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The long 1950s in Jamaica encompassed the pivotal moments that set into motion the infrastructures of modern political, social, economic, and artistic activity. They also brought into relief struggles over the appropriate scales of interaction, whether national, regional, Pan-African, or diasporic. This essay lays out three of the experiential baselines that would have undergirded these processes—the beginnings of developmentalism, the normativity of migration, and the more explicit emergence of the United States as a significant actor within political and economic affairs. It argues that by the end of the long 1950s, the earlier-twentieth-century story of an emergent civil society in Jamaica was displaced by the story of political society. The result has been a formal decolonization that lacked some of the decolonial social and cultural visions of earlier moments.

This essay, part of a roundtable celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Charles V. Carnegie's Postnationalism Prefigured (2002), explores the theoretical effects of Carnegie's insistence that we release ourselves from the thrall of liberal Western sovereignty. It addresses Carnegie's prescient interventions in relation to three canards of political philosophy—race-based notions of belonging, the centrality of secularism to modern notions of political community, and particular discourses of autonomy and self-determination. The author argues that what Carnegie shows us is that the modernity of control and containment is continually one or two steps behind the countermodernity of subalterns, and that autonomy is rooted not in the race-nation-territory triad but in the everyday movements within, across, and beyond it.

AbstractThis essay probes the project of security (defined as the protection of whiteness, class hierarchy, and heteropatriarchy) in relation to the desire for safety (glossed as "having somebody"). In probing this relation within a context in which police violence and extrajudicial killing are not typically seen as part of the global phenomenon of anti-Black racism, it seeks to contribute to a conversation in which raciality is not tethered to physicality, but instead is grounded in both historical-ideological and onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness as the apex of humanity in the modern West. The essay explores the relation between security and safety through the rubric of diaspora in two senses—first as a phenomenon of Western modernity via plantation-based New World slavery, which catalyzed the development of enduring categories of (non)personhood and their elaboration into hierarchies of humanity; and second as a phenomenon of migration and the constitution of transnational sociocultural spheres. Diaspora, thus, generates forms of pan-Africanism and Black consciousness as much as it produces agendas related to transnational governance and global security infrastructures. The essay argues that to more complexly understand security from the South, these two notions of diaspora must be held in productive tension. In this way, security is revealed as a racializing project grounded in coloniality, even within majority Black spaces. The essay concludes by illuminating other terrains on which to build accountability and safety.