Exceptional Violence

"Over the course of five chapters, Thomas embraces a variety of methodological approaches, including sociological and historical analysis, anthropological tools, and literary criticism, to explore how citizenship and violence have been understood--or, as she aptly puts it, embodied--by Jamaicans since the end of the colonial era. She uses numerous sources, including newspaper articles, government reports, oral history, music, film, and fiction, to investigate widely varying topics, from the eruption of gang warfare in the small Jamaican community of Jacks Hill and a public debate over nudity in the statue Redemption Song, to the official cultural policy of the Jamaican state and the Rastafarian experience." Anne Rush, University of Maryland, H-Empire "In this supremely engaging book, Deborah A. Thomas does to death a number of procrustean, often racist, preconceptions about violence in Jamaica--and, by extension, other post-colonies. Arguing persuasively against 'culturalist' explanations, she seeks to make sense of both the incidence and the preoccupation with violence here--for its exceptionality, that is, in all senses of the term--by placing it in its proper historical context, one that turns out to be highly complex, deeply entangled, temporally disjunctive. But she does more than this. Thomas opens up a window in the very soul of Jamaica and its diasporas, interrogating the ways in which Jamaicans today envisage and make their futures, how new, embodied forms of subjectivity and citizenship are being practiced and performed, how, indeed, we may understand the role of 'culture' and representation in these processes. Exceptional Violence is the kind of book from which every anthropologist, every intelligent reader--without exception--will learn something worth knowing. And thinking deeply about." John Comaroff, University of Chicago and the American Bar Foundation "Deborah Thomas' Exceptional Violence is at once methodologically astute, richly researched, and critically engaged. In reframing the historical object of violence in Jamaica she enables us to see hitherto obscured dimensions of its embodied constitution as social practice and social imaginary, its relation to citizenship and gender, the state and community, racial subjectivities, and transnational migrations. It is a fine achievement." David Scott, Columbia University