Postcolonial Jamaica Research Articles

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.

By the Waters of Babylon: Ethiopian Orthodox Enculturation in a Rastafari Context, 1965–1980

ABSTRACT: Postcolonial Jamaica provided a surprising new avenue for mission for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. A new religion, Rastafari, refocused its practitioners not only away from England but also sought to chart a cultural course independent of Cold War competitors. Many Rastafari sought connection with the 'Zion' they identified with Ethiopia. As Caribbean Rastafari interacted with the Ethiopian Church, Rastafari were challenged by finding an Ethiopian Church that did not accord with their expectations. The Ethiopian Church, especially through Archbishop Yesehaq (Mandefro) struggled to navigate a foreign context with little institutional or financial support. Yesehaq's interactions with Rastafari (and most curiously with his spiritual son, Reggae artist Bob Marley) demonstrates the complexities of mission in a specific context. The Orthodox-Rastafari interaction challenged the limits of what Orthodoxy could assimilate. It also challenged Orthodoxy's new Caribbean members who could not simply cast away the tight web of relationships and culture in which they lived. Thus, demonstrating that mission rarely implicates doctrine and institutional forms alone, but also involves a web of social and cultural contacts. Navigating this web often benefits from the presence of empathetic and energetic pastors such as Archbishop Yesehaq and suffers in their absence.

Legacies of indenture: identity and belonging in post-colonial Jamaica

ABSTRACT This article examines narratives of identity and belonging among descendants of white German indentured labourers in Jamaica and the local community in which they live. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews the research shows the ways in which members of the community in the village of Seaford Town make sense of and articulate elements of their German cultural heritage. This paper argues that while ideas about whiteness suffuse many of the identity-narratives, whiteness can variously be muted or amplified as a marker of identity. Similarly, notions of German-ness are not consistently articulated as embodied cultural forms. Here, culture is not conceptualized as static or embodied, but can be claimed and shared. In sum, the paper speaks to the ways in which whiteness read through a historical lens becomes remade in a contemporary context.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge and Social Justice Pedagogical Knowledge: Re-Envisioning A Model for Teacher Practice

The nature of teacher knowledge and preparation has incited many significant debates over the years. The major point of contention being what knowledge do teachers need for effective practice? Research have presented arguments distinguishing between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. A key study on teacher knowledge is Shulman’s (1987) study on Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) where he defines teacher knowledge as knowledge which integrates the knowledge of a specific subject and the pedagogical knowledge for teaching that particular subject. I question however what other knowledge component can contribute to effective teaching? Shulman’s model has been criticized for its non-inclusion of social justice knowledge. I argue Social Justice Knowledge can support Pedagogical Content Knowledge especially for teacher preparation practices in postcolonial Jamaica. Social Justice Pedagogical Content Knowledge empowers teachers to illuminate their voices inside and outside of the classroom. Hence, the purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the relationship between Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) and Social Justice Knowledge as a model for teacher practice in the Jamaican context. What are the benefits to teacher practice? And how can it inform a stronger model for teacher preparation; essentially supporting a teacher preparation model which is not siloed from social justice knowledge.

Black Carcerality and Emancipation in Postcolonial Jamaica

In 2017, the Jamaican government communicated to the populace its intention to introduce the National Identification System (NIDS), which would house biographic, biometric, and demographic information. Following the announcement, NIDS became engulfed in controversy. Deep suspicions arose about the government’s desire to provide each citizen with a unique identification number and secure biometric data. For some, the introduction of identification numbers was read as an apocalyptic reference to the Mark of the Beast, a sign of those who worship the anti-Christ, as detailed in The Book of Revelation Chapter 13. For others, such as those who protested in Kingston’s Emancipation Park, the move to collect biometric data was taken as an act of warfare against the liberty of the Jamaican people. What is at stake in a post-slave and postcolonial Caribbean society with the merging of the body and technology predicated on state-legitimized techniques of branding, surveillance, and control? In this essay, I interrogate NIDS as an infrastructure of postcolonial datafication governance (Arora 2016) and one that embodies simultaneously biblical, spatial, and corporeal fears of insecurity in a Caribbean geography that lies in the shadow of the plantation. Moreover, in elucidating the discourses of racialization, carcerality, and emancipation surrounding the resistance to NIDS, I argue for a reading of the Caribbean that positions it as a critical geographic lens through which to consider Simone Browne’s (2015) contention that blackness is a key site through which surveillance is not only practiced, but also creatively resisted. In responding to the call for the decolonization of surveillance studies, this reflection takes seriously what the Caribbean can contribute to our understandings of the possibilities of black emancipation in the present moment of global surveillance.

