinking, and a focal point for debates on martial law and British justice. This article presents a new interpretation of the rebellion’s legal and political significance. Focused on processes of formal inquiry, I argue that legal analysis reshaped the political “moral” of the event. For the rebellion’s participants and some British observers, Morant Bay challenged the practice of colonial rule. But beginning with the royal commission of inquiry called to investigate the suppression, formal inquiry displaced the systemic critique that had largely motivated the uprising. Focused increasingly on the nature of martial law and culminating in the criminal prosecution of Jamaica’s colonial governor, legal debate and analysis transformed the scandal’s moral center and turned Morant Bay into a new justification for further and more centralized imperial control. In developing these arguments, the article examines law’s capacity to read, write, and exclude competing narratives of empire. In so doing, it contributes to scholarship on scandal and legitimation, and offers a new interpretation of a seminal nineteenth-century debate on the use of martial law.

Queering/Querying the Text in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Sui Sin Far's "Jamaica Works"

Queering/Querying the Text in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Sui Sin Far's "Jamaica Works" Giselle Liza Anatol (bio) and Joo Ok Kim (bio) Although African/Jamaican novelist Patricia Powell and Chinese/ Canadian writer Sui Sin Far were born almost exactly a century apart, their artistic works are strongly linked by setting—both time and place—and the authors' forceful critiques of the British Empire and its productions of colonial knowledge.1 For Far, the empire entangled transnational links from Shanghai, where Far's English father met her Chinese mother; to England and the British dominion of Canada, where she spent her childhood; to her work as a journalist in the United States—founded as a British colony—to Jamaica, another British colony, which Canada provided with "an ongoing force of women office workers" (White-Parks, Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, 32). Her writings, particularly "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian" (1909) and "The Sugar-Cane Baby" (1910), provide sharp expositions on the racialized, gendering plantation labor system and white supremacist colonial violence routed through the circuits of empire. Patricia Powell's novel The Pagoda (1999), which features a gender-queer Chinese/ Jamaican protagonist seeking firm footing in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica, holds significance in the historiography of the Chinese Americas and multiple global souths—including the U.S. South—which invites exploration beyond the book's conventional categorization as queer fiction of the Anglophone Caribbean. Thinking through the Chinese/Jamaican community as represented in Powell's novel in conjunction with Sui Sin Far's stories set in Jamaica, we explore the ways [End Page 121] both authors challenge xenophobic and imperialist regimes, particularly those predicated on knowledge production and literacy. Far's decision to "fight… battles" on behalf of Chinese people in North America by writing articles in local papers ("Leaves" 223) and Powell's artistic choice to open and close her narrative with the act of letter-writing foreground the ways that composing and deciphering all kinds of texts contribute to empire building and whether, as Audre Lorde so provocatively questioned, these "master's" tools can indeed "destroy the master's house." Like Ella Shohat, we argue for the Caribbean's significance in understanding Orientalism: the myth of Columbus's "discovery" of the so-called "New World" in 1492 can be tied to the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in Spain in the same year—commonly known as the Reconquista. The events are linked in terms of both discourses of travel and conquest and expurgatory practices. As Shohat claims, Perhaps the first modern orientalist was none other than Columbus. After his arrival in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, he wrote to the Spanish throne praising the war against both Muslims and Jews, and thanking the queen for having sent him to the regions of India to convert its people to the holy faith. Here, discourses about Muslims, Jews, and (Asian) Indians crossed the Atlantic… arming the conquistadors with a ready-made us-versus-them ideology aimed at the regions of India, but applied instead towards the indigenous peoples of the accidentally discovered continent. (47) Significantly, Shohat's argument hinges on acts of writing: Columbus's missive to the queen; his travel journals, diaries, and maps; Bibles for converting "heathens"; and later, historical accounts of empire and colonization are essential to constructions of race, geographies of the "backward" cultures of the Global South, idealized notions of the "progress" of the Global North. In U.S. history, denied or restricted access to literacy was essential—even after the abolition of slavery—to preventing Black, Indigenous, and other people of color from participating in the political sphere. Twentieth-century literacy tests, for example, served as obstacles to citizenship: barriers to African American enfranchisement and, in the form of entrance applications, impediments to Chinese immigrants' physical entry to the nation. Despite its centrality to the liberation narratives of prominent figures, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and others, literacy has been utilized for "regulation, imposition, surveillance," and other means of control that regularly "do damage or inflict harm on individuals" (Pritchard 9, Prologue). These considerations of reading, writing, and power...

