Christie:	Welcome. It's my great pleasure to welcome our key-note speaker for Black History Month: Dr. Deborah A. Thomas from the University of Pennsylvania. And it's my special pleasure to welcome her, because she was one of my mentors when I was a graduate student. So it's really nice to have you here with us.
	Deborah A. Thomas received her PhD in Anthropology from New York University in 2000 and is currently professor of Anthropology and Chair of the graduate group in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She's also, an affiliated faculty with the Center of Africana studies. And has a secondary appointment in the Graduate School of Education. And she's a member of the Graduate groups of Africana studies and English. Prior to her appointment at Penn, she spent two years as a Melon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University and four years teaching in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke. 
	She's the author of "Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica" and "Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica" and co-editor of the volume, "Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness." Her articles have appeared in a diverse range of journals, including Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Radical History Review, Small Acts, Identities, and Feminist Review. Thomas was also the editor of the journal, Transforming Anthropology and currently sits on the editorial boards of American Anthropologist and Social and Economic Studies.
	She was also co-editor and co-producer of the documentary film Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens, which chronicles violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women. Thomas has also been a program director with the National Council for Research on Women, an international working alliance of women's research and policy centers whose mission is to enhance the connections among research, policy analysis, advocacy and innovative programming on behalf of women and girls. 
	She was editor of the journal Transforming Anthropology from 2007 to 2010 and currently sits on the editorial committee of the Caribbean-based journal Social and Economic Studies and is Secretary of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. We're all very lucky to have her here with us today and I hope you'll join me in welcoming her. Thank you.
Dr. Thomas:	So I have to turn myself on. Okay.
	Thank you for the lovely introduction and for the invitation. I was here six and a half years ago; almost seven years ago and it's very nice to be back right before the storm. I wanted to talk to you today about Africana Studies, I suppose. African American Studies as a whole but also share with you some of the work that I've been doing more recently. So, the title of my talk has changed, as they always do. The title of my talk is: "The Time of the Archive: Africana Studies, Vindication and Deconstruction."
	One of the agendas of Africana Studies or, African American Studies or Diaspora Studies or, the various names under which our field has been institutionalized on University campuses, has been to create archives. We do this in order to produce knowledge about ourselves that would counter the epistemological certainties of various imperial racisms that have forged the modern world over the past 5 centuries. Scholars across the disciplines have been inspired by historical, literary and ethnographic evidence to general arguments about the centrality of the Americas to the development of mercantile and later industrial Capitalism, to a system of racialized labor management and contemporary class and cultural stratifications, to ideologies and practices linking gendered and racialized subjectivities to patterns of state formation and imperialism and to the development of new and creatively Creolized social and expressive cultural practices. As well as, to revolutions, modern social movements and to contemporary processes of transnationalism.
	If, as David Scott has argued, an archive is not merely a collection, rather, it's a generative system that governs the production and appearance of statements then, we must think about the process of developing archives as one that creates new possibilities. And these are possibilities for seeing connections that were previously unexamined or for re-ordering our ontological taken-for-granteds. Some have seen the process of archive creation as simultaneously a process of Black memory making. Memories, in this case, of things not directly experienced. Black memory, it's claimed, and more specifically, New World Black memory, is something of a special case as it's produced and reproduced within a context that's often characterized as an "absence of ruins." 
	This title of Orlando Patterson's second novel is meant to foreground experiences of rupture, pastlessness, and fragmentation. Legacies of the Transatlantic slave trade that are often seen as constituting the historical and discursive context for the majority of New World African populations. Indeed, three generations of writers and literary critics have attempted, in different ways, to reconstruct the lives of those who were, or would become, slaves. To glean insight into their aspirations, their imaginations, and their day to day movements by putting together a mention in a diary here, a list in a log, there. These acts of reconstruction are oriented towards the creation of a historical consciousness. One that often stands in opposition to forms of State memory and this is why they constitute a counter-archive or what Tony Bogues has called, considering the Caribbean case: "a dread history." 
	Of course, the project of mining diverse spaces in order to generate this kind of historical consciousness not only counters dominant tropes about the Americas and the people who have inhabited it, but it also potentially provides the basis of claims about the relationship between present inequalities and past injustices. As this is the structural historical framework used by reparations activists, we might also profitably consider the impetus for archive creation in relation to practices of reparative justice.
	Because we know that knowledge is never disinterested, and that the questions that we ask are always shapes by broader sociocultural, economic and geopolitical frameworks, we must also recognize that archives created within different moments, by necessity, serve different purposes. 
	What I want to do today is explore some of the archives that have been created within Caribbean Studies in order to think through the connections between the context of knowledge production and the relationship between vindication and reparation. And while the focus here will be on Caribbean Studies similar processes are clearly afoot within African American Studies, more generally. And indeed, many of the principles who were involved in creating these archives were moving back and forth between these two spaces.
	By thinking through some of these archives, I will show that in the post-independence period, we begin to privilege a national analytic frame and therefore we seem to lose the global, geopolitical and structural historical macro-perspective that structured earlier archiving efforts and that supports a reparations logic. 
