Forging In/Security: Fear, Metal, and Situated Knowledge in a Caribbean City

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - II

Abstract

In Kingston, Jamaica, a residential architectural aesthetics defined by metal has emerged in response to the high crime rate and violence in the urban environment- stylized metal burglar bars protect windows, metal gates secure front yards, and metal grills enclose verandahs. In this paper, I draw on anthropological research conducted in Kingston to argue that this stylized metal has come to mark Kingston's urban landscape as a security-scape, where security and insecurity and not simply spectacular violence, have come to be important organizing principles. I offer too, a material and historical reading of Kingston’s metal, one attentive to its properties and its attributes which I suggest opens up space for an imagination of Kingston as more than just a fortress city defined by enclosure and exclusion. Through attention to Kingston’s metal security artifacts, the metal artisans who make them, and the stylized adkinkra patterns that decorate them, I suggest that the Caribbean securityscape must be studied as an archive of black memory and a site of continuity and creativity that gives us insight into forms of citizenship and belonging that predate the trans-Atlantic slave trade and continue to resonate in the cityscapes of the so-called New World. This paper calls for an afro-diasporic intervention in STS and security studies, one that contends with the ways in which contemporary infrastructures of in/security in many high-crime cities of the Global South are shaped by not only by somatic experiences of fear but also by situated practices of afro-diasporic knowledge and expertise.

Author

• Kimberley Danielle McKinson, John Jay College, CUNY