Black Police Power: The Political Moment of the Jamaica Constabulary

AbstractContemporary debates on policing trace the rise of “law and order” populism and police militarization to colonial histories and imperial boomerang effects. In a time marked by the renewed imperative “to decolonize,” however, few studies examine what decolonizing policing did or could look like in practice. This article draws on oral history narratives of Jamaican police officers to recover their ideas about transforming the colonial Jamaica Constabulary Force in the 1970s. Born out of black power mobilizations and under a democratic socialist government (1972–1980), police decolonization was viewed as part of broader transformative effort to rid the country of colonial inheritances in economics, culture, and politics. Jamaican policemen, radicalized since the early twentieth century, then began revising their social mandate and ask who the police should serve and protect. Ultimately, due to internal contradictions and external pressures, the experiment failed, giving rise to police populism and increased violence against black men and women in the ghettos. The episode reveals how populism emerges out of a failure of emancipatory campaigns and how radical critique can turn into ideological justification. It also highlights the need to distinguish between diverse, contradictory, and overlapping demands to decolonize societies and institutions today.

Political Thought and the Emotion of Shame: John Stuart Mill and the Jamaica Committee during the Governor Eyre Controversy

This article argues that the emotion of shame explains how John Stuart Mill and the Jamaica Committee developed intellectual arguments in response to the brutal suppression by Governor Edward Eyre of the Morant Bay rebellion in post-emancipation colonial Jamaica in 1865. Positioning the emotions as integral to cognitive systems, the article traces Mill and the committee's arguments against their opponents, the Eyre Defence Committee. The Jamaica Committee was not solely concerned with liberal imperial order. Instead, under Mill's leadership, the committee sought to reconstruct and defend the pre-rebellion political culture that freedpeople in Jamaica had developed. The committee also demonstrated the illegality of martial law. There were, nonetheless, differences between Mill and other committee members, including Charles Buxton and Frederic Harrison. Shame, the emotion experienced when a subject fails to meet the values to which they are attached, helps to explain these differences. Shame also helped to generate the possibility of reforming the colonial political relationship.

Encountering the Colonial Relationship and Existential Uncertainty in Andrea Levy’s Small Island

For West Indian colonials whose cultural traditions are colored by the idealizations of a colonizing British mother country, discovering one’s place in familial and national structures involves making real and imagined journeys to that mother country. In Andrea Levy’s Small Island, two Jamaicans, Hortense and Gilbert, grow up in early twentieth-century, colonial Jamaica and later immigrate to WWII-era England. Through their narratives of both places, Levy demonstrates how the dynamic of the colonial relationship—the values and hierarchies inherent in the relationship between the mother country and her colony—impact mother-child relationships, self-understanding, and identity. In this article, I assert that the existential uncertainty that the colonial relationship creates—the desire and unpredictability of human relationship and the ensuing ambivalence about psychological survival—consistently holds in tension two important concepts: help and humiliation. The structure, pressures, and oppressions of the colonial system in Jamaica and England lead Hortense and Gilbert to either experience or inflict scenes of humiliation that arise from making relational sacrifices.

Henrice Altink. Public Secrets: Race and Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica.