	This is a logic, after all, that privileges the interplay of scales rather than limiting analysis to the space of the nation state and that draws lines between unlikely bedfellows, far-flung constituencies and interests and between then and now. The post-independence project of state formation in the British West Indies, not unlike the post-Jim Crow United States, produced a concern with development. A phenomenon that was to be measured by various statistical indicators that would allow link to be made between cause and effect, policies and populations. While in the earlier part of the 20th century the vindicationist ethos that undergirded archival efforts encouraged a focus on how current structural inequalities have emerged, and persist, as a result of real and codified institutional discrimination with the ultimate reparative goal being the dismantling of Imperialism.
	In the post-colonial period, however, we have often been left with the sense that current social ills are the result of cultural deviations and disfunction. Failures and lacks that are passed from generation to generation because the achievement of independence was itself unable to undo almost five centuries of violence. Violence, in fact, serves as a limit point here. I'll show that while many of the early archives that were created were explicitly mobilized towards the projects of political and cultural nationalism. And one archive in particular, the emergent archive of violence, cannot be effortlessly rallied toward these ends. Instead, archives of violence bring into relief the limits of the anti and immediately-post focus on the nation state as the primary locus of vindication. 
	I'll illustrate this point by drawing on some of the recent work I've been doing in terms of creating visual archives of moments of exceptional state violence in Jamaica. And finally, I'll suggest that confronting these and other archives of violence over time encourages us to return our vision more pointedly to the trans-national spheres that constituted the political frame of reference for earlier Internationalists and Pan-Africanists. And to rethink the ways that we think temporality. 
	Two of the earliest classics of Caribbean history, Eric Williams' "Capitalism and Slavery" and C.L.R. James' "Black Jacobins" were designed as antidotes to European notions of legitimacy and governance. Williams, himself saw his project as one of reworking and re-evaluating our conceptions of history and economic and political development. He set out to do what we would now call a transnational historical exegesis of "the role of Negro slavery and the slave trade in providing the capital, which financed the Industrial Revolution in England and of mature Industrial Capitalism in destroying the slave system." His was primarily a study of British economic history chronicling the rise and fall of Mercantilism and of Monopoly. And therefore he positioned it as a corrective to approaches to slavery and its dissolution that foregrounded then-contemporary notions of racism and its correlate, anti-racist activism.
	Indeed, his short foray into the "inhumanity of the slave system and the humanitarianism, which destroyed that system," which only occurs in the last 30 pages of the book, demonstrates that Abolitionists did not advocate for emancipation until 1823. And then, only due to the "persecution of the missionaries in the Colonies." In fact, Williams goes to great lengths to demonstrate Abolitionist's contradictory sensibilities by showing their support of East Indian and Brazilian sugar after Emancipation in the West Indies. And he also really goes after the Quakers, as well. Which is, for us in Pennsylvania, a big social and moral force, and he shows in this book that in fact, they were very slow to embrace Abolitionism as well. 
	Famously, it's only within the last 10 pages of the book that he actually addresses slave resistance. His text, therefore, is geared towards arguing that the primary forces responsible for Emancipation were economic. Thus demonstrating the bankruptcy to European claims to moral superiority and legitimate governance and making a critical argument for independence. His concern did not lie primarily with vindicating the agency, organizational skills, or revolutionary leadership of those deemed incapable of such traits, though in a footnote Williams does direct readers to James' "Black Jacobins", a text that for him corrected the historical distortion of not addressing the role of slaves in the abolition of slavery. 
	Indeed, James' agenda in this other classic historical text was to argue against the prevailing idea that Black people were not competent to govern themselves by showcasing Toussaint Louverture's skills as a strategist and a leader. Much has been written about the context for James' ideological formation and therefore for his elaboration of this tale in "Black Jacobins." A Trotskyite, James, like many other Black Communists during the inter-war period, was disgruntled by Stalin's turn away from Internationalism and the growing focus on expanding Socialist bureaucracy within the context of nation states.
	For James, the collapse of Internationalism, coupled with the rise of Fascism in Europe, exposed the bankruptcy both of liberal democratic western states and of the Communist international. Moreover, a growing pan-Africanism, after Italy's two attempts at colonizing Ethiopia in 1895 and 1935, had many intellectuals galvanized toward the anti-Imperialist agitation and critical discussions of race and empire. At the same time, within Trinidad itself (James is from Trinidad), this was the period of the establishment of labor unions, and of more general heightened political activity. "Black Jacobins" then was part of a more general Vindicationist struggle to tell the history of Haiti and more broadly, of the West Indies, from the point of view of Haiti, rather than from the point of view of France. One of the incidental effects of this focus correlates with Williams' project. That is to say, it gives some context for the argument that Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was the direct result of economic and social fallout caused by the Haitian Revolution. And not primarily due to the work of Abolitionists.
