Deborah A. Thomas: Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica.

Galvin, Anne M.

Deborah A. Thomas

Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. xiii + 298 pp.

In the book Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica, Deborah Thomas demonstrates her creativity in interweaving seemingly disparate threads of theory with ethnography and historical data in order to create a unique analytical lens for examining a well-studied problem. This interdisciplinary project draws from anthropology, literary criticism, and archival research and is intended to disrupt "culturalist" explanations of the violence that shapes Jamaican life and statecraft. To move beyond the "culture of violence" arguments in the social sciences, Thomas proposes understanding violence by engaging "the effect of class formation, a process that is immanently racialized and gendered" (4).

Thomas approaches the problem of violence by locating Jamaican citizenship across national boundaries as a part of state-making projects that differentiate citizen from non-citizen. She contextualizes the Jamaican experience within a wider history of the African diaspora to "apprehend citizenship as a set of performances and practices directed at various state and non-state institutions or extraterritorial or extralegal networks" (6). She constructs a "thematic" argument that builds across the book's chapters (18), each titled to evoke "embodiment" as a way of mapping "social transformation" (17).

Ethnographically rich, "Dead Bodies, 2004-2005" (Chapter 1) draws the reader into Thomas's project with writing less dense than the weighty introduction. The chapter charts a changing landscape of violence in Jacks Hill, the area above Kingston where Thomas conducted her graduate research. Rather than treating violence as a localized expression of community-rooted gang activity or Jamaican culture, Thomas highlights webs of interconnection between communities through space and time, demonstrating how violence draws "broader institutional structures" into "global circulations" (26). The chapter initiates a historical argument linking contemporary Jamaican patronage and political violence to colonial provision grounds as a tool of domination and to a creole historical context in which selves are created "through and in relation to conditions of death and disease" (50).

The "thematic" organization of Thomas's argument, at times, gives the book the feel of a collection of linked essays, and the reader must vigilantly track each of the many analytical threads to fully comprehend this complex project. Chapter 2, "Deviant Bodies, 2005/1945" transitions from the temporal, spatial, and ethnographic mapping of Jamaican violence to the "epistemological" violence perpetrated against black populations throughout the diaspora when scholars and policy makers crafted explanations for violence using culturalist and psychologizing discourses. Thomas articulately situates the dialogue around Jamaican violence within a long, globalized history of public analysis concerned with "black violence" more generally. She identifies key historical transitions within the discourse in relation to the changing labour needs of the global economy. Discourses first pathologized non-nuclear black family configurations that failed to meet demands of industrial capitalist labour regimes. Emphasis on the nuclear family placed disproportional focus on the sexual regulation of working-class black women. However with shifts in the labour requirements of capitalism, scrutiny shifted to black men, characterized as problematically undomesticated and unemployable within predominating service-based economies. Thomas peripherally suggests that new explanatory approaches should contextualize violence within the logic of contemporary capitalism. She claims that violence is something that is "consumed," and that the spectacular and brutal violence that became the calling-card of segments of the Jamaican criminal population was established as a Jamaican "brand" on a globalized market for violence (74). This fascinating line of thought bears greater consideration and ethnographic attention. Thomas also shifts focus off "deviant" black families as the locus of violence and onto states themselves as inherently violently rendered formations, criticizing the idea that "deviant" immigrant groups have introduced violence into naturally "pacific" and orderly states.

In Chapter 3, "Spectacular Bodies 1816/2007," Thomas connects the violence of slavery to contemporary forms of Jamaican violence via the establishment of a "repertoire" that provides source material for "improvisation" (89). Because of the widespread emphasis on deleterious neocolonial American influences upon Jamaican youth, Thomas argues that the enduring "continuity" with violence in the colonial past is obscured. To demonstrate this relationship, she examines national cultural policy prescriptions, plantation-based heritage tourism, and reggae music. Jamaican national cultural policy is positioned as a form of social engineering targeted to defend youth against exterior cultural influences. Heritage sites are analyzed in relation to public depictions of the past and the ways artifacts displaying the violence of slavery are consumed and understood by visitors. Reggae music's utilization of slave motifs and imagery in lyrics are analyzed as "public iterations of alternatives to hegemonic nationalist ideologies" in which the resistant ancestors of contemporary Jamaicans are celebrated and the continued inequalities faced by working-class black populations are identified (119).

"Public Bodies, 2003" (Chapter 4) unpacks the controversies surrounding popular representations of Jamaicanness. Thomas presents the debate surrounding "Redemption Song," a monument erected in the key commercial district of Kingston that depicts a naked black man and woman and was installed as a commemoration of emancipation. She then provides a detailed recounting of gendered, transnational narrative depictions of Jamaicans in popular fiction and film targeted toward a mainstream, black consumer base. Using these sources, Thomas examines how the historical use of gender and sexuality in the definition of black peoples' relationship to states has been retooled relative to contemporary neoliberal, transnational anxieties about citizenship. She argues that the policing of "respectability" for middle-class consumers and of heteronormativity and appropriate sexuality have formed a borderline that differentiates authentic cultural citizens from non-citizens, claiming that the policing of gender and class-based sexual propriety might effectively reproduce national boundaries transgressed by globalization and diaspora.

Intriguingly, Thomas utilizes reparations as a framework to "help expose how and why biopolitical strategies of social control never fully eclipse disciplinary modes of power within postcolonial Atlantic worlds" in Chapter 5, "Resurrected Bodies, 1963/2007" (7). The framework, conceptualized through the Rastafari critique of capitalist development, is particularly resonant throughout her discussion of the 1962 Coral Gardens incident, in which Rastafari were rounded up by the Jamaican state, jailed, beaten, and killed. Commemoration of the incident serves as an "alternative archive," according to Thomas, that "can be mobilized to serve the cause of reparations" (179). Less elaborated, however, is how reparation can be used to "destabilize" arguments valorizing the Jamaican problem as a "culture of violence," a discussion that largely takes place in the book's coda (175).

Exceptional Violence is at times a challenging read, but bursts with provocative ideas that make it worth the work for anyone interested in Caribbean societies, the formation of the Atlantic World, and contemporary issues of transnational citizenship and racialized violence.

Anne M. Galvin, St. John's University