Capture land as abolition geography: The mutuality of placemaking and flight

Introduction

This is how residents generally responded when I asked about their eviction. Living on a former sugar plantation in Jamaica—a single parcel of property that is still hundreds of acres in size—they had been served with notice to vacate but refused to move. The response, rooted in a logic that runs counter to their exclusion from property, reflects spatial practices that are instead oriented towards life.

… wi build house just fi mek life fi a time. (Brown, 2008)

Together, these quotes begin to convey the spatiotemporality of capture land. Capture land is a Jamaican colloquialism for land that is (or is presumed to be) occupied without the authorization of the landowner. Although the term carries a sense of the pejorative, it bears another sense too, related to a long tradition of refusing persistent land monopoly.

The expressions “mek life fi a time,” and, “we’ve always been here” show how capture land enacts spatial practices of varied temporalities: rooted in belonging to place, but also alighting provisionally. In apparent paradox, these spatiotemporalities can also be simultaneous, as I will show.

Ethnographies of land tenure practices in Jamaica have detailed the desire for property as a means of creating an eternal stake in the land, and the strategies through which Jamaicans transgressed the formal property regime in order to extend the boundaries of landownership. Co-existing with strategies to acquire property have been a variety of non-propertied strategies for laying claim to land. Here I reject “landless”—which tends to naturalize dispossession and placelessness—and instead call these durable yet insecure forms of tenure “ownershipless,” following Small (2012) whose off-the-cuff coinage grasped at a term to describe a familiar reality. I take up ownershipless to describe a multivalent relationship, learning from Wynter’s multivalent plot (1971)—a spatial figure that is tethered to the market, ² and yet has the capacity to both sustain life-in-refusal and to ground an epistemology rooted in alternative relations with the earth. The ownershipless may leverage gaps in the law or its uneven enforcement to maintain tenure (Goffe, 2024), sometimes towards becoming owners of land under the liberal property regime. Regardless of whether turning seized land into property might be possible, the ownershipless make life in the places where they are, where they have always been. These durable yet insecure forms of tenure include the practice of land seizure known colloquially as capture land. This article thinks with the ownershipless to explore, if “the opposite of dispossession is not possession” (Simpson, 2017: 43), how might we think land after colonialism, and beyond property? ³

Today, the growth of informal settlements is narrated as the catalyst for policy aimed at curtailing “squatting,” which is discursively linked to increasing social disorder under the current conjuncture (Goffe, 2023b). ⁴ “Squatting” is often understood only as provisional. Indeed, policy documents cite a rapid increase, even though government-commissioned research shows that most “informal settlements” had been in existence for more than a generation at the time of data collection. With official estimates varying as wildly as they do—from 10 to 30 percent of the population, depending on the definition of the category—it is difficult to know who policy will displace (Goffe 2023a).

Length of tenure matters in the process of sorting out who will be displaced. Duration figures in the Law: it is the condition that distinguishes between criminal trespasser, unauthorized possessor, and those eligible for possessory title under the common law principle of adverse possession. Given the complex “infrastructures of feeling” (Gilmore, 2017) at play, duration also figures in distinguishing between the ownershipless whose tenure is delegitimized—presumed criminally- or corruption-adjacent, and the respectable ownershipless—for whom regularization by the state is deemed legitimate redress to injuries of exploitation. In other words, rather than the legitimacy of extra-legal tenure being determined purely by the legal abstraction that is a contract (lease, conveyance, title), in public and legal discourse the insult to property posed by seizure fades unevenly under the weight of history, and the passage of time.

In contrast to temporalities associated with the Law, in this article, I explore duration as inhered in the material enactment of land seizure; how the both/and spatiotemporality of capture emerges from epistemologies that are oriented towards the affirmation of sustenance, refusal, and alternative futures. While capture describes familiar ways in which life is made in the interstices of racial capitalism, it also challenges us to engage differently with the project of thinking land beyond property, and after colonialism.

This article is based on ethnographic research beginning with a seven-month period in 2013–2014, with brief follow-up visits in 2016 and 2018. The fieldwork at Tulloch, ⁵ a former sugar plantation occupied by hundreds of residents who were served with eviction notices, was accompanied by interviews with civil servants across multiple state agencies spanning landowning, land administration, housing, building regulation and enforcement, and social welfare agencies in both central and local governments.

I open with a section titled, “An Eternal Stake in the Land?” in which I revisit literature on Jamaican land tenure that associates a desire for property with the assertion of “personhood” (Besson, 1984: 4) in a post-slavery landscape that is still structured by plantation land monopoly. Over the next three sections, I locate this desire in a broader tradition of anticolonial practice based on my ethnographic research. Beginning with the section “Up there cyaan [can’t] suit wi again,” I show the intimately scaled alternatives facilitated by capture land as practiced by those who left property in order to capture land, situating themselves in relation to sustenance, refusal, and a vision for the future.

