Inside Tenement Time

Suss, Spirit, and Surveillance

By Kezia Page

SERIES: Critical Caribbean Studies

Rutgers University Press

Inside Tenement Time is the first comprehensive treatment of literary and cultural texts on surveillance in the Caribbean. Covering the long historical arc of the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, Inside Tenement Time uses Jamaica as a case study to examine moments of crisis and particular spaces, especially urban yard enclaves and their environs, in the Caribbean encounter with surveillance. Making the argument that the Caribbean situation reveals flexible hegemonies rather than provinces of exclusive control, the book demonstrates the countervailing force of sussveillance and spiritveillance, Afro-Indigenous variations on surveillance. Sussveillance and spiritveillance are exemplars of vernacular arts and sciences that operate at and within the frangible borders of state power, exposing the unique dynamics of surveillance in the region and marshalling the acts of imagination with which it contends. For example, the Smile Jamaica concert of 1976, headlined by reggae Superstar Bob Marley, and the reputedly US government-backed 2010 Tivoli Gardens incursion in West Kingston, both moments that have dramatic, even mythic residue in Caribbean and global memory, are among the real-life events brought into conversation with literary representations of this history.

Inside Tenement Time: Suss, Spirit, and Surveillance is an outstanding and timely work that Caribbeanizes surveillance studies. Its narrative arc is neither triumphant nor tragic; instead, it carefully attends to what is possible (and impossible) for postcolonial states. Donette Francis, author of Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Liter

Kezia Page’s Inside Tenement Time takes us on a rapid, incisive tour across Jamaica’s social and political contours to help explain how power works to maintain hegemony in a small postcolony. Creatively choosing fictional texts, iconic events, and popular cultural movements, she critiques Jamaica's modern history through a powerful set of vignettes and lays a credible foundation for us to conclude that despite the rocky road, the struggle of the subaltern in Jamaica and the Caribbean for a future beyond surveillance and social domination continues and is undaunted. Brian Meeks, author of After the Postcolonial Caribbean: Memory, Imagination, Hope

KEZIA PAGE is an associate professor of English and Africana and Latin American studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. She is the author of Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature: Remitting the Text.

Introduction: Flexible Hegemonies: The Tivoli Incursion and the History of Surveillance in Jamaica

1 In the Shadow of the Wall: Suss and Sussveillance in the Yard Fiction of H. G. de Lisser

2 “The Dungle Is an Obeah Man”: Spiritveillance in The Children of Sisyphus

3 Smile Jamaica, for the Camera: Performance and Surveillance in 1970s Jamaica

4 Bongo Futures after Tivoli: The Reggae Revival and Its Genealogies

Coda

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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