A lecture by art historian Krista Thompson (Northwestern University, Chicago) about fugitives and their photographic histories.
Image: A demonstrator in support of Christopher "Dudus" Coke during a march in Kingston. (AP Photo/The Jamaica Gleaner, Ian Allen)
On 24 May 2010, soldiers and police officers—with the aid of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security— entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens in search of Christopher “Dudus” Coke. Coke became a fugitive after the United States sought his extradition. After almost four days, at the end of this operation Coke remained at large, but at least 69 civilians—mostly young black men— and 3 members of the security forces lay dead and with two others disappeared. Examining photographs, surveillance footage, artistic, and archival projects related to the massacre, I interrogate why the hunt for a single fugitive led to the detainment, containment, and killing of so many. The talk discusses strategies for critically reassessing the evidence of things not captured in the widely accepted visual and discursive formations surrounding the event and in narratives of state violence in Jamaica more generally.
The photographs surrounding Dudus and Tivoli Gardens are part of a longer history of how fugitives and the representations surrounding them shaped and were shaped by wider social, political, and cultural forces in Jamaica. Fugitives and their photographic histories since the nineteenth-century informed individual and communal formations in Jamaica that sought to reimagine the existing parameters of the colonial and postcolonial state.
People
Krista Thompson
Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics (2006) and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (2015), recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association (2016). Thompson is currently working on the manuscript The Evidence of Things Not Captured, which examines notions of photographic absence, fugitivity, and disappearance in Jamaica (Duke University Press, forthcoming). She is also writing Black Light, a manuscript about electronic light artist Tom Lloyd (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).