	James was also interested in the nature of revolution itself, how it happens, what drives people to participate, how people make and break fragile alliances. And this preoccupation reveals his own agenda. Demonstrating that the Haitian revolution was waged by slaves who constructed a revolutionary consciousness by drawing from their own cultural heritage, with plantations here newly conceptualized as proto-Capitalist forums of socio-economic organization, allowed James both to formulate critical aspects of Marx's Theories of Revolutions and historical Materialism. And to counter racist ideas about African culture as backward. 
	By the time the vintage edition of "Black Jacobins" was released in 1963, the real world problem for James would have explicitly become the problem of development in the newly independent nation states of the Caribbean, which would also explain his addition of the famous appendix "From Toussaint Louverture to Fidel Castro." For David Scott, this shift represents a generic transition in frame from Romance, which is his sense of the 1938 Jamesian perspective on revolution to Tragedy; his assessment of imminently faltering nationalist projects. Yet, its also true that throughout the original edition of "Black Jacobins," James grapples in complex ways with the question of how national identity is to be produced, how sovereignty is to be gained, and what it will mean, how freedom can be envisioned and taken, what sacrifices and alliances must be made and how leadership is to be cultivated.
	Of course these questions regarding leadership, sovereignty, freedom and autonomy still urgently confront us today. But Williams and James were part of a more general historiographic trend throughout the Black Atlantic world. A trend that was concerned to vindicate New World Africans' cultural heritage and political potential. While we might understand this project as one that James shared however, it might also be productive to read both of them less in the vein of vindication and more through the lens of deconstruction. 
	William especially is concerned to dismantle European claims to superiority and the sole inheritors of modernity, and argues persuasively and passionately that the West Indies and the Americas more broadly are nothing if not quintessentially modern. James as well, in adding Haiti to a modern revolutionary cannon argues that Black West Indians "from the very start, lived a life that was in its essence a modern life." For both, the New World geopolitical and structural historical frame of analysis allows them, not only, to vindicate the humanity of slaves and former slaves, but also to advocate for reparative solution, which was, for them, the achievement of independence. 
	These two foundational historical texts dismantled prevalent ideas about civilization, humanity and democracy and so provided the fertile ground out of which post-World War II scholars grew other kinds of archives. However, though foundational, their interventions are not actually the earliest examples of Caribbean archive-building. This designation would go to the folklorists and anthologists who, in the first instances collected songs, stories, dance, and texts designed to answer questions about "the exact relationship between the Negro and Bantu races." Seeing this as part of a broader Creole cultural complex that built on work being done in time within the US south and particularly the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. And that sought to develop a program of study that would be geared toward identifying these sorts of Africanisms throughout the circum-Caribbean more generally. 
	These scholars were attempting to understand the expressive cultural practices of African American societies as elements of an African cultural heritage and ultimately as part of what we might now understand to be a repertoire of traditions that were transplanted to and transformed by the New World context. This provided the agenda for Hertzkowitz's 1930s provocation to study "the Negro in the New World," which was to chart culture change over time and space with the intention of vindicating a cultural past living in the present.
	These sorts of folkloric projects seem to stand in almost direct opposition to the work of Williams and James, whose primary aim was to demonstrate the modernity of African descendants in the Americas. Not to place them in relation to some sort of persistent tradition. Even James' assertion that after the revolution, "the Haitian peasantry resuscitated to a remarkable degree the lives they had lived in Africa," is less a validation of specific African-derived practices or a nod to some sort of diasporic memory and more an indication of his more general perspective: that in order to achieve real and true independence, West Indians and especially educational and political elites had to he writes "clear from their minds the stigma that anything African was inherently inferior and degraded." Because, for James, as he wrote, the road to West Indian national identity lay through Africa. And for him to write "West Indian" and "national" in the same sentence there also says something about how he's envisioning these spaces, right? Because the West Indies is not a nation state it's a regional formulation.
	The New World analytic framework of early 20th century folklorists however, places them in a structurally sympathetic relationship with James and Williams' projects. Later observers of folklore would more to approximate a more Jamesian position in their elaboration of a more general post-Colonial and intellectual political revisionism of the place of Black West Indians in the modern world. Scholars like Kamau Brathwaite and Sylvia Winter, building on Jean Prismeur's reevaluation and affirmation of African-derived folklore in Haiti, as the necessary foundation for nationalist development, cultural self-esteem, et cetera, within the context of US occupation, argued against the notion that a process of acculturation is what characterized Caribbean societies. 
	Their view, instead, was that the dominant European sector, often absent, did not provide a cultural and social scaffolding to which dominated Africans had to acclimatize, but that Afro-West Indians, in maintaining, reconstructing and transforming their own cultural practices, especially those having to do with land use and religious expression, underwent a cultural process of indigenization that rooted them to the New World. And this, now, is being taken up by contemporary groups who are not what, I think, most people wold consider to be indigenous populations in the West Indies, but are claiming indigenaety through international social movements sponsored by organizations like the UN etc. And so, becoming part of these more global politically engaged groups, Rastafari is one example of a group that is now trying to claim indigenous status within Jamaica for Jamaica. On the basis of having transformed or having built the only New World religion and having transformed practices related to land and land-use, right? 
