Commentary: Post-Colonial Encounters of the Methodological Kind (original) (raw)

Riddims of the Street, Beach, and Bureaucracy: Situating Geographical Research in Jamaica

Southeastern Geographer, 2005

This paper is motivated by a concern about the limited critical attention directed toward the methodological challenges of conducting geographical research in the Caribbean. Drawing on social theories and our empirical experiences with doing qualitative research in Jamaica, we present a variety of methodological conundrums associated with three distinctive contexts: the street, the beach, and the bureaucracy. Such contexts in Jamaica, we argue, should be understood and approached by researchers with respect to their 'riddims,' that is, their distinctive socio-spatial tex-paul kingsbury is an Assistant Professor in the His research interests include the theories, discourses, and practices of development in global context.

Displacements: The Jamaican 1950s

small axe, 2020

In April 2019, Small Axe convened the symposium "The Jamaican 1950s" at the University of Pennsylvania. As with the two prior conferences-on the Jamaican 1960s and the Jamaican 1970s, convened in Miami and New York, respectively-the conference on the Jamaican 1950s was meant to contribute to our ongoing overall concern to rehistoricize the Jamaican cultural-political modern. Our aim in the series of symposia has been less about producing new substantive facts about these (or any) historical periods and more about inquiring into the frames of history through which we tell the stories of our pasts for our presents. Here, Jamaica has been mobilized as an "instance," one Caribbean geopolitical and historical terrain on which to carry out a methodological exercise. Our intention was not to reify Jamaica but to use it as the paradigmatic basis on which to reconsider the conceptual idioms appropriate to the demand of contemporary intervention. We were preoccupied, therefore, with a number of questions: How does our excavation of particular archives open new questions about Jamaica-and about the postcolonial Caribbean more generally-in particular moments? How do we question our received wisdoms, and what are the stakes of doing this? How does this help us reconceptualize the modern Caribbean?

A Place to Belong: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies

A map can take one from Point A to Point B. Or it can depict where one “belongs” and where one does not. What does it mean to be “lost?” What’s on a map? How are maps useful? Are maps graphic depictions of something real? If not, then why do we use them? This course explores the meanings human beings have attached to “space” and “place” throughout the modern period, especially the ways in which spatial representations have been employed as forms of power in processes of colonization and decolonization. Much of the course focuses on the legacy of European colonialism in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It considers the effects of colonialism on the histories, geographies, and identities of “the colonized” and “the colonizer,” as well as those in between. The course commences with readings on colonial and postcolonial theory and then focuses on the spatial practices of colonial powers and the anti-colonial movements they spawned. It considers the spatial legacy of colonialism in formerly colonized territories to examine residual spatial practices of the colonial state and how postcolonial states have leveraged these practices for their own interests or established spatial practices of their own. In addition to these more local forces, the course considers the spatial legacy of global capitalism and how Cold War competition affected it. Finally, the course considers how societies have countered state spatial representations and other attempts to depict and control space and place, as well as the bodies and resources they contain. Overall, the student should come away from the course with an appreciation for the ways scholars have wrestled with the complexity and contingency of colonialism in spatial terms, along with its effects on the lives of the human beings living in colonial and postcolonial spaces. In short, taking this course should make the student more aware of the spatial discourses and practices in which power has been employed in the past and in the present.

Reading Violence and Postcolonial Decolonization through Fanon: The Case of Jamaica

2011

Caribbean Fanonism Louis Lindsay's seminal piece, The Myth of Independence: Middle Class Politics and Non-Mobilization in Jamaica is the main attempt to apply Fanon's understanding of decolonization to the Anglophone Caribbean. Lindsay's project attempted to show that what passed for independence in Jamaica was a sham, symbolic rather than substantive, based on the nationalist leadership's desire to install themselves in the colonizer's place rather than transform the society. Lindsay insists that the failure of the Brown and middle class nationalist leadership was its reliance on compromise with colonizers and their lack of confidence in the capacities of the Jamaican people to determine their own development. Independence, he argues, was not achieved because it was not fought for, and indeed, there was no mobilization toward that effort. Lindsay's essay was revisited in 2005. Girvan's "Caribbean Fanonism," Richard Hart's commentary and Tai...

Where the Present is Haunted by the Past': Disarticulating Colonialism's Legacy in the Caribbean

Cultural Dynamics, 1999

The complex theoretical and political formulations of the Caribbean historian and activist Walter Rodney (1942-80) were based on a strategy of bringing to light and thereby undermining the divisive influence of pejorative colonialera constructions of the various racial diasporas in the region. His interventions in public life in Jamaica and Guyana in the late 1960s and 1970s which foreground race without essentializing it, and which refuse to submit to the false opposition of 'race or class' in social analysis and organizing, contribute to an understanding of how strategic and expansive uses of 'blackness' work within and across nation-states to articulate new forms of politics. Walter Rodney's life and work also has much to tell us about how to conduct an engaged, socially relevant academic praxis.

Recognizing and undisciplining feminist geography in the Caribbean

Gender, Place & Culture A Journal of Feminist Geography, 2019

The aim of this piece is to provide an overview of the state of feminist geography in the Anglo-Caribbean. In doing so via the metaphor of a gayap, we provide a precis of work that has been completed by feminist geographers across the region; offer an analysis of the historical, structural, and institutional obstacles of why it is not more robust; and propose that it can be seen across the region via an undisciplined and anti-orthodox standpoint. In addition, we review how Caribbean feminist scholarship and praxis contributes to feminist geographies through analyses of how people in the region, particularly women, are contesting, negotiating, disrupting, and responding to prevailing heteropatriarchal ideologies across differing social contexts and political arrangements within the Caribbean.

Mapping the Lived-Imagined Caribbean: Postcolonial Geographies in the Literature of the 'Diasporic' Caribbean

The present article is part of a larger project that intends both to bridge some of the existing gaps in the fields of postcolonial studies and geography, and to explore potential avenues for interdisciplinary research. It will do so through the study of selected writings of five contemporary Caribbean authors living in the USA. At the core of my project is an analysis of how these novels map the Caribbean ‘otherwise’, both through the language and the imaginaries they produce and through their function as cultural products circulating and being consumed in transnational cultural markets. The literary geography produced by these novels is timely, as it attempts to reveal the impact in the Caribbean region of three important concepts that have increasingly been debated in Humanities scholarship in recent decades: ‘hybridity’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘authenticity’. The article investigates how these concepts fail to recognise and address the complexities of its space and will explore the ways in which this literature challenges the imaginaries around the above concepts by mapping of the Caribbean as ‘livedimagined’ space. Such mapping, I contend, demonstrates the urgent need for academic research  especially in geography and postcolonial theory  to honour the contribution of literary imagination in envisioning links between how a place is imagined, represented and lived, in suggesting new ways of looking at and across places that count as historically ‘marginal’ and geographically ‘invisible’, and thus producing knowledge and culture ‘otherwise’.