Beyond a Boundary: The Gangsta as Modern Black Subject in Contemporary Jamaican Art Practices

This essay is concerned with the centrality of culture to a notion of diasporic identity encapsulated in the term "modern black subject." Taking Jamaica as both a sign and site of lived Caribbean experience and a metonym for the black diasporic world, it focuses on material artistic objects—photographs, art installations, and films—made by Jamaicans. Ranging from the 1972 film The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell) to contemporary Jamaican cinema, from Marlon James's novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), to the installations of Ebony Patterson and the photographs of Peter Dean Rickards, what these examples have in common is their preoccupation with what the philosopher Sylvia Wynter identifies as "systematic pariah figures…and their respective 'captive populations:'" in other words, the figure of the gangsta and his ghetto community. Drawing on historical diaspora thinking as well as contemporary cultural theory, it shows how subalternity and resistance are (also) negotiated through artistic practices.