	So, they go to meetings and other native populations look at them. They're like, "What are you doing here? You're trying to co-opt our movement." So, it's complex.
	For these scholars it was the African heritage embedded within the folk culture of the West Indian slaves that should be seen as the basis for cultural creativity and thus developed as modern, national cultures. The tension between the perspectives of James and Williams and these folk-based nationalisms is one that is ultimately rooted in a vision of what constitutes the appropriate sphere of for political action. 
	For scholars like James and later Fanon and E. Franklin Frazier, in usurping the struggle for self-determination from the working classes who rose up to challenge Colonialism, the nationalist Bourgeoisie reasserted Colonial paradigms and hierarchies while dressing up nationalism in the clothing of culture. It was, nevertheless, this project that dominated the immediate post-independence period. And with a number of extraordinary exceptions, both scholars and activists turned their attention to the space of the nation state. 
	This meant that scholarly archiving within Caribbean Studies began to primarily serve the purpose of validating the particularities of national histories and cultural practices rooted in specific places rather than maintaining a focus on the space of the region in relation to complex global processes. 
	Of course, historians and folklorists have not been the only scholars to set themselves the task of re-thinking and recreating archives. James himself ends the 1963 appendix to "Black Jacobins" with a nod toward novelists. Chroniclers of the West Indian national identity and, there it is again, that coupling of West Indian and national. And indeed, literary scholars have been concerned to both excavate and challenge cannons of national and regional literatures throughout the Caribbean. As well as to reconsider what constitutes literature in the first place. Anthropologists have also played a significant role in how we archive our sociocultural realities and our political rationalities. For these scholars, as for both Brathwaite and Winter, it has been critical to demonstrate both to an Imperial reading public and to an incipient national one, that the cultural stuff related to religious ideology, ritual practice, dance, movement and folk tales was not, as Europeans would have had it, a remnant of backward Heathen thinking and therefore evidence that former slaves were unsophisticated, uncivilized and ultimately unready for independence. But should instead be thought of as the foundation for national cultures throughout the region. 
	The African derivation of a number of ritual and social practices had continued to be of interest to ethnographers, and especially to those working on issues related to religious and spiritual practice and to a degree music. Many of these scholars, however, have sought to work beyond the frameworks of acculturation and tracking Africanisms and toward an analysis of the ways notions of Africa and slavery are constructed to serve particular narratives of uprootedness, belonging, identity, and legitimacy. 
	Additionally, the extensive anthropological literature regarding family formation that developed after the West Indies-wide labor riots in the late 1930s, created an archive that ended up, on some level, countering the West India Royal Commission's claims that the West Indian family structure was dysfunctional. Characterized by high rates of illegitimate births, "loose family organization" and "careless upbringing of children." For the authors of this report, dysfunctional families were seen to have generated a lack of economic productivity and motivation and therefore also a lack of ability to participate politically in an engaged and thoughtful way. And obviously there are similarity with what ultimately becomes the "culture of poverty" discourse in the US in the 1960s, spurring Linden Johnson's War on Poverty. 
	The report, ultimately recommended a movement towards independence for the West Indian Colonies as well as the establishment of an Office of Colonial Development and Welfare, led by Thomas Simey, who was appointed in 1945 as the Social Welfare Advisor for Jamaica. This office was charged not only with seeing to improvements in housing, education, public health and land resettlement, but also with fostering what they saw as more responsible parenting and sexual restraint. 
	So it's accompanied, also, by a mass marriage movement that lated maybe for years where long-time couples were encouraged to come and get married and many of those couples, ironically or perhaps not so ironically, broke up after these marriages happened, which led people to understand that, actually, marriage means something different for differently located people within a population.
	Simey also wrote a survey of social conditions in Jamaica called "Welfare and Planning in the West Indies," and this set the pattern for future family studies by delineating types of "mating practices," and that's what they were actually called. And by arguing that there seemed to be a close correlation between color, occupation or economic level, and family type. These findings were echoed, though modified, in various ways by scholars whom Simey invited to study social conditions in the region, including Edith Clark and Madeline Carr, whose 1952 study was also influence by the Functionalist, psychologically-oriented studies of family life in the United States at that time.
	The context within which these studies were conducted was one in which people were captivated by both the possibilities and challenges offered up by impending political independence. And though many of these early scholars reproduced the ideology that the most appropriate family form was a cohabitation nuclear unit. They also ended up creating an archive of additional forms and these for them were linked to socioeconomic underdevelopment. These archive vindicated lower class West Indian actors because they were recognized as having an underlying organization and utility rather than merely standing as examples of failure to achieve hegemonic middle class norms. 
	The cataloging of family structure, therefore, provided evidence to make a claim that West Indians were indeed ready for independence because they had a number of systematic ways to organize the economic and political lives of their communities. 
