Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica

4. Public Bodies, 2003

Chapter 3 outlined some of the parameters for a discussion of the relationships between culture and history, culture and policy, and culture and memory. In this chapter, I turn more explicitly to the realm of representation. Rather than focusing on representations of slavery, however, I will be preoccupied with how representations of Jamaicanness—and the discourses that circulate around these representations—are produced and consumed in relation to the categories of citizenship that emerged initially in the postcolonial period and that subsequently have been transformed in the neoliberal moment.This necessarily means that I want to think overtly through the analytic frames of gender and sexuality, since it is through these frames that the ideas of appropriateness and respectability that have undergirded black people’s relationship to the colonial and postcolonial states have been imagined. As I will show, it is also through these frames that contemporary anxieties about the transnational are expressed. I begin the chapter with a discussion of the controversy that erupted in print and over the airwaves concerning a statue titled “Redemption Song” that was erected during the summer of 2003. The statue, designed to commemorate the abolition of slavery, ended up generating heated debates that brought to light how differences along the lines of gender, generation, color, class, and reli4 Public Bodies, 2003 126Chapter 4 gious and educational background influence people’s consumption and appreciation of public representations of Jamaican culture and history. In thinking through how these black bodies became flashpoints, I show that the arguments that raged in the newspapers and on the airwaves rehearsed ongoing struggles over the terms of cultural citizenship—struggles whose racial, gendered, and sexual dynamics are constituted transnationally. Jamaicans in diaspora wrote themselves into the national space throughout the extended period of debates, not just to stay connected, but also to play an active role in the co-construction of the nation. In doing so, they reproduced and sometimes sharpened the borders of the nation even as their own spatial dispersion held the potential to deconstruct those very borders.1 I move from the discussion about the parameters of citizenship that were inspired by the “Redemption Song” statue to one about those that suffuse the production of popular culture, particularly the gangster genre of popular fiction and film. I am especially interested in how the space of the nation is imagined primarily within the Yardie trilogy, written by Victor Headley, and in Bun’ Him!!! by Macka Diamond (billed as Jamaica’s first “official” dancehall novel), and secondarily in the films Belly (directed by the African American Hype Williams) and Shottas (directed by the Jamaican-born Cess Silvera). I do this to demonstrate that where elite nationalist representations (such as the formulation of cultural policy) are defined by boundary making, even though the discussions surrounding particular representations are transnational in scope, popular culture is always already imagined and produced through transnational channels (and is recognized to be so by its participants). Because of this, it is forced to engage intra-diasporic hierarchies and stereotypes and to be explicit about the sorts of masculinity and femininity that can move across borders. I suggest that “transnational Jamaica” is engaged differently in these two forms of cultural production as the result of two related phenomena, one having to do with the contexts within which the art forms are produced, and the other with the sorts of critical mediation that has characterized the two forms. I am intentionally invoking Inderpal Grewal’s provocative Transnational America (2005) here to suggest that Jamaica, like America, is a globally circulating entity that holds within it particular expectations and sensibilities that can be consumed without having to set foot in its actual territorial space. This is the case, on one hand, because the transnational sphere of Jamaica (its migrant Public Bodies127 communities) spans the globe, and on the other, because people’s mediated experiences of Jamaica—reggae music, athletes—have been so profound. Despite the divergence related to notions of what constitutes the appropriate spatial frame for imagining citizenship, these two forms of representation do share ground on one issue: the policing of sexuality. The various responses to the “Redemption Song” statue should recall for us the discussion in chapter 2 about a particularly situated notion of how class position and social mobility are related within the national space and how this relation is lived and embodied through family formation. For a middle...