From “at Risk” to Interdependent: The Erotic Life Worlds of HIV+ Jamaican Women

In post-colonial Jamaica, the iconic portrayal of “sun, sex, and smiles” clashes with the disproportionate rates of HIV among working-class black Jamaican women. Even though the Caribbean has both the highest incidence rates of reported AIDS cases and HIV prevalence rates in the Americas, second only to Africa, the region remains largely ignored in scholarship on the HIV/AIDS pandemic and black political movement. This essay draws from feminist ethnographic research on the grassroots organizing of HIV-positive Jamaican women in Kingston, Jamaica. In this essay, I delineate how women in an HIV/AIDS activist organization, EVE for Life, develop and cultivate HIV/AIDS care strategies through women-centered networks. I read these networks as intentional communities of interdependence and psychosocial care, rather than simply invisible “at-risk” groups or passive victims subjected to “a paralyzing plague.” I contend that the homosocial intimacies that characterize these networks of care reflect an “intraventive” cultural practice and knowledge, a term that Marlon Bailey uses to describe the organic ways community members represent themselves individually and collectively. Furthermore, they reveal how the embodied knowledges of HIV-positive Black women challenge pathologizing public health and academic discourses, while also serving as conduits for enhancing and extending theories about bodies, sexuality, power, and intimacy. By offering a culturally-specific exploration of the socio-erotic lives of working-class HIV-positive Black Jamaican women, this paper concludes with a discussion about how centering our analysis on the Caribbean and Black women expands the geographic and thematic scopes of studies of race, racism, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS.

Jamaican Dancehall: Demasking the grotesque realism of race and class in ghetto ‘gangsta’ performance

ABSTRACTThis article considers the self-conscious, exaggerated performance of gangster ghetto subjectivities by the younger and more media savvy generation of Jamaican ‘gangster dancehall’ artists as an example of resistant subjectivization. Through masquerade and hyperbolic visual representations of the ‘grotesque’ black body, resistant subjectivization facilitates the questioning and transgression of dominant narratives which negatively cast the black body as ‘monstrous.’ At the same time, the commercialization of gangster dancehall and the grotesque dancehall subject is seen as contributing to the reinforcement of unfavorable stereotypes of the black subject. This potentially undermines the element of resistance in the counterhegemonic discourse of gangster dancehall and leads to tension, not only between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives on black subjectivities, but also between the counterhegemonic discourses within gangster dancehall itself. Through the critical explorations of writings by Jacques Lacan, Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Franz Fanon and Homi Bhahba, this paper tries to establish whether or not this performance of the monstrous black self indeed represents a form of empowerment for the black ghetto subject in postcolonial Jamaica.

The indifferent

ABSTRACTThis article presents a portrait of indifference, a psychosocial analysis of middle class bystanding of social suffering. It arises as a way to tell a research story of colonially produced racism, classism, and denial. Together, these ways of being produce a mode of perception that denies reality, an active erasure that makes the indifferent apathetic. It is based on research in postcolonial Jamaica, yet some of its features can be recognized elsewhere, where bystanders bury their witness, their insight, concealing their understanding of other’s pain. Because this portrait is based on what male and female research participants said, “he/she” are used interchangeably throughout the portrait.

The artist Carl Abrahams and the cosmopolitan work of centring and peripheralizing the self⋆

The article looks at the work and life of Jamaican artist and ‘citizen of the world’ Carl Abrahams. Responding to Gell's argument that art should be thought of as a ‘technology of enchantment’, and to a wider approach that seeks to explain art by reference to cultural context, the article takes Abrahams's ownWeltkenntnis, or world‐knowledge, as its focus. TheWeltkenntnisof an artist, or indeed any person, is often at odds both with their surrounding cultural situation and the technical means they have to express themselves. It is never entirely possible to reduce a particular form of self‐expression either to the wider worldview or to a particular set of technical effects. The article explores the conceptual tensions involved in Abrahams's claims to be a cosmopolitan artist and his work of centring and peripheralizing himself in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.

What Times Are These? Visual Art and Social Crisis in Postcolonial Jamaica

This essay reflects on how social unrest and violence are responded to in the mainstream visual arts of postcolonial Jamaica. The focus is on two particular moments of crisis: the social unrest and political violence during the Michael Manley administration in the 1970s and the current escalation in violent crime. Both moments have also coincided with intense cultural activity, in which the lived experience of these crises commands centre stage. This essay explores how this has resulted in visual art works that record, critique or seek to transcend the crisis at hand and how these, along with the popular visual culture and the news media, forge the visual imaginaries of these moments and the visual memories of the future. The essay also reflects on the role of art in times of social crisis and the ethical questions that surround the artistic representation of violence and trauma, especially in the market-driven context of contemporary Jamaican art.