	After independence, additional archives emerged that, like the history and anthropology of the pre-independence era, were sometimes also vindicationist, but that moved beyond a critique of Colonialism and its legacies to also implicate the nationalist state. I'm thinking here, especially, of the immediately post-independence emergence of an archive of Women's lives that was generated by feminist scholars located within and beyond the University of the West Indies System. The Women in the Caribbean Project, for example, and the volumes that emerged from it were deigned to counter popular perceptions of Caribbean women as overbearing matriarchs. Again, the concern with the female-headed household that we hear also in the United States. And they were also geared toward debunking the lingering concerns about Caribbean familial disfunction, on the other hand. 
	In a similar vein, sistren theater collectives, "Lionheart Gal: A Collection of Stories," was published in order to demonstrate the gendered effects of development. Both of these projects countered dominant images of women and illuminate the ways more general economic and political processes have redounded to women's lives and therefore the wellbeing of entire communities. 
	These archival bodies were deigned to contend with the present by historicising it. By generating evidence that could both counter the old, racist epistemologies and serve as foundations for new, more libratory claims. This has had the effect, across the disciplines, of dismantling enduring tropes: Black people are unfit to lead, Black people create dysfunctional families, Black people are hyper-sexual, Black people don't have a valuable cultural legacy. Initially, the impetus for this archive creation was nationalist in scope even as its analytic lens was rooted in a more global systems approach. That is, it's had to do with assembling evidence in order to make a claim for the strength and validity of Caribbean societies as autonomous and legitimately sovereign. Seeing the achievement of national independence as a form of reparative justice. 
	The Feminist critique of development literature on the other hand, began to highlight the extent to which the inequalities that were foundational to the Imperial era, persisted in the Nationalist period. Especially when development economists were lauding the growth that was being generated at the time by tourism and the Beauxite industry during the 1960s. The Women in the Caribbean Project and the Sistren Archives therefore, alongside a longer popular tradition of Ethiopianism and Black Power, called into question the extent to which the vindication of British West Indian people through the achievement of independence in and of itself could be a form of reparations. 
	Moreover, while the scholarship emerging during this period may perhaps have been vindicationist without the global geopolitical frame, it could not be reparative. It could not challenge a popular and sometimes academic assertion that solutions to macroeconomic problems should be pursued through transformations in people's cultural practices and beliefs and therefore could not deconstruct the enduring tropes about Black people globally. To which I will now add one more: Black people are violent. Or, more specifically, Black people have a culture of violence.
	Violence, of course, has become one of the primary issues confronting both Caribbean states and American cities. Jamaica consistently stands with Columbia, South Africa, Honduras and El Salvador as countries with the highest per capita murder rates in the world and instances of assault throughout the Caribbean are significantly higher than the world average, with kidnapping becoming a growing phenomenon, especially in Trinidad and Guyana. The region also has the highest per capita lethal police shooting rates globally. 
	Post independence violence however is an unwieldy research topic. And it's archives obviously don't lend themselves easily to a nationalist vindicationist position. In part, this is because violence tends to be transnational in scope even if it's often analyzed as a national phenomenon. It's tricky, therefore to pinpoint the ways violence could serve a nationalist goal. Though in Jamaica, there are these constant Jeremiads against the way political violence has been institutionalized, right? So, this idea that if we call for the end of the patron-client relationships that create links between political representatives and people in poor communities in downtown Kingston, then that will solve Jamaica's development problems. When, of course, it's implicated in much broader arrangements of international drug trade and arms trades and other forms of corruption that move way, way beyond these small spaces.
	Also, with respect to violence, its difficult to identify the body to which to present evidence and make claims. And also to determine the sorts of vindication sought after and the kinds of repair envisioned. And finally, the daily experience of living with violence or, the threat of violence, is needless to say, demoralizing and devastating.
	But, what if we applied the same impetus: evidence generation, claim making, vindication, and perhaps, ultimately, repair to the study of violence that we have to the study of slavery, governance, family formation and expressive cultural practices? How might an archive of violence help us to understand our past, our present, our potential futures and the relationships among them? How might it serve as a counterpoint for racist assessments of violent behaviors, actions and discourses? And finally, would a comprehensive archive of violence prevent us from reproducing the sorts Imperialist and Nationalist myopia that led scholars to exclude particular populations from both cultural and political citizenship during and beyond the Nationalist period? 
	So, over the past year or so, I've been thinking through some of these questions collaboratively with [Junior Gabu Waterburn 00:36:46] who was the music director on the film that Christie was talking about, "Bad Friday." And Dion Baugh who's a Jamaican liberation psychologist whose now teaching at Antioch College. And together, we're working on a project called "Tivoli Stories:" a multimedia art installation and social memory project addressing the state of emergency that was declared in West Kingston, Jamaica in May 2010. This incursion, which was enable the security forces to apprehend Christopher "Dudus" Coke who had been ordered for extradition to stand trial in the United States on charges related to drug and gun trafficking, resulted in the death of at least 73 civilians at the hands of the security forces. 