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“The influence of Melody upon man in the wild state of nature”: Enslaved Parishioners, Anglican Violence, and Racialized Listening in a Jamaica Parish

AbstractIn 1827, George Wilson Bridges, the outspoken proslavery rector of the parish of St. Ann, Jamaica, published a pamphlet of music that he had written to be used as the choral service at his church. The Bishop of Jamaica condemned Bridges's musical innovations on the grounds that they were not suitable to be heard by “a congregation chiefly composed by people of colour &amp; negroes.” On the Bishop's orders, Bridges's music stopped, and by 1828 he reported that his pews were once more empty. The congregation of St. Ann parish church was almost entirely enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants who could choose their place of worship. However, in Bridges's own household, the people he claimed as property had little opportunity to escape his ministering. In 1829 Bridges came to the attention of British abolitionists for his brutal flogging of Kitty Hylton, a woman he claimed to own. This article uses Black feminist approaches to archival materials to explore the relationship between the music promoted by Bridges, conflicting views held by white religious leaders about what music was appropriate for African and African-descended people to listen to, and Bridges's violence towards enslaved people; in so doing exploring the inescapable entanglement of religious music, race, and violence in colonial Jamaica.

Managing “Property”

Abstract Probate inventories helped to support the established social and economic order in colonial Jamaica. These documents were part of the legal process of winding up an estate after a death and presented an account of personal possessions that had belonged to a decedent. They facilitated the transfer of property to heirs and identified those parts of an estate that were available for the repayment of debts. The inventories contain lists of enslaved people, representing them as a type of “property,” and so these documents form a major part of the archive of Jamaican slavery. This article explores the practices, aims, and assumptions of the people who produced the inventories, developing our understanding of slaveholder culture in the British Caribbean and of the bureaucratic and accounting techniques that facilitated slave management.

A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, by Brooke N. Newman

A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica, by Brooke N. Newman

Public Secrets: Race and Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica, by Henrice Altink

Public Secrets: Race and Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica, by Henrice Altink

A Daughter of the Gods (1916): Film, Tourism and Empire on Location in Jamaica

This article examines the location production of the early Hollywood blockbuster movie A Daughter of the Gods (1916) in British colonial Jamaica on the basis of historical newspapers and magazines, and demonstrates the close ties between film, tourism and empire on the island in the early twentieth century, both materially and ideologically. In so doing, the article reflects a twofold comparative perspective: between different histories and between different countries. Despite the rise of postcolonial cinema historiography, the early cinema histories of the Caribbean have remained largely unexposed. More specifically, Jamaica’s early film history has, notwithstanding some notable exceptions, hardly been dealt with, particularly in relation to the island’s tourism and colonial histories. At the same time, the early relationship between Hollywood and the British Caribbean has not often been explored. All in all, this article seeks to contribute to the discussion of the interconnectedness between cinema, tourism and empire, and between Hollywood, the British Empire and Jamaica, by revealing the colonialist cine-tourist practices and discourses of A Daughter of the Gods, one of the most important American moving pictures of the silent era, and one of the most significant global imperial tourist films of the early twentieth century.

Antihomosexuality and Nationalist Critique in Late Colonial Jamaica

This essay examines discourses of homosexuality in late colonial Jamaica through an analysis of the 1951 Police Enquiry, which leveraged accusations of homosexuality among Jamaica’s foreign police officers as a key component of its investigative work. With information from Jamaican state records, news media, literature, and social science studies, the essay argues that the inquiry mobilized divergent discourses of homosexuality across the Atlantic to enact an anticolonial nationalist form of sexual regulation. The inquiry drew not only from Jamaican figurations of homosexuality as the preserve of wealthy white foreign men but also from the Wolfenden Committee proceedings that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in England and from the “Lavender Scare” that purged homosexuals from federal government employment in the United States. Despite its failing to reform Jamaica’s police force, the inquiry nevertheless foregrounds how sexual regulation operates through the interconnected workings of race, class, gender, and nation.

Brooke N. Newman. A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica.

Brooke N. Newman. A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica.

Thinking the Future through Blackness

Thinking the Future through Blackness

Security, Taxation, and the Imperial System in Jamaica, 1721–1782

White Jamaicans paid relatively high rates of taxation to support a powerful and assertive imperial state in schemes of settlement and security. They paid such taxes willingly because they were satisfied with what they got from the state. Furthermore, they believed they had a significant stake in the processes by which taxes were collected and spent. The power of the colonial state depended on the empire being a loose fraternal alliance. Nevertheless, what worked for imperial and colonial Jamaica did not necessarily work elsewhere. Jamaica provides a case study of how the imperial state worked satisfactorily for imperial rulers and those colonists whom they ruled when both the state and colonial settlers shared common beliefs and when negotiations made it clear that the interests of all parties coincided.

