Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Mary Seacole's autobiography has been read as a feminist performance as well as a paradigmatic Victorian travel narrative. While these assessments address important aspects of the memoir, neither affords the author's Jamaicanness significant space in its analysis. This essay addresses the silences left when Wonderful Adventures is removed from its Jamaican context, then offers a reading of it from this perspective. Grounded in histories that document nineteenth‐century Jamaican social categories, the article analyses Seacole's book using Caribbean literary perspectives that explore raced, ‘coloured’ and geographically‐located identities. The result is an interpretation of the memoir that offers insight into Jamaica's Creole population, its status and colour politics, and identity concerns. All have been expertly shaped by Seacole's rhetorical manoeuvres.     

The strange case of ‘John Black’ and ‘Mr Hyde’: constructing migrating Jamaicans as (un)worthy nationals

This paper examines how migrating Jamaicans were constructed as ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’ of Jamaican diasporic membership in the early years of statehood, to demonstrate the role of nationalist cultural repertoires in constructing particular diasporic imaginaries. I conduct a discourse analysis of Jamaica's national newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, between 1962 and 1966, a period encompassing crucial transitions in Jamaican migration movements and from colony to statehood. I argue that tropes of respectability present in Afro‐creole nationalist ideology form the cultural repertoires used to distinguish migrants' actions as worthy or unworthy of national membership. These distinctions specify who ‘counts’ as part of the diaspora and how migrants of different social positions may claim and articulate their membership.     

Governmentality,Diaspora Assemblages and the Ongoing Challenge of “Development”

Abstract: Drawing on governmentality debates, I argue that skilled members of the Jamaican diaspora are becoming important actors in an ongoing development strategy to extend the rationality of the market into everyday social relations and institutions. Diaspora members are imagined by states and development institutions to be ideal development partners because of their access to potentially lucrative business, knowledge and capital networks, and their desire to direct them towards socially transformative ends. But, as I shall demonstrate, efforts to incorporate skilled émigrés into national development plans raise important questions about the entanglements between diaspora strategies, state power and enduring local patterns of uneven development. Rather than a space of social transformation, diaspora can also function as a space of stasis that reproduces rather than transforms such patterns. By examining Jamaica's emerging diaspora strategy, I examine not only the governmental role that diaspora groups are increasingly beginning to play, but also their potential to support or disrupt the class, gender and racial asymmetries that have historically governed flows of wealth, opportunity and power across the island.     

Books received

A chamber of commerce in Kingston was a response to defects in local projections of the British imperial state. It met immediate needs to organise naval convoys and liaise with the local naval commander in the face of breakdown of effective government resulting from conflicts between Governor John Dalling and Jamaica's Assembly. The efforts of collective action were mitigated by being shared across a range of activities that the chamber either developed or collaborated in providing: convoys, negotiations over naval impressment, a coffee room, help with credit and specie, marine insurance and response to the disastrous hurricane of October 1780. The chamber is a significant illustration of the growing development of voluntary formal rules-based business interest representation in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Although short-lived, it is important as an early example of chamber bodies that later helped the management of empire and covered all its major cities. It shows these locally based bodies seeking new opportunities to represent commercial interests directly, rather than through traditional intermediaries, and beginning to fill gaps to support the development of trade.     

Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development,Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions

This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of “improvement” and communities whose land use practices contradict these logics. Since the 1970s, “improvement” has meant establishing different types of tree plantations on wastelands to ostensibly provide energy security. These projects have dispossessed land users by enclosing common property lands and by providing forms of energy incommensurate with local needs, a trend I term “energy dispossessions”. Factors enabling energy dispossessions include the government's increased attempts to establish public–private partnerships to carry out “improvement” and a “field of observation” constructed to obscure local livelihoods. Unveiling these logics will help to problematize and contest future iterations of wasteland development.     

A Critical Note on ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’

Almost a decade ago, Fareed Zakaria published an article claiming that ‘illiberal democracies’, i.e., countries combining the presence of free and fair elections with the absence of constitutional liberalism, were on the rise in the present; and were beckoning as a new species of democracy in the future. In this research note, I revisit and reassess Zakaria's claim. On the basis of a simple conceptual critique – that it is logically necessary to treat the two components of liberal democracy as different attributes, conceptually independent of each other – I reach an equally simple empirical conclusion: illiberal democracies were not really on the rise in the 1990s and they have decreased rapidly in the 2000s. The latter finding even comes out using Zakaria's own, arguably flawed, conceptualization.     