	People in the community say it's ore like over 200 and that bodies were burned in order to diminish the official death count, but there still hasn't been a list of the dead that's been released. This is almost four years ago. 
	Despite the immediate activities of various civil society organizations such as Jamaicans for Justice and the Jamaican Civil Society Coalition, it took almost three years for the office of the public defender to submit an interim report to parliament regarding the conduct of the security forces. While the report calls for an inquiry that would hold accountable those who were responsible for the operation, community members still feel that their stories haven't been fully heard. "Tivoli Stories," thus, is designed to provide a platform through which participating Tivoli Gardens community members can recount their experiences during May and June of 2010 and name and publicly memorialize the loved ones they lost. 
	We've been interested not only in what community members narratives tell us about what they experiences during the state of emergency. But also about how their stories can provide some insights into the more general underlying conditions that actually produced these experiences. In other words, by listening to people recount what happened to them and what the effects have been, we get a sense of the everyday forms of structural violence that both provide the foundation for exceptional eruption and shape how they experience the aftermaths. 
	We've also been interested in what their narratives might tell us about how people experience temporality. And for us it's clear that the narratives of the state of emergency always contain the sediments of what has happened before. But, what I believe is especially compelling in this case, is that it invites us to think beyond the causal dimensions of this kind of structural historical analysis and notions of cyclical time. I think a case can be made that community members narratives show us that time during exceptional moments is experienced as out of joint. Not just because it's multi-directional, nor merely because it reflects the multiple entanglements and palimpsests of events and experiences that, as they layer on top of each other, create the conditions for the haunting of the present. 
	I want to suggest instead that, time can be experienced as simultaneous with all times existing at once and potentially available for interpenetration. So, I'm going to share with you a couple of examples to help flesh out these claims. But, I should first say something about the nature of political violence in Jamaica. 
	Most academic ... who knows about this? I mean, most people I think, in the US think about Jamaica and they're thinking about holiday, and a beach vacation, some rum, coconut water, yeah. That's because that's the image that's presented, right? And in fact when these moments of political violence really escalate, the government does a lot of work to keep it under the radar so as not to disrupt the tourism industry, because that's the main contributor to the economy. But most academic, journalistic and popular observers of the contemporary Jamaican situation attribute the high rates of murder and violent crime to the various failures of the Jamaican economy and to the development of political partisanship during the mid-20th century.
	When the People's National Party, which was the first political party in the Jamaica Labor Party, were building their constituencies in the 1960s and 70s, already existing gangs became tied to political leaders. And political partisanship became more directly linked to the distribution of state resources with housing foremost among these. 
	Tivoli Gardens, for example, was conceived in the mid 1960s by the then-Minister of Welfare Development and Housing for the Jamaica Labor Party, Edward Seaga. And Seaga was, in fact, the Member of Parliament for this community for 40 years before he retired for politics. Also the Prime Minister. Everybody who's been the Member of Parliament for the Tivoli Gardens community was also the head of the Jamaica Labor Party, so either leader of the Opposition or Prime Minister. His vision was of a planned community in the emergent tradition of low-income communities that were being developed in the United States. One that would serve as a model for community building and self sufficiency where both renters and home-owners would have access to proper schools, shopping facilities, recreational activities and social services without having to leave their neighborhoods. And sometimes these become like fortresses. 
	To build it, however, the shanty town and Rastafari settlements, populated largely by rural migrants, recently arrived in Kingston, were razed leaving thousands without shelter. These denizens were replaced by those selected to reside in Tivoli; the majority of whom were members of the Jamaica Labor Party. Later, the Opposition Party would also develop politically homogenous neighborhoods. And, as these communities became militarized and ideologically polarized, these garrisons became central to what became known as Tribal Politics. By the 1980s with the advent of Crack Cocaine, these downtown neighborhoods were also rife with internal turf wars in which rival gang members violently policed their areas. This is not an unfamiliar story, right? 
	It's this complex layering of political turf and drug and gun trade violence that sill plagues Kingston, and Jamaica as a whole. Because residents in garrison communities operate with a profound distrust of the police, and because the state has typically relinquished its responsibilities to persons living in these garrisons, the Dons or area leaders become the political authorities in the area. These Dons not only mediate links between formal and informal economic and political enterprise but also perform state-like functions such as security, the mediation of domestic and other disputes, and determination of guilt and punishment, help with access to health care and education, and sponsorship of community events such as beauty pageants, Christmas treats, street dances, etc. So, violence in this context is organized jointly, though sometimes towards different ends, between the Dons and the political directorate. This is the context that structures the everyday worlds of those community members in Tivoli Gardens with whom we've bene working. 
	So, I'm going to introduce you to Sean Boen who has lived in Tivoli Gardens for all of his 33 years. Policemen picked up Sean three days into the state of emergency and he, along with other men, was taken out of the house where he lived with his baby-mother, and son and mother, to one of the roadblocks that community members had built to keep the security forces out. And he was ordered to empty the sandbags. Then, a truck pulled up and carried them to a nearby primary school where their hands were tied behind their backs and they were taken into the bathroom.
