A So Black People Stay: Bad‐mind, Sufferation, and Discourses of Race and Unity in a Jamaican Craft Market

Abstract

A b s t r a c tCraft vendors in St. James, Jamaica, interpret the competive strategies of fellow vendors as acts of animosity understood through the trope "bad-mind." Despite facing a marketplace increasingly constricted by foreign-made souvenirs imported by emigrant Sindhi Indian wholesalers, vendors attribute their economic failings and the conditions that create them to a chronic black Jamaican disunity inherited from slavery. In this context, vendors reconcile their limited prospects and normative expectation of failure through the rationale of "sufferation," a notion broadly availed within Jamaican society, to contextualize and rationalize economic adversity. What emerges is an ethnicized framing of the market as a construct through which inferences of citizenship and racial discourses are produced. [Jamaica, ethnicity, economics, markets, race] With numerous all-inclusive hotels and the three major cruise ports, Jamaica's north coast is the country's premier tourist region, at the center of which is Montego Bay. 1 Home to Sangster International Airport, which serves 72 percent of the country's annual visitors, Montego Bay stands as the most active of Jamaica's tourist cities. Bay Fort craft market, the city's largest, sits along three blocks and has over two hundred stalls in operation. 2 The vendors, who are almost all women in their late thirties to early sixties, recall the characteristic hard-working women featured in numerous ethnographic accounts of family life in Jamaica and throughout the

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