Estate youth and complicated migration in Malaysia's oil palm plantations: the emotions of leaving and connecting back

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the emotional relationship young Tamil Indians have with oil palm plantations they are leaving behind or have left behind. Working in a small town in Malaysia, as well as in a large estate, we show how communal and individual aspirations of migration shape young people's mobility. While young people recognize the poverty and marginalization of plantation life, they continue to be emotionally and affectually connected to plantations through socio-cultural and spiritual practices. Post-migration we show how youth maintain estate connections, and argue that the pull back towards plantations is contrary to state-sponsored ideologies of modernization. Not all young people feel the same pull; many try to distance themselves from their estate roots through consumption and other social practices. Responding to calls for researchers emotions to be present in youth research, the paper also briefly reflects how adult emotions shape our understanding of young people's emotions of migration.     

The Secularization of Providential Order: F. A. Hayek's Political-Economic Theology

In this article I argue that the concept of spontaneous order that underlies F. A. Hayek's political-economic thought is a secularized version of classical liberalism's understanding of order as providential. In Adam Ferguson's writings on history and social order, from which Hayek draws the notion of spontaneous order, the classical liberal paradigm reveals its intimate connection to providential theology. It is in three features of Ferguson's thought, namely his understanding of order, the politics of laissez-faire he dictates, and his providential optimism, that a providential theology reveals itself. Hayek's restatement of liberalism involves the secularization of this notion of order, which forces him both to ground his thought in a different ontology and to formulate a different politics. By contrasting Hayek's political economy to Ferguson's thought I trace the implications of this secularization. In the conclusion I contend that despite his secularizing gesture, Hayek does not succeed at emptying his understanding of order of all theological traces. Consequently, his notion of “spontaneous order” still carries a distinct theological charge, making it impossible for Hayekian political economy to countenance the destruction wrought by markets.     

Agricultural Justice,Abnormal Justice? An Analysis of Fair Trade's Plantation Problem

A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. On one side of this debate is Fair Trade USA, which supports plantation certification. On the other is the retailer Equal Exchange, whose leaders fear that fair trade's longstanding commitment to small farmer cooperatives may be in jeopardy. Drawing on the two organizations’ experiences with tea plantations and cooperatives in Darjeeling, India, as well as my own ethnographic research, I explore how advocates in the global North identify who counts as a legitimate laboring subject of agricultural justice. This debate underscores that social justice in global agriculture is fundamentally multiple—in Nancy Fraser's terms, “abnormal”. The seeming intractability of this debate shows that while the agricultural justice movement has attended to questions of economic distribution and cultural recognition, it must do more to address problems of political representation at national and international scales.     

PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE: THE CARNIVAL AT GREENHAM COMMON*

In this paper I examine reactions to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. I argue that the media, local and government responses to the Greenham women reveal geographical assumptions about “normality.” The peace women, by living away from home, on the edge of a military (and therefore masculine) establishment challenged accepted patriarchal understandings of “women's place” and were thus described as “out of place.” More specifically, the women were referred to in terms of hygiene, inadequate culinary ability, sexuality and hysteria. Each of these implies a gendered form of disorder in which social, cultural and geographical boundaries have been transgressed. These reactions are placed within the context of Bakhtin's formulations of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism. I suggest that the women, through their highly visible opposition to a patriarchal military establishment, represent a threat to neatly bounded official culture which finds its geographical expression in the formal territories of the courtroom and the air base. In conclusion this illustration is placed in the wider context of cultural/political protest. I argue that transgression, while serving to reveal normally assumed hegemonic landscapes, is restrained by already existing boundaries.     

Epilogue

This epilogue reflects on five questions raised by the papers in this collection. First, I ask ‘what are women's groups’. Second, I consider the centrality of Christianity in women's groups in colonial and contemporary epochs and review debates about how women's agency has been seen in becoming a Christian and in the perduring reality of Christian commitment. Third, I ponder the expansion of agendas from ‘welfare to empowerment’ and the proposition that even groups with conservative agendas can empower women. Fourth, I review the relation between self‐help and help from others and the associated issue of divergent local and global agendas. Fifth, I consider the differences between women grounded in age, rank, and class, highlighted by several authors. I caution against seeing such differences as irredeemable, irrevocable divisions. In conclusion, I pose the sensitive question of the relation between Western feminist scholars and the diversity of Melanesian women and espouse Teresia Teaiwa's value of Oceanic fluidarity rather than solidarity in coalitions of women.     

