Black Carcerality and Emancipation in Postcolonial Jamaica

In 2017, the Jamaican government communicated to the populace its intention to introduce the National Identification System (NIDS), which would house biographic, biometric, and demographic information. Following the announcement, NIDS became engulfed in controversy. Deep suspicions arose about the government’s desire to provide each citizen with a unique identification number and secure biometric data. For some, the introduction of identification numbers was read as an apocalyptic reference to the Mark of the Beast, a sign of those who worship the anti-Christ, as detailed in The Book of Revelation Chapter 13. For others, such as those who protested in Kingston’s Emancipation Park, the move to collect biometric data was taken as an act of warfare against the liberty of the Jamaican people. What is at stake in a post-slave and postcolonial Caribbean society with the merging of the body and technology predicated on state-legitimized techniques of branding, surveillance, and control? In this essay, I interrogate NIDS as an infrastructure of postcolonial datafication governance (Arora 2016) and one that embodies simultaneously biblical, spatial, and corporeal fears of insecurity in a Caribbean geography that lies in the shadow of the plantation. Moreover, in elucidating the discourses of racialization, carcerality, and emancipation surrounding the resistance to NIDS, I argue for a reading of the Caribbean that positions it as a critical geographic lens through which to consider Simone Browne’s (2015) contention that blackness is a key site through which surveillance is not only practiced, but also creatively resisted. In responding to the call for the decolonization of surveillance studies, this reflection takes seriously what the Caribbean can contribute to our understandings of the possibilities of black emancipation in the present moment of global surveillance.