Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica

Coda Repairing Bodies

Reparations tovictims of slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism and their descendants should be in the form of enhanced policies, programmes and measures at the national and international level to be contributed to by States, companies and individuals who benefited materially from these practices, in order to compensate, and repair, the economic, cultural, and political damage which has been inflicted on the affected communities and people, through interalia, the creation of a special development fund, the improvement of access to international markets of products from developing countries affected by these practices, the cancellation or substantial reduction of their foreign debt and a programme to return art objects , historical goods and documents to the countries of origin. GROUP OF 21, DRAFT DECLARATION PREPARED FOR THE WORLD CONFERENCE AGAINST RACISM, 31 AUGUST–8 SEPTEMBER 2001, PARA. 116 Just before the planes flew through the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, debates regarding the long-term effects— structural, interpersonal, and psychic—of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of mass terror were gaining some public speed as the result of preparations for and deliberations at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa. The draft declaration from which the epigraph is taken framed these issues, and CODA Repairing Bodies 222Coda thus the relationship between the past and the present, in robust terms. Here, damages were portrayed not only as economic in nature, but also as political and cultural; it was not only states but also the companies and individuals who operate in transnational spheres who were being called to account; and redress was imagined on various planes, all of which reflected a deep understanding that geopolitical relations, past and present, are global in scope and therefore have global implications. We should not be especially surprised that the paragraph was omitted from the final document , and likely would have been even if the United States and Israel had not withdrawn from the conference as charges of racism and Zionism took center stage. However, what its language signals is a growing appreciation for the application of a reparations framework to injustice and to imagining new ways to repair broken relationships between people and new channels through which collectivities might be forged. While the discussions in Durban occurred at a meta-state level, it is also the case that governments have been attempting to grapplewith this framework , partly as the result of these sorts of multilateral initiatives. Indeed, in January 2009, the Jamaican government announced the establishment of a Reparations Commission.1 This commission, chaired by the anthropologist Barry Chevannes, was charged with developing a position on the issue for the country as a whole and making recommendations that would take into account those that were formulated at the World Conference in 2001 (“Chevannes to Chair Reparations Commission” 2009).The commission was asked to “receive submissions, hear testimony, evaluate research and study, and engage in dialogue with relevant interest groups, legal and academic experts,” as well as to “undertake public consultation as necessary ” with a view toward elaborating a sense of appropriate reparations from Britain for the transatlantic slave trade and, to a degree, colonialism (Hall 2009). Before his death in March 2010, Junior Manning sat alongside the various scholars and lawyers who were appointed members of the commission. He saw his participation as a chance to engage the Jamaican government on the question of reparations to Rastafari and, in particular , for those Rastafarians who were immediately affected by the events at Coral Gardens. What might largely be viewed as a progressive move on the part of the Jamaican government therefore became substantially more complex, for if Manning’s entreaties are followed, the commission will not only have to confront how the brutality of the slave trade (and plantation Repairing Bodies223 slavery more generally) stunted Jamaica’s colonial and postcolonial development , but it will also have to acknowledge that the Jamaican state’s own brutality has stunted the development of sectors of its own population. This would also be the effect of other initiatives that are currently being proposed. For example, in his recent Envisioning Caribbean Futures (2007), Brian Meeks has advocated the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to bring the political violence that tore Jamaican society apart between 1976 and 1980 into public discussion with a view toward exorcising it: The near-civil war moment of 1980 still haunts Jamaican social...