EXCLUDING THE POOR FROM LOW INCOME HOUSING PROGRAMS: THE ROLES OF STATE AGENCIES AND USAID IN JAMAICA*

This paper investigates why low-income housing agencies in Jamaica do not accomplish their self-imposed progressive mandates to assist large numbers of poor people. To expose what produces gaps between policy and practice, the analysis focuses on how housing programs are organized, both in Jamaica's two largest state agencies and in USAID. The crucial organizational features include the housing agencies' sources of funding, reliance on the private sector, and associated motives and interests. Among the three agencies, a set of inter-related forces block low income access to housing assistance: (1) most of the policy influences of international development agencies such as USAID, (2) the pervasiveness and increased penetration of market logic into low-income housing programs, (3) state agency bureaucratization and careerism, and (4) an elitist neglect of the housing needs of the poor. Prejudices against the poor based on the belief that they do not repay housing loans are not justified by empirical evidence, much less by the fact that the programs were explicitly created to improve their housing conditions.     

Electoral Nationalisation,Dealignment and Realignment: Australia and the US, 1900-88

Has the behaviour of Australian voters become more 'nationalised' over time? Kemp (1978) and to a lesser extent Aitkin (1968) conclude that it has. Using more precise and comprehensive measures of nationalisation, a more standard (variance-components) statistical method and longer and directly comparable series of data, I qualify this conclusion heavily and place it on a firmer theoretical footing. I find that voting behaviour has generally been more spatially uniform in Australia than in the US, and that a sustained homogenisation-but not a 'nationalisation'-has been underway since the realignment of the late 1930s to early 1940s. Exceptionally and continually high levels of party identification, together with class-based alignments (and realignments) of electoral forces, appear to underlie the relatively high spatial uniformity of voting behaviour in Australia.     

Boundary Crossings: Transitions from Childhood to Adulthood

In this paper I argue that the boundary between childhood and adulthood is very difficult to define. Notably, it is blurred by the ambiguous period of 'youth'. I therefore draw upon Beck's theoretical work on individualisation and the life-course, which has been influential in youth research in sociology and youth studies, to provide a framework for reviewing some of the processes through which young people make the transition from childhood to adulthood. In the conclusion I reflect on the need to explore the importance of the different spaces implicit in young people's transitions, and the interconnections between them. I also highlight how distinctions between the states of childhood and adulthood are not clear-cut, nor are transitions a one-off or one-way process. Rather I draw attention to the way that changes associated with growing up may or may not be connected, and may occur simultaneously, serially or not at all. Finally, I point out the limitations of normative models of transition given the way that other social differences such as gender, class and sexuality intersect with the categories children and youth.     

Further Thoughts on the Imperial Endgame and Britain's Dirty Wars

The publication of my book Imperial Endgame: Britain's Dirty Wars and the End of Empire in 2011 provoked many to respond, although not with a criticism that was consistent across the board. In my work, I intentionally did not draw a moral conclusion and took care to present what I considered a balanced account of British decolonisation, without praise or condemnation of past actions. This has made my argument vulnerable from several directions since, as reviewer Ashley Jackson commented, ‘it is rather difficult to know on which side the author's bread is buttered’. This paper is an attempt to bring clarity to my argument and to continue the debate on some of the aspects of Britain's end of empire that my book discussed.     

4. REASON,AGENCY, AND HISTORY: REMARKS ON KANT AND BENJAMIN

This essay begins by determining the nature of Richard Eldridge's project. Referring mainly to writings by Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin, I view his attempt as considering what it involves to be an agent in a historical setting. According to Eldridge, the correct answer will have to involve the right combination of Kant's emphasis on rational self‐determination and Benjamin's account of spontaneous (yet nonrational) self‐transformation. In response to this answer, I suggest that Benjamin's view may not easily lend itself to being made compatible with Kantian thinking. In particular, Benjamin's effort to think experience in terms that do not make any reference to rational self‐determination must be viewed as deeply foreign to Kant's project. I also argue that Kant's third Critique, in particular its conception of reflective judgment, could have provided Eldridge with a view of agency and experience that does not deviate substantially from Kant's project elsewhere. At the end of the essay, I argue that the duality we find in Eldridge's exposition should be viewed as not only related to individuals but to society in general. An attempt to resolve it must involve reflection on how historically constituted social forms create such stark oppositions between reason and its other.     

Truth and reconciliation? The experience of Truth Commissions1

Do truth commissions achieve truth? Do they achieve reconciliation? This article will consider these two questions in turn. I argue that truth commissions have failed to discern and report accurate and complete records of past atrocities, but they are socially and politically purposive. To reach this conclusion requires examining some theoretical concerns about the nature of truth and consideration of the accuracy and completeness of commissions’ reports. I argue that truth commissions do not achieve reconciliation, but they can catalyse it. I develop this argument through examining meanings of reconciliation, its (contested) relationship with truth and issues that complicate and advance its achievement. In this article I differentiate between truth as a product—a commission's report—and truth seeking as a process. I examine the contribution of both product and process to the achievement of truth and reconciliation.