A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica by Brooke N. Newman

A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica by Brooke N. Newman

Slavery, Race, and the Contours of Belonging in the Atlantic World

Slavery, Race, and the Contours of Belonging in the Atlantic World Jessica M. Parr (bio) Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics Resistance in the Early Atlantic World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $39.95. Brooke N. Newman, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. xii + 340 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $40.00. Ruma Chopra, Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 336 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina University Press, 2018. 335 pp. Maps, figures, and index. $39.95. When direct English engagement in the transatlantic slave trade opened up in 1689, it ushered in an age where the English became the largest traffickers of Africans. The dissolution of the Royal African Company’s charter was the result of arguments made by merchants that the Company’s monopoly on English trade was a violation of their rights as Englishmen, under the Constitution of 1688.1 English sensibilities about “rights” and “liberties” stood in contestation to “slavery,” and in many cases, the lack of positive and/or negative law concerning the legality of chattel slavery meant that the shapers of empire were left to define the parameters of enslavement. Early English debates about law and slavery frequently entailed addressing potential loopholes over whom could be enslaved and under what circumstances. For instance, was it permissible to hold slaves in Great Britain, or only in its dominions? Was it legal to enslave Africans who had been baptized, or would planters who allowed missionaries onto their plantation be forced to manumit those who converted to Christianity? And what of the children born to enslaved [End Page 211] women? Were there justifications in law and philosophy that made slavery an inheritable condition, and were the children born of enslaved Black women and white enslavers condemned to slavery themselves?2 In an effort to address these legal ambiguities, English economic interests and law frequently went hand-in-hand in shaping imperial policy around the Atlantic slave trade.3 The transatlantic slave trade was a multi-empire system, but even within the British Empire, the legal geography was complex, uneven, and inconstant. Edward Rugemer’s ambitious new work, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, traces the development of slave law in the British Atlantic, with a particular focus on mechanisms of resistance to slavery. Rugemer follows the development of slave law from English’s first “slave society” in Barbados through Jamaica, slavery’s entrenchment in the Carolinas, the complexities of abolitionist politics in Great Britain and the United States, and the “retrenchment” of enslavers in the nineteenth century.4 He illustrates the ways in which economic interests, law, and resistance are interlinked. For instance, in his discussion colonial administrators worked not only to clarify details like the ways that the sale of slaves as property could be used to satisfy planter debts, but administrators’ ability to align their general drive to protect property rights with the laws that were designed to control property (i.e. their slaves). His analysis is corroborated by works like Andrew Fede’s study of the law governing planters’ homicides against slaves. Fede draws the connections between jurisprudence that framed justified killings as, at times a necessary function of protecting their property (including their other slaves).5 British law, as both Rugemer and Fede demonstrate, was different than that in the Portuguese, French, or Spanish empires because the structure of English law meant that colonial policymakers and judges were able to fold aspects of English positive law and common law into “local conditions.”6 Collectively, these works illustrate the different ways that law shifted to make enslaving Africans more economically efficient.7 Birthright citizenship is another contour of slavery and the law that has begun receiving attention recently. Martha Jones’s pathbreaking book, Birthright Citizens (2018) provides an exemplary analysis of...

"Erotic Nature"

To decode John Dunkley’s dark and sexual landscape is also to reveal a decolonial message in his broader works. Dunkley humanizes nature through both masculinizing phallic and feminizing yonic symbolism as an emancipatory tactic, thereby reflecting a culturally nuanced relationship between people and landscape. Dunkley subverts the expected in Caribbean painting, especially for foreign consumers. By bringing nature to life, his paintings offer subversive anti-colonial themes, too, waiting for decipherment. This paper will examine Dunkley’s use of erotic imagery, arguing that the painter’s sexual landscapes, through layered poetics and symbolism, ultimately served to challenge every day oppressions in colonial Jamaica.