Global Sisyphus: Rereading the Jamaican 1960s through A Brief History of Seven Killings

This essay uses the coincidence of three facets of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings to consider how Jamaican literature imagined political sovereignty during the 1960s. The first is a 1966 event characters refer to as “the fall of Balaclava.” The second is the ghost of Sir Arthur Jennings. The third is reference to global figures and events that index the destabilization of governments in Latin America and Africa.