Black Religious Placemaking in the Postcolony: A Case Study of Kingston, Jamaica

This paper centers Black religious placemaking as a strategy of survival and meaning-making on the part of members of a Holiness/Pentecostal church in Tivoli Gardens, an inner city community in Kingston Jamaica. It examines the boundaries of belonging and identity amongst the seven subdivisions that constitute Tivoli Gardens, as Tivoli Gardens itself has largely functioned as an extralegal economy governed by a local don, or enforcer supported by the neoliberal Jamaica Labor Party. The process of Black religious placemaking, I argue, is a fraught and agonistic process that entails shifting solidarities within a postcolonial milieu deeply shaped by underdevelopment and American imperialism. These global processes simultaneously create economic and political instability, enacting chronic precarity and heightened stakes of survival. Employment and religious language, framed by evangelical Christian theology authorizes claims to political and spiritual sovereignty. Religious placemaking, then, is an embodied and ideological act of claiming space and authority to secure human flourishing.