Spatial Imaginaries of Jamaican Organised Crime

Panels and interactive sessions

Day 1: Monday 11 June

9.15. Organised crime in fiction and (auto)biography

Kim Robinson-Walcott (University of the West Indies, Mona), ‘Legitimate Resistance: Drug Dons and Dancehall DJs as Jamaican Outlaws at the Frontier’

Lucy Evans (University of Leicester), ‘The Yardies Becomes Rudies Becomes Shottas’:

Reworking Yardie Fiction in Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings’

Michael Bucknor (University of the West Indies, Mona), ‘Criminal Intimacies: Psycho-Sexual

Spatialities of Jamaican Transnational Crime in Garfield Ellis’s Till I’m Laid to Rest (and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings)’

• Chair: Rivke Jaffe

11.15. Organised Crime in the Media and Popular Culture

Ronald Cummings (Brock University), ‘The Graveyard’

Jovan Scott Lewis (University of California, Berkeley), ‘The Jamaican Lotto Scam: Crime, Capital, and Citizens Reconfigured’

Sonjah Stanley Niaah (University of the West Indies, Mona), ‘Representing ‘Incarcerated’ Desires and Organised Crime: Vybz Kartel and Tupac Shakur’

• Chair: Lucy Evans

1.45. The Spatial Imaginaries of Organised Crime in Post-2000 Jamaican Films 

Interactive session led by Emiel Martens (University of Amsterdam)

3.15. Film Screening / Q&A

There will be a screening of Storm Saulter’s 2010 feature film Better Mus’ Come, followed by a Q&A with the film’s writer and director (via Skype)

• Chair: Emiel Martens

Day 2: Tuesday 12 June

9.30. Mapping City Spaces

Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University), ‘Gendered City Spaces, Gender Violence and Socio-spatial Maps of Crime in the Fictions of Contemporary Kingston’

Faith Smith (Brandeis University), ‘Dread Intimacies’

Alana Osbourne (University of Amsterdam), ‘On a Walking Tour of Trench Town: Sensing Violence in Downtown Kingston, Jamaica

• Chair: Patricia Noxolo

11.30. Telling True Crime Tales. The Case of the Thom(p)son Twins?

Interactive session led by Karim Murji (University of West London)

1.30. Crime and Visual Culture

Wayne Modest, ‘Aesthetics of Complicity: Contemporary Art and the and the (In)Visibility of Crime in Jamaica’

Patricia Noxolo (University of Birmingham) ‘Exhibiting Caribbean In/Securities’

• Chair: Ronald Cummings

3.30. Visualizing violence: An interactive session on representing crime and protection in Jamaican visual culture

Interactive session led by Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam)

4.15. Concluding discussion

Concluding discussion reflecting on the progress of the project, and future directions for the research.

• Chair: Lucy Evans