What Times Are These? Visual Art and Social Crisis in Postcolonial Jamaica

This essay reflects on how social unrest and violence are responded to in the mainstream visual arts of postcolonial Jamaica. The focus is on two particular moments of crisis: the social unrest and political violence during the Michael Manley administration in the 1970s and the current escalation in violent crime. Both moments have also coincided with intense cultural activity, in which the lived experience of these crises commands centre stage. This essay explores how this has resulted in visual art works that record, critique or seek to transcend the crisis at hand and how these, along with the popular visual culture and the news media, forge the visual imaginaries of these moments and the visual memories of the future. The essay also reflects on the role of art in times of social crisis and the ethical questions that surround the artistic representation of violence and trauma, especially in the market-driven context of contemporary Jamaican art.

?No Grave Cannot Hold My Body Down?: Rituals of Death and Burial in Postcolonial Jamaica

?No Grave Cannot Hold My Body Down?: Rituals of Death and Burial in Postcolonial Jamaica

“No Grave Cannot Hold My Body Down”: Rituals of Death and Burial in Postcolonial Jamaica

In contemporary Jamaica, funerals increasingly revolve around fantasy coffins and designer caskets. This paper attempts to marshal visual and textual information describing recent developments in Jamaican funerals with a view to recording attempts by the Jamaican underclasses to produce prestige for themselves in the face of an ever-effacing violence.

Birth's encrypted Messages

This paper examines the nature of sexual and gender relations as they impact upon birth and takes a comparative look at some of the often oppressive ritualised hospital procedures and structures and at the agency and agents of their perpetuation within hospitals in modern America and postcolonial Jamaica. The liberating power of finding space beyond institutional confines to allow women and families freedom to choose their way of birthing will also be touched on.

Democratizing Dance: Institutional Transformation and Hegemonic Re-Ordering in Postcolonial Jamaica

Democratizing Dance: Institutional Transformation and Hegemonic Re-Ordering in Postcolonial Jamaica

Reggae, Ganja, and Black Bodies: Power, Meaning, and the Markings of Postcolonial Jamaica in Perry Henzell s The Harder They Come

Reggae, Ganja, and Black Bodies: Power, Meaning, and the Markings of Postcolonial Jamaica in Perry Henzell s The Harder They Come

Churches And The State: Aspects Of Religious Ideology In Colonial And Post-Colonial Jamaica

En Jamaique, le pentecotisme remplace et reinterprete des aspects du discours de race et de classe. Loin d'etre un phenomene, ces formes de deplacement et de reinterpretation etaient presentes dans la pratique baptiste d'autrefois.

Postcolonial ghosts in the Caribbean: Lloyd w brown's Duppies

A ghost is the sign that a haunting is taking place, according to sociologist, Avery Gordon (8), who defines ‘ghost’ as a ‘social figure’, one form by which something lost, or not visible, is made known. This paper looks at the signs of haunting in a postcolonial context in Lloyd W Brown's poetry collection Duppies. The poems are inspired by Brown's revisiting of Jamaica and the ‘ghosts’ (duppies, soucouyants, rolling calves and zombies) that are invoked relate to his past ‐ his childhood memories and violent ancestral history. However, they also reflect how the colonial past continues to haunt present day, post‐independence Jamaica. I examine a selection of poems which demonstrate Lloyd Brown's use of gothic motifs. These represent his personal view of the condition of postcolonial Jamaica, and “write back” to dominant colonial discourses. In so doing, I call upon Bill Ashcroft's work on the process of writing back and postcolonial transformations and the insights of Avery Gordon, David Punter, Glennis Byron and Marina Warner into the notion of haunting.

The Politics of Creole Language Education in Jamaica: 1891-1921 and the 1990s

The underachievement of ethnic minorities has been the subject of much reflection and action by educators and researchers world-wide. This two-part study uses archival and empirical research to focus on the acquisition of English by another group, speakers of Jamaican Creole: a unique typology which can neither be categorised as foreign-language nor mother-tongue teaching. Both English and Creole share a common lexis, but Creole speakers need expert help in acquiring the phonology, morphology and syntax of English. In Part I, archival/historical data drawn primarily from the Annual Reports of 'Her Majesty's Inspectors' for a part of the colonial period, 1891-1921, highlight the systemic failure of pupils to acquire English in elementary schools. But in Part II, an investigation which the author conducted in the 1990s in 'secondary' schools in postcolonial independent Jamaica finds a similar cycle of underachievement among Creole speakers. The inference to be drawn is that successive generations of these language learners have left schools, in the words of Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins (1988: 1), as an 'undereducated underclass'. The paper analyses the issues which have bedevilled the education of Creole speakers in both centuries. Then, it outlines new political initiatives designed to effect change and redress the inequities of the past before the twenty-first century begins.

Educational Change in Postcolonial Jamaica. Wills S. Jervier

<i>Educational Change in Postcolonial Jamaica</i>. Wills S. Jervier