In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction:Here and There, Now and Then
  • Paul Youngquist (bio), Jillian Heydt-Stevenson (bio), and Jeffrey N. Cox (bio)

As we have worked collectively on this special issue on "Secure Sites" we have had opportunities to think about our own "sitedness": about our secure positions of privilege as tenured faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder and also about the various sites in which we do our work. These include Palmyra, which Jill Heydt-Stevenson visited before the Syrian civil war and which inspires her current research; the theatrical archives and ephemera Jeff Cox draws on in his critical and textual reconstruction of the Regency harlequinade; and Paul Youngquist's explorations of Chicago as the place from which Sun Ra launched his Afrofuturist music, poetry, and thought. As we contemplated this introduction, we were again made aware of different locations for our work, as Paul Youngquist was in Jamaica pursuing his project on the Maroons when, as a sort of corresponding editor, he issued the following findings from his perch in Maroon country:

Here I sit, on top of the world. The place is Flagstaff, Jamaica, former site of Trelawny Town. In whatever direction I look, I see green: bushy bamboo, tall palms, rows of cultivated banana and plantain, breadfruit, ackee, and scattered mango trees. The vegetation covers the surface of steep conical hills and narrow valleys, the karst limestone corrugations that give Jamaica's Cockpit Country its distinctive—and formidable—geography. The Flagstaff Visitor's Center is an exposed concrete platform and vaulted roof built over a bar where local guys with nothing much to do shoot pool, and maybe drink rum and Turbo. I hear the occasional snap of billiard balls over the wind blowing across the platform and Cockpits. Gun Hill, a steep peak, blocks the view to the east. To the south lie two similarly eclipsing ridges. The west slopes through the valley to long lines of humped hills, and northward, because it's a clear day, appears the faint flat line of the ocean out beyond Falmouth. I've been here before, and nothing has changed. Jamaica lies beneath me, rolling green to the sea.

But a long time ago everything here changed. Flagstaff, so named for the British imperial banner atop that easterly hill (visible on a windy day from Falmouth), occupies the place where Trelawny Town once stood. It was home to Jamaica's original clan of Maroons, transported Africans whose guerilla resistance to colonialism and its traffic in black flesh won them independence. In 1739, the British signed a treaty granting them freedom "in perpetuity" and a land grant of fifteen [End Page 1] hundred acres. Every March 1, locals celebrate "Treaty Day" to commemorate this momentous event. I call it "British Surrender Day." That's what it was.

Perpetuity, as it turns out, can be provisional. Land values, injustice, and geopolitics inspired the Maroons of Trelawny Town to rebel. To make a very long story very short, through military terror and diplomatic guile, the British extorted their surrender, expropriated their land, and transported the Trelawny Town Maroons off the island to Nova Scotia. Trelawny Town became Flagstaff, and the British built barracks on the site of Maroon independence. The story of their rebellion and exile remains too little known in the annals of imperial violence. But it underwrites the ways of imperialism today, with its sites of negotiated security and militarized means of administration.

This insight from the top of the world led us, as editors of this issue, to wonder whether other secure sites of historical import might yield an improved understanding of today's security state. How might the instrumentalities of colonialism construct a geopolitical infrastructure for security? We thought this was an interesting question and wrote a call for papers for this issue of English Language Notes examining historical sites of securitization: spatial practices such as the expropriation and militarization of Trelawny Town that lay the groundwork for the global management of populations by means of security. To our surprise, our very creative contributors moved in wildly different ways to investigate a deeper dislocation prior to and therefore constitutive of the practices we believed were foundational to the...

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