Sean Boen :	 [Jamaican Creole 00:44:54]
Dr. Thomas:	They were held for about three hours in the bathroom and when another truck drove up they were counted off and told to get in the back, 25 to 30 men at a time. They were taken to a local corporate headquarters where they joined hundreds of other men. And as they walked into the premises, Sean noticed soldiers on top of the buildings with masks over their faces. Looking up at them earned him several smacks across his back with a board. And he saw men lined up "neat in a row," as he said, on their knees. One of the police told them," No Passa-Passa, not keeping today you know. So right here, right now, Passa-Passa go keep." And Passa-Passa's the weekly dance party that's hosted by "Dudas" Coke on the main road bordering Tivoli Gardens.
	So, their taunting them, basically. 
Sean Boen :	[Jamaican Creole 00:46:09]
Dr. Thomas:	After about six or seven hours, anther truck came and they were told to get in. 
Sean Boen :	[Jamaican Creole 00:46:37]
Dr. Thomas:	At that point, the truck turned into the parking lot for the National Arena, where Sean said he saw around three or four thousand men as well as young, teenage boys. He was kept there for several days for processing, during which time he was unable either to bathe, so you can imagine the smell, he said, or sleep. 
	Sean's uncle came for him in a taxi when he was released and he went to his step-mother and father's house uptown. And the geography of Kingston is also a class geography. So we say Downtown is below Torrington Bridge and it's where the majority of working class and poor people live. And Uptown, though many working class people live Uptown also but in these pockets of very lovely middle class and upper class neighborhoods. 
	Sean didn't go back to Tivoli Gardens for another two and a half months when eventually, he returned to his baby-mother, mother, and children. Prior to the state of emergency, Sean had a CD stand that did good business with people coming into the community for stage shows and for Passa-Passa. With this, he was able to make enough money to enjoy himself and provide for his family and his children. After he returned to the community, however, he couldn't get the business going again because Passa-Passa was shut down and visitors weren't going to Tivoli Gardens anymore. And in fact, there's seven entrances to the community, two of which are actually open, and there's a police truck that's parked at one of the entrances 24/7. 
	After about a year and half, he got a job at one of the new supermarkets on one of the big highways. What is clear from Sean's and other men's narratives, is that, within the context of garrison communities, all male youth (and Youth is a flexible category, like 15 to 35, basically) are considered criminals or potential criminals. While the security forces also took older men from the community, these elders weren't physically terrorized to the extent that young men were. This reflects the structural violence of the garrison system, or Donmanship, whereby young men's options are limited to either legitimate work that they can obtain through their links to a Don (because these opportunities are typically generated through State contacts that flow to the community from the MP to the Don) illegitimate activists work for the Don himself. And by activist I mean political activism, so working to make sure your party stays in power by whatever means necessary. Or through self employment like driving a taxi or running a shop. And these latter opportunities are, however, are also typically mediated in some way by the local authority of the Don. 
	And I make these points not to demonize garrison Dons, but to suggest that their leadership is exploited by elected politicians and therefore by broader political norms that:
	1) Since the inception of Nationalist politics with universal adult suffrage in 1944, has tolerated a parallel political structure, allowing elective representatives to avoid responsibility for both partisan politician violence and their involvement in illicit, international trades in drugs and arms. 
	And 2) Creates the illusion that we are not all, as citizens of Jamaica and North America, complicit in these patterns. 
	These points that are also made by Tony Harriet, who argues that not only is there a partnership between those engaged in informal and illicit criminal networks and politicians but also that sections of the Jamaican middle class, are a core part of the criminal political linkage on both the PNP and JLP sides of the political divide. And that they, therefore, have a stake in the maintenance of the status-quo. 
	This raises the question of whether elites, or party members in Jamaica have the politician will to take on garrison Dons, given that most people living in garrisons also revere them and depend on them. It also leads us to ask whether people living in garrisons are able and willing to give up and efficient, although authoritarian, form of everyday governance, for national bureaucratic systems of governance that are often slow, ineffective, corrupt and discriminatory, and that they have routinely experiences as trigger-happy, and to a degree, genocidal.
	So this brings me to the point about temporality. And here, I want to briefly introduce Nadine Sutherland who was born in 1968. Nadine moved from Maxfield Avenue at the age of 13 to live in Tivoli Gardens with her grandmother where she's been ever since. And the first question that we asked her was, what do you remember about the days surrounding the 24th of May 2010? And here's her response:
Nadine :	I remember 2008, 13th of January. I remember I was at turn for census percent on my godmother's house when I hear a lot of noise. And when I look through the door I saw lot of soldier coming, 'bout that direction. Couple hours about, in 3:30, going to 4:00. I get a phone call and said, 5 men died at Keith Avenue. But to my surprise, when I look and saw my son was in it, at the age of 18 year old. Just graduated from [inaudible 00:53:00] high school. I went to Kingston Public Hospital just to identify my son when the Jeep comin' round with the 5 men, just the shoes. I said, he was have on a Gap prepper, and an Old Navy plaid, blue shirt set, and a sky blue gainsey. And I remember, lady turn to me and say, "don't go over there, don't go over there." And I said, "Well to see my son there, see him there." She said, "You can't identify a person by the feet alone."
