Contradictory Formations: Jamaicas Contemporary Conjuncture
This talk approaches Jamaicas current conjuncture as a field of contradiction and tension in which democracy, security, and the economy are being recomposed. Within this formation, long-standing narratives of sovereignty, dependency, resistance, and violence appear in altered ways. Sovereignty is staged in proposed constitutional reform yet unfolds amid unprecedented political disengagement. Dependency is recast through declining debt ratios and steady growth, secured not by autonomy but by fiscal conditionality and social disciplining. Resistance shifts from party-centered politics to informal mobilizations and illicit economies that increasingly provide security and sustenance. Violence is reorganized as homicides decline even while fatal police shootings rise, consolidating state force in the name of order. Drawing on conjunctural analysis and the Caribbean tradition of conceptual tension, I argue that attending to these contradictions generates a critical vocabulary for apprehending contemporary Jamaican social life, unsettling the interpretive frames that have long governed Caribbean studies and development discourse.
Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities. His research examines Black geographies, racial capitalism, and reparations, with particular attention to the economic and social conditions of Black life in the United States and the Caribbean. He is the author of Scammers Yard (2020), Violent Utopia (2022), and co-editor of The Black Geographic (2023).