Next, in “Them rob wi, wi foreparents,” through the words of one resident, I show how multiple overlapping histories implicate places as sites of racial violence, against which capture reasserts the right-ness of dwelling in place. The alienability of land, and the racial capitalist development that now puts Tulloch on Jamaica’s “front page” (Author Interviews, 2014), threaten claims legitimized by the living memory of labour exploitation. However, alternate epistemologies of land point to horizons beyond those couched in liberal rights to land via either ownership or labour.

The exploration of how capture land simultaneously facilitates mobility and rootedness concludes in the section, “We’ve always been here.” I show here as an ambivalent geography spanning the village—what some residents called “Black man land”—and its other, the remaining traces of the plantation. Here asserts belonging to a place that straddles, and thus refutes, the inscription of property boundaries on the earth. Playing with pathways to formalization that require continuous occupation of a particular parcel of land, here reminds us that radical traditions encapsulate “a metaphysic of the sedentary and the mobile” (Carnegie, 2002: 141).

In conclusion, I consider how capture land offers insight into reading geographies of freedom differently: e.g. the geographies of marronage, which emphasize flight or removal, and geographies of placemaking, which emphasize permanence. Though placemaking and property suggest stability, it is a stability forever haunted by the threat of displacement, by forced mobility. On the other hand, though marronage suggests mobility or withdrawal, this remove is forever haunted by the threat of recapture (Hartman, 2007). In other words, both are threatened by the ongoing production of space under racial capitalism. I am interested in the ways that capture land invites a reconsideration of the unfinished project of freedom as a spatial practice, one that moves beyond freedoms haunted by the plantation: beyond property and the spatiotemporality of legitimacy under the Law, and beyond autonomy-in-flight.

An eternal stake in the land?

Though constrained from land ownership, Black Jamaicans have pursued strategies for sustenance and autonomy based in the land, strategies that spanned different relationships to the land scarcity that was fabricated through monopolization. Early ethnographies of land tenure practices emphasized the cultural significance of acquiring property. Writing in the 1950s, Edith Clarke was perhaps the first ethnographer of Black Jamaicans’ land tenure practices by way of her research on working-class family structure across three villages. She wrote, “a special social value came to be attached to the ownership of land” (1999: 15, emphasis added) as “both the symbol and reality of freedom” (22).

Funded by the colonial state during the decades-long run-up to constitutional decolonization, Clarke’s study was expected to inform social development on the eve of a new nation. ⁶ A foreword written by a former governor of Jamaica bemoaned the ignorance of policymakers and urban Jamaicans alike regarding “the lives and the homes and the families of the great bulk of the Jamaican population” (Clarke, 1999: xiii). Couched in sympathetic language, his essay nevertheless blames the repeated failure of colonial land and housing policy on this opacity. Indeed, according to a contemporary reviewer, the potential value of the study could be measured in light of the “many attempts […] to rationalize the traditional attitudes of the peasants towards the land, by giving clear titles, by preventing fragmentation, and by encouraging better land use” (Proudfoot, 1958: 226). In other words, in the eyes of the colonial developmentalist state, if these practices were made transparent, they might yet yield to policies and institutions that had long aimed to categorise, discipline, and liberalise land relations.

As such, rather than an affective predisposition to property, we might understand tenure practices in the villages Clarke studied as reflective of efforts to claim place in the face of myriad acts through which a liberal property regime was imposed, acts that spanned exclusion and predatory inclusion. Families who exercised heterodox land claims sometimes made them into property; a registered title could sometimes help guard against the fragility of non-propertied claims (Besson, 2002: 145). Jean Besson reveals family land as one strategy that hedged against displacement and land monopoly, with the threat of the Law acting as a catalyst in institutionalizing it as property.

Besson, an anthropologist who for decades has studied land tenure practices in Jamaica, has valorized family land, describing it as a resistant response to plantation land monopoly. Common across the Caribbean, family land is often theorized as “folk law” in that it transgresses the formal property regime in order to extend legal rights in the land to future kin (Besson, 1984, 1987; Maurer, 1997; Olwig, 1987). Family land is described as an inalienable, jointly held tenure formed when a forebear—through will or oral tradition—bequeaths land to be held undivided and accessible to all their descendants in perpetuity (Besson, 1984). Besson writes, “these tiny plots of land … are imbued with an unlimited capacity for sustaining ever-increasing generations of descendants” (1987: 14); in the context of plantation land monopoly, family land maximizes freehold rights in a society where land ownership meant “economic and political power, social status, personhood and freedom” (Besson, 1984: 4).

Under the rubric of rural development, some scholars (e.g. Momsen, 1987) focus on the constraint that maximal availability places on land as an economic asset. Certainly, there may be many more people with claims to a parcel than might be able to use it. Against this critique, Besson (1987) labours to show how family land maximizes the kinship group’s stake in the parcel’s symbolic availability.

