Black Religious Placemaking in the Postcolony: A Case Study of Kingston, Jamaica

This paper puts forward my nascent theory on Black religious placemaking as a strategy of survival and meaning-making on the part of members of a Holiness/Pentecostal church in Tivoli Gardens, an inner city community in Kingston Jamaica. It examines the boundaries of belonging and identity amongst the seven subdivisions that constitute Tivoli Gardens, as Tivoli Gardens itself has largely functioned as an extralegal economy governed by a local don, or enforcer supported by the neoliberal Jamaica Labor Party. The process of Black religious placemaking, I argue, is a fraught and agonistic process that entails shifting solidarities within a postcolonial milieu deeply shaped by underdevelopment and American imperialism. These global processes simultaneously create economic and political instability, enacting chronic precarity and heightened stakes of survival. Employment and religious language, framed by evangelical Christian theology authorizes claims to political and spiritual sovereignty. Religious placemaking, then, is an embodied and ideological act of claiming space and authority to secure human flourishing.

Based on my framework of lived Black religion, which builds on the subfield of lived religion, and centers the imbrications of race and religion in shaping the lived experience of Black religious agents surviving an antiblack world, I am developing a hermeneutic of Black religious placemaking. Black religious placemaking by members of the Holiness church who are also residents of Tivoli Gardens refers to acts of sacralizing public space through physical occupation and resignification. Their self-fashioning in public spaces responds directly to the deleterious impact of underdevelopment and the political clientelism that undergirds the social order.

Black religious placemaking is the concept I’ve developed that refers to acts that reify and challenge imagined and physical boundaries. It refers to the practical activities and ideological negotiations on the part of Caribbean subjects in their historical and contemporary milieus. The practice of placemaking also occurs along the lines of shifting solidarities. Solidarities shift and who has authority is never a foregone conclusion. The history and contemporary features of Tivoli’s built environment has direct bearing on how these contentions unfold and subsequently shape believers’ lived experience of material progress and human flourishing.

In 2010 Tivoli Gardens was ground zero for a widely publicized and tragic security operation. Residents were under siege for four days while Jamaican security forces sought to apprehend and extradite Christopher Coke, to face charges of drug trafficking and gun trading in a U.S. court. Through a case study of two marches, one in 2007 prophesied that residents prepare for state violence and the other in 2011, wherein community members protested imminent state violence to extradite Coke. During the prayer march in 2007, members of the church circumambulated all seven subdivisions of Tivoli Gardens for seven days. With loudspeakers rigged to the pastor’s minivan, they sang an original song “Tivoli for Jesus” and warned men to come out of the “system” to avoid the violence that would befall the community. The system refers to the extralegal economy and vigilante violence that maintains order in Tivoli Gardens and similar garrisons in Jamaica. Under the control of the don, Christopher Coke, the system was sustained by “soldiers” who ensured peace and order. Coke functioned as a benefactor distributing material goods and promoting community events. He also functioned as judge and jury. The church’s prophecy came to pass in 2010. In the days leading up to Coke’s extradition, women from Tivoli Gardens, dressed in white shirts took to the streets to declare Coke’s innocence. Coke was deified as “Jesus” and “God” on cardboard signs to declare to the Jamaican government that he was a savior of the community. And this role as a such was reason for him not to be extradited. Coke efforts addressed the resource gaps and provided for residents in ways the Jamaican state was/is unable to provide. Also nicknamed, The President, Coke’s function in Tivoli Gardens and what he represents for the material flourishing of inner-city Jamaicans demonstrates the failures of structural adjustment policies of the 1990s and the adverse effects of globalization in the Caribbean and Global South.

I draw on humanistic theories of place/space in the works of Yi-Fu Tuan, Tim Cresswell, and Elizabeth McAlister, and the emerging field of Black spatial thought in the work of Pat Noxolo, Katherine McKittrick and Christina Sharpe, to name a few. My presentation offers preliminary theorizations around questions proposed by Cresswell, “Why is place such a powerful container of social power? What is it about place that makes it an effective signifier of ideological values?” Through my analysis of the peace and prayer marches, I expand on Cresswell’s questions by asking how might the study of religion, illuminate and deepen our understanding of the ideological values that permeate a place? In what ways might religion help to name and describe heretical geographies?  How do these conceptions of space/place emerge around moments of rupture and violence? My analysis will draw on Elizabeth McAlister's argument that we attend to the violent process of globalization in the development of space/place within postcolonial societies.

Through ethnographic and archival research, this study centers on the inherent frictions that accompany claims about identity and belonging at the local and national level, within conditions of precarity. Ultimately, the practice of Black religious placemaking centers on quotidian and exceptional acts of individual and collective refusal; the results of which are neither wholly tragic nor triumphant.