Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica

Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011 . xiii + 298 pp.IN A COMMENT TO ME, YEARS AGO, on the internecine partisan conflict in Jamaica, a veteran journalist declared, "We are a violent society." That statement might well serve as an epigraph for any study, political, historical, social, or as in the case of Deborah Thomas's latest work, anthropological, that has at its core violence in Jamaica. There are many roads that can be taken to develop an understanding of what it means to be Jamaican, and a consideration of violence, whether by individuals or by the state, is one of the most interesting.The main title, for all that it enfolds layers of meaning in two words, is problematic in and of itself. Violence - political, personal, criminal, directed by the state, and directed against the state - has been the very core of the Jamaican social fabric since Christopher Columbus happened on the island in 1494. This, it is unfortunate to relate, makes it not exceptional but normal. In point of fact, there are so many ways that violence in Jamaica is not merely normal but normative (e.g., in the household, in schools, as a means by which communities enforce their norms of order, and, of course, by the state) that had Thomas entitled the book Normative Vioknce, readers familiar with Jamaica might not have blinked.For Thomas, Jamaican violence is examined in order to understand how ordinary black Jamaicans see themselves, their world, their identities, and how those identities and that world are shaped - Jamaica, and Jamaicans, being defined not by the boundaries of the island but by the extension of Jamaica into its diasporic communities in Britain and North America and by the penetration of United States power, both that of the state and that of the culture, into Jamaica. Each chapter of the study considers a different aspect of violence within the structure of transnational Jamaica. The first chapter opens with a very personal account of a murder in Jacks Hill, the exurban area that had been the subject of Thomas's dissertation research. This leads into an examination of the discourses by which the people of Jacks Hill made sense of the violence. Thomas also provides a detailed, indeed thick, description of the events in the Jacks Hill community, both in regard to sociocultural transformation and to the rising levels of violence. Thomas's approach here to the socio-cultural phenomena that she has encapsulated within the term 'modern blackness' is more ambiguous and thoughtful than in her eponymous study published in 2004.1She recounts the evolution of garrison communities in Kingston, the emergence of the dons as powerful figures mediating between the formal institutional structures of state and political party and the informal hierarchies of the street, and the transformation of the drug trade. Her understanding of the formal institutional structure of Jamaican politics can be sketchy, as when she writes, "For several terms, Jacks Hill had a JLP councillor (this is the local representative for the community to the MP)" (39). Jamaican parish and city councillors would be astonished to learn that their task was to represent their districts to the member of parliament rather than on the parish councils or the two city councils. Violence, she relates, turned Jacks Hill into "a frontier of sorts" of a kind not "easily reconciled with the notions of the frontier that were developed in the late nineteenth century" (41). This is in keeping with Kamau Brathwaite's description of eighteenth-century Jamaica as a frontier society, and also with R.A.J, van Lier's classic description of Surinam as a "frontier territory". Thomas's definition and conception of frontier is both interesting and sophisticated and constitutes a significant addition to theory.In her second chapter, Thomas explores the discourse on the culture of violence which she sees as having emerged from the older language of the 'culture of poverty' of the post-war period. …