Plantalogical Politics: Battling for Space and the Jamaican Constitution
LIVING AT THE BORDERSLINES: ISSUES IN CARIBBEAN SOVEREIGNTY AND DEVELOPMENT, pp. 424-468, Cynthia Barrow-Giles, Don Marshall, eds., Kingston: Ian Randle Press, 2003
14 Pages Posted: 14 Jan 2011 Last revised: 27 Apr 2011
Date Written: March 15, 2001
Abstract
The paper explores the centrality of the plantation in contemporary political realities in Jamaica. This examination is undertaken by looking back in history, in order to make a more Caribbean-centred sense of the present and future. The paper argues that the constitution upholds and legally seals, to a certain extent, the inherited colonial baggage that has to be tackled.
If enslavement and colonialism were established to dehumanise and oppress groups of people on the basis of skin colour for profit, then the most natural human response to enslavement would be to struggle, resist, fight and survive. The conflict created spatial cross fires and tensions among the transplanted people which, since formal independence, have made attempts at integration and consensus exceedingly difficult to achieve. The historical contradictions of this experience and its contemporary manifestations have perpetuated seemingly irreconcilable distortions, contradictions and fragmentations. Taking a cue from George Beckford, Louis Lindsay, Rex Nettleford, Lloyd Best, C. Y. Thomas and other Caribbean scholars of the New World Group, whose studies concentrated on the problematique of development in plantation economies such as Jamaica, I am calling the colonial baggage, ‘plantalogical politics’. Jamaica, being a member of a wide group of neocolonial countries in the Americas, will have similarities and parallels of analysis. Thus this represents one of many perspectives that could be taken. Getting down to specificities, it is the colonial baggage historically enshrined in the Jamaican constitution and its significance in governing its society is what this paper highlights.
Keywords: Jamaican politics, constitutional history, post-colonialism
JEL Classification: Z00
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation