Histories

Abstract

This chapter discusses Jamaica’s histories of political leadership, exploring how the notion of the hero has featured in official histories, popular culture, and everyday discussions of leadership. It draws on popular Jamaican music and oral history interviews to understand how mainstream political histories are contested, rewritten, and mobilized to explain present-day conditions. Popular music and everyday narrative memory-making act as sites where political authority is imagined and reimagined, where official celebrations of past rulers are reworked, and where alternative histories of political leadership are posited. The chapter moves from the late colonial past into the postcolonial present to sketch this historical reconfiguration of political leadership: from the anticolonial nationalist movement that emerged in the 1930s, through the consolidation of “garrison politics” in the 1960s and 1970s and the broader governance role that dons assumed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, to the aftermath of the Tivoli Incursion.