You are not required to obtain permission to reuse this article in part or whole. About 1 in 5 high school students have witnessed community violence A member of the RJRGLEANER Communications Group. One particular concern has been the use of guns in the commission of crimes. Safety after dark. This literal erasure of creative expression in Kingstons inner-city neighbourhoods illustrates a clash between competing narratives of the city and nation a key theme of this special issue. There is a trust in the dons justice system, and you see the public sharing information with them that they are not willing to share with the police. The English-speaking Caribbean's record on democracy notwithstanding, it is acknowledged that the area, in common with the rest of the region, is one of the world's hotbeds of violent crime. Since that time many other reports and documents have come from different groups and sectors that all include lengthy recommendations on how to tackle crime and violence in varying degrees. It is not unlikely that, in addition to intellectual and societal urgency, the same naturalized connections between crime and the Caribbean region that this special issue critiques played a role in this funding success. Deborah Thomas critiques the essentialism of perspectives that present violence as a primordial aspect of Jamaican culture (Citation2011, 55), perspectives that are applied both to Jamaica and to members of the Jamaican diaspora in Europe and North America. To learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our Cookie Policy. Bringing together researchers and creative practitioners from the Caribbean, Europe and North America, this networking project has focused on depictions of crime, violence and Jamaica(ns) in literary writing, visual art, popular music, film and the media, and considered the relationship of these representations to public policy and debates in the social sciences. The 1980s was a tumultuous decade, described as the lost decade, in the history of the world and Jamaica. The contributors critically examine representations of the Jamaican rudie, shotta, don and yardie figures in media discourse and in popular culture, while at the same time exploring fictional, biographical, visual and cinematic texts that rethink this figure. Even though the majority of discussions about crime impute a connection with its primary partner, violence, not all crimes fall under the ambit of violence, and many non-violent crimes or white-collar crimes are on the increase in Jamaica today even though there is significant under-reporting of these. While these representations can contribute to the reproduction of stereotypical associations, they can also challenge dominant understandings by questioning and complicating assumptions around national and cultural identity, race, class, gender and sexuality, and by reframing the contexts and causes of crime in Jamaica and in the Jamaican diaspora.
