Notes on the Age of Dis: Reading Kingston through Agamben

This paper examines the representation of contemporary figures of “bare life” in the context of postcolonial Jamaican modernity. The representation of Kingston as a dystopia is one such trope of bare life, as evident in Kamau Brathwaite's 1994 prose poem, Trench Town Rock, and the selected lyrics of dancehall artistes such as Damian Marley and Super Cat, which are read in terms of Giorgio Agamben's concepts of homo sacer, the state of exception, and the biopolitical paradigm of the camp.