	And I start describe the clothes and tell her, he have on a chain round him neck. And I wouldn't mind if she could take it off for me. And she turned to me and said, "Alright." She would go and identify him for me. And when she look up, she said, "Yes, that's your son for true."
Dr. Thomas:	I lost a part at the end of that where she says, "Come back 2010, the 23rd the 24th of May, I lose my two nephews," with whom she lived. So here, Nadine begins her story of the 2010 state of emergency with her son's killing during an incident in 2008. So, she's weaving these two moments together not in the manner of providing a background to current events; a causal progression from one to the other. But instead in a way that suggests the compression of time with all killings bleeding into each other. All becoming parts of one immediate story. 
	The extreme violence of the state's actions in 2010 produces a multiplicity of time in which the loss of Nadine's son and the loss of her nephews become simultaneous events. By this I mean to suggest something different from the story that many psychologists would tell. For them, this sense of urgency and immediacy might reflect a trauma that's not fully processed. And therefore always prone to resurfacing in relation to new provocations. 
	What I'm trying to get at here is that the kind of "bare life" that's produced through and within these moments suspends the possibility of both linear and cyclical time. And, therefore, opens alternative analytic spaces within which we might more clearly see the entanglements that matter in the world. 
	This urges us to look at the connections among moments of extreme violence. To look for the priors coexisting with the present across contexts. My contention, here, is that they temporal multiplicity generated by extreme state violence dislodges progress narratives and lays bare both the exclusions perpetuated through liberal rule, and the strategies through which these strategies are produced and reproduced. In this case, these strategies are the international trades in drugs and guns, patron-client wholistic political relations, corruptions, and racially-motivated disenfranchisement. 
	If we position these strategic entanglements not as context as history, but as producing an existing and multiple and simultaneous temporalities, temporalities akin to the non-unitary versions of time studied by neurologists like David Eagleman or the notions of imaginary time proposed by physicists like Stephen Hawking. We can gain greater insights into the way archives of violence reveal political temporalities. 
	In the case that I've talked about here, the narratives we've been collecting call into question what citizenship has meant in post-independence Jamaica. And tell us something about how it's been constituted over time. They also situate the meaning of belonging to this specific nation state within the messy contexts of transnational circulation of people, of world views, of informal economic industries and the global institutional framework that sustains them. An approach to temporality that seriously this sense of simultaneity would rescue it from the hegemony of liberalism and its political teleologies of progressive time and would untether it from popular and scientific notions of Evolution. 
	It would also suggest that we should be more skeptical about narratives of perfectibility like the one that we hear in this country about Obama's election signifying some kind of post-racial utopia. Understanding the experience of time and exceptional moments as multiple and simultaneous instead encourages us to delve into the ways these sorts of archives can elucidate the various, and messy entanglements at multiple levels of scale that constitute our socioeconomic and political worlds. It gives us a sense of how people produce themselves as citizens and develop mechanism to deal with the various forms of structural violence with which they are confronted in the day-to-day. 
	Careful ethnographic attention, combined with deeply historicised contextualization, can help us to take these expressions seriously and to map them as part of a more general, post-Colonial, post-Civil Rights critique, rather than, as a phenomenon that feels to many like little more than either intensified slackness or political hopelessness. It might also open avenues for thinking about projects of repair since it challenges the cultural violence trope through nuanced, engaged, and bodied structural historical and transnational accounts of the contemporary situation rather than through a strictly Vindicationist perspective privileging the governmental real of the state and the body of the nation. 
	What I've been trying to get at, here, is that the archives that we develop as the result of scholarly and artistic engagement, might provide us with a different register through which to make visible actual processes of social change as well as the creative and dynamic ways people make new worlds out of their own bare life. 
	Archiving, thus, becomes less the development of a list of bounded traits, practices, statistical indicators that make us who we are and more an articulation of processes that both constrain and open up the range of futures that are possible at any given moment, both within and beyond the space of the nation state. This, after all, is the strength of contemporary Africana Studies. Neither narrowly area studies nor merely identity movement, the intellectual power of Africana Studies, lies in the transnational perspective we emphasize in our analyses of issues confronting African and African-diasporic populations across the globe. 
	In other words, rather than a framework that highlights Black folk here and there, or Black folk now and then, our forte rests in showing how "here and there" and "then and now" form a relation through which we can understand the specificities of political and economic, social and cultural, and symbolic and spiritual practice in space and time in ways that ultimately destabilize Western categories of understanding the world. It is this kind of perspective that can help us to turn the modern Liberalist project on its head to undo taken-for-granted notions of Democracy, freedom, community, and to illuminate connections between the world of the political and the global processes that shape our lives today. 
	Thank you.