Jamaica residency - reflections

Abstract

The text derives from the discussion of four key words – dream, love, water, respect – during a residency on colonial ideologies and scholarship, which took place in Negril, Jamaica in 2017. The residency was located, theoretically as well as in actuality, in the Edgelands of knowledge-making in northern, Eurocentric academia, in order to allow for sifting through what tends to be cast aside in the disciplinary environments which we inhabit normally. It addressed the coloniality of knowledge production as something that is based not only on canonic forms and structures, but also on its construction as a territorial artifact. Coming together, as a group of scholars from different places, in the Jamaican setting of mass tourism and postcolonial power inequalities, was intended to help in turning the gaze to the binarities at the foundation of ideologies associated with knowledge and language: Following the strictures of this architecture, academic thinking and theory-making happens in university offices, seminar rooms and conference halls, while beaches and tropical greenery are places of leisure or of fieldwork in the sense of data mining. Such spatial divisions are connected with other binarities that characterize epistemological colonial continuities, such as oppositions between theory and practice, culture and nature, reason and emotion, male and female; dualisms such as beach vs. office allow for powerful othering in that observers must withdraw from the contexts of observation and reflect upon them from an institutionalized distance in the isolation of their academic home bases.