Geographies Open Access
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Published:November 2024
This chapter discusses the spatial dimension of dons’ political authority, emphasizing the centrality of urban space, place, borders, and mobilities. Achieving authority involves enacting spatial relations between rulers and ruled that normalize the political arrangement between them. These are relations of proximity and distance, and of mobility and immobility. The chapter analyzes how dons’ power comes to feel right through their embodied positioning in Kingston’s sharply divided, highly unequal urban landscape. Dons draw on a sense of closeness, derived from shared sensorial experiences of urban poverty and racialized exclusion, but their authority is also enhanced by their ability to suggest a certain distance from other residents, a social or even spiritual separation from the masses. In addition to this combination of closeness and distance, dons’ authority is strengthened through their capacity to mobilize, navigate, and reconfigure urban and national borders and, in so doing, to control residents’ mobilities.