Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Exceptional Violence. Embodied Citizenship in Transitional Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2012. xiv, 298 pp. $84.95 US (cloth). Post-independence discussions about Jamaica's violence range from esoteric examinations, domestic- and international-research reports and statistical rankings, to more sophisticated theorizing that attribute violence to a number of economic, social, and political factors. Using an anthropological lens, Deborah Thomas acknowledges traditional sociological and criminological explanations, but also challenges, expands, and locates the problem within the historical context of slavery with its practice of social exclusion, alienation, and inequalities. Thomas uses the discussion of violence to rethink the post-colony from the perspective of an earlier imperial moment, and by so doing, she interrogates particular forms of violence, that for her, foundational to the development and deployment of ideologies regarding (p. 3). For Thomas, two related themes are repeated: one examines and its relationship to history, violence, and practices of citizenship; the other explores culture and its relationship to representation, debates about the appropriateness and availability of representations, notions of who has the power to create representations, and the relationships between representation and economic development (p. 4). She situates violence within the colonial epoch. This systematic interrogation sets the context for understanding possession and perception of citizenship, its meaning, impact, representations, and power relations in the experience of violence. Current manifestations of violence in Jamaica have been observed in other post-colonial societies. Indeed, the discussion underscores how historic injustices are overlaid on contemporary Jamaican cultural and political practices and institutions, thereby replicating, in different forms, that which the colonial made dominant. The chapters are treated topically. The introduction, entitled Moving Bodies and subtitled Reluctant Witnessing articulates how violence pervades the psyche of government and citizens. Consequently, levels of interpersonal violence are symptomatic of historical trajectories of structural violence. The explication of Dead Bodies in Chapter one lays the groundwork for the understanding that patterns of authority in the political sphere are extensions of practices from colonial period (p. 7). Chapter two invokes the notion of Deviant Bodies to contextualize the effects of slavery on family formation, as well as provide the scaffolding for understanding culturalist notions of poverty and violence. The discussion of Spectacular Bodies in Chapter three dismisses the attribution of violence in Jamaica to the influence of American media, suggesting instead that such interpretation obscures earlier histories of imperialista and slavery, and specifically the transnational organization of violence. Instead, spectacular forms of punishment and discipline during slavery better account for the more performative dimensions of current killings. Public Bodies, in Chapter Four, juxtaposed narratives and counter-narratives about the emancipation statute--Redemption Song--to explore the crisis. This discussion deconstructs the superimpositions of norms related to gender, sexuality, and family, and thereby underscores how these control mechanisms serve as a foundation for respectability. The most poignant articulation of interrupted citizenship is outlined in Chapter five. …