Political life in the wake of the plantation : sovereignty, witnessing, repair /

When the modern Caribbean is considered within the linear narrative of Enlightenment progress, countries like Jamaica are expected to play catch-up, gradually assimilating to European norms and an idealized version of modernity. Thomas (Univ. of Pennsylvania) rejects this model for one that situates episodes of sociopolitical friction in Jamaica within a plantation-specific affective framework. She argues that the affective patterns slaves improvised as a coping mechanism during two centuries of plantation slavery continue to inform how ordinary people understand their relationship to the state today. Informed by prophetic and romantic frameworks for imagining the future, two vivid episodes in her work illustrate how the affective past acts on the present: the prophetic promise of a new home (the repatriation to Africa proposed by Reverend Claudius Henry in 1959) and the frightening destruction of home (the police violence in Tivoli Gardens in 2010). What remains hidden in the economic and the political registers of these events becomes sharply visible with the affective. Thus, witnessing Jamaica with an affective register provides an essential standpoint from which to recognize African diasporic people's lived reality, and compels us to reimagine--affectively--the possibilities for social repair. Summing Up: Recommended. Researchers and faculty. --Ruma Chopra, San Jose State University