Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica

Ships in 7-10 business days This ethnography of violence in Jamaica repudiates cultural explanations for violence, arguing that its roots lie in deep racialized and gendered inequalities produced in imperial slave economies. Exceptional Violence is a sophisticated examination of postcolonial state formation in the Caribbean, considered across time and space, from the period of imperial New World expansion to the contemporary neoliberal era, and from neighborhood dynamics in Kingston to transnational socioeconomic and political fields. Deborah A. Thomas takes as her immediate focus violence in Jamaica and representations of that violence as they circulate within the country and abroad. Through an analysis encompassing Kingston communities, Jamaica’s national media, works of popular culture, notions of respectability, practices of punishment and discipline during slavery, the effects of intensified migration, and Jamaica’s national cultural policy, Thomas develops several arguments