Review of Political life in the wake of the plantation: sovereignty, witnessing, repair

Tka Pinnock
2020 European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies  
members of the armed forces and the police entered the garrison community of Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston to apprehend Christopher 'Dudus' Coke on an extradition warrant. The military-police incursion left "at least seventy-five civilians officially recognized as having been killed" (p. xi). These events -known as the Tivoli Incursion -provide the "impulse for" this monograph in which Thomas attempts "to witness and to archive state violence, and to give some sense of how the practices and
more » ... rformances of state sovereignty -and the attempts to create life alongside, though, and in opposition to them -have changed over time" (p. xiv). Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation is a must-read for those interested in postcoloniality, sovereignty, state violence, and affect theory. In the monograph, Thomas uses post-colonial Jamaica to theorize sovereignty in relation to affect -tracing the relationship between sovereignty, violence and subjectivity. In so doing, she offers a way to examine the constitution of political subjects and subjectivity through the sensory dimensions of sovereignty. This theoretical intervention opens up space to interrogate the affective dimensions of socio-political struggle -how politics has felt at different temporal junctures and the political possibilities that are available at these junctures. Thomas further presents the concepts of witnessing 2.0 -an embodied and moral practice that involves assuming responsibility for contemporary events and repair -an ethical and political practice of justice (p. 2). These conceptual interventions allow readers to understand both every day and moments of exceptional state violence as processes that deeply implicate civil society. Bearing witness to sovereign violence "...produces the need...to probe and acknowledge the extent to which we are complicit in its reproduction and therefore obligated to its transformation" (p. 220). Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation consists of an Introduction, three chapters interspersed with interludes and a coda. Throughout the book, Thomas engages in thick description constructing rich and textured narratives. Further to, she compels the book's audience to engage in a transmedial reading
doi:10.32992/erlacs.10656 fatcat:zddd53cnbnhxxaxam7xqm7cqyq