Epilogue: Dancehall’s Urban Possessions

Territories of the Soul concludes with an epilogue that brings us to another kind of Jamaican blackspace, this time in Kingston. Through an astonishing set of artworks by Ebony Patterson the author reads the week in May 2010 when Jamaican police and military forces entered the community in search of a drug lord, killing an estimated 120 civilians in the process. Patterson’s detailed, filigreed, and ecstatic mixed media pieces render 72 of those deaths using the aesthetics of reggae’s young spawn, Jamaican dancehall. Patterson’s visual elegies articulate a future for diasporic belonging in which local performance practices, usually in situations of dire extremity, call out to the diaspora, carving black space out of materials that, at first glance, should never allow it.