The expansiveness of family land indexes a refusal of the capitalist logic of alienability. Years before fieldwork at Tulloch, I interviewed the country director of a multilateral development bank about a pilot program the bank had funded through a loan to the Jamaican state. The programme was touted as providing land to the landless. ⁷ The pilot was not a success—fewer than one-quarter of the targeted 30,000 titles had been awarded. But beyond that he explained, it was judged that the program would never have the desired effect due to unshakable cultural norms. In a Hernando de Soto-inspired reflection he stated that, while they held great interest in achieving security of title, these Jamaicans (judged to be inadequate to Liberalism) were loath to leverage their property, to use it as collateral on a loan. As a result, he bemoaned, the land would remain dead capital.

The reference to a reluctance to mortgage land was familiar. It is one of those commonsense things said about Jamaican culture, alongside the knowledge that some of us bury our babies’ navel strings (umbilical cords), and our dead on family land, and that some of us do not risk land—and all that it symbolizes—through money dealings. A vague memory from a long ago afternoon drive returns to me, visiting the rural kin of a family friend, walking the land, and being shown white tiled tombs in a quiet area of the plot. Whereas the planting of navel strings tethers mobile lives lived elsewhere to a particular place, plot burial reinforces the significance of ancestors to future kin (see Besson, 1999; Chevannes, 2001).

Kin and navel string in the ground are not the sole motivators, but they point to an epistemology that runs counter to the fungibility associated with what Wynter called mere land. She writes,

The plantation was the property of the master: mere land; as the slave was the property of the master: mere labour. The relation of the slave to the provision ground was a relation of a man to the Earth. While the Plantation ideology, the official ideology, would develop as an ideology of property, and the rights of property, the provision ground ideology would remain based on a man's relation to the Earth, which linked a man to his community. (Wynter, 1970: 38, emphasis added)

Though Besson argues that families continue to make land acquired in the villages she studies into family land, this strategy is stretched thin by a persistent inequity in the distribution of property, which it does not challenge. Over generations, families grow—in numbers, and grow apart in relational and physical distance—increasing the likelihood of conflict. Meanwhile, securing sustenance is ever more difficult post-structural adjustment, with the shrinking of the post-independence developmentalist state. Given all this, family land falls short of grounding a sense of stability and rootedness amidst increasingly insurmountable uncertainty.

And yet, as Winston notes, the “worlds created within abandonment” point us to persistent radical epistemologies (Winston, 2021: 2191). Rather than reading capture as an instrumentalist response to this conjuncture, the exhaustion of family land as an anticolonial practice invites us to reexamine the tradition. Indeed, radical tradition is a complex and flexible resource, “sturdy but not static, that viscerally underlies our capacity to select, to recognize possibility as we select and reselect liberatory lineages” (Gilmore, 2017: 237). I will return to this in closing.

Besson documents a broad array of anticolonial tradition spanning peasants, squatters, free villagers, Rastafarians, and Maroon communities, showing how each appropriates liberal property to other ends. This includes the literal appropriation of property—as with capture land, but also the appropriation of the Law—as with stretching the logics of joint tenure and inheritance to make the “folk law” of family land (Besson, 2000). Although these traditions have succeeded in appropriating property, close study of capture land undermines any conclusion that tradition equates land ownership with freedom.

In the next section, I turn to the first of three movements examining capture land, each structured around a quotation from ownershipless Tulloch. To begin, the first section divests from the tendency to collapse freedom dreams as sedentary and synonymous with property. As a middle class Jamaican and a reader of ethnographies that emphasized the significance of property and inalienability, I was surprised to learn that ownershipless Tulloch was constituted in part by leaving property in favour of capturing land. As I learned more about these trajectories, a different understanding of the values at stake came to the fore.

“Up there can’t suit wi again”

As a worker for the plantation, Miss S’s mother was able to occupy one of the tiny “Sugar Board” ⁸ houses within the estate when infrastructural neglect made her village plot uninhabitable. Miss S described the exodus of her fellow hillside occupants to other places, some of them overseas. In addition to her mother’s advancing age—which made the walk down the hill to the estate more challenging—Miss S said that the parcel’s location required crossing a riverbed—impossible during the rainy seasons. She explained,

Mi mother wen [used to] have one likkle piece of land up deh; it tun standing bush there now.

Miss S’s mother had been a domestic worker in the estate owners’ house. Perhaps because of her mother’s experience, Miss S had decided never to work for anyone. She explained, “some of the people that you work for, they facety with you [treat you with disrespect].” ⁹ In contrast, she prided herself on never having worked for anyone. She worked for herself. She “buys and sells”; she is a market vendor, or in Jamaican parlance, a higgler (see Brown-Glaude, 2011).

Given this line of work, her routine journeys were not up and down the hill on foot, but miles away to the public market in a major town. In a sense then, it was her refusal—to do work that made it easy for an employer to facety with her—that made “up there” particularly unsuitable. As she fashioned a life for herself, her desire—to set terms for how she engaged with those empowered to visit disrespect on others—superseded the legal tenure to a parcel made inconvenient by its “organized abandonment” (Gilmore, 2007) by state and capital.

Gary, in his 50s, had left overcrowded family land—in Black Man Land, uphill from another former plantation further down the coast. He made the move from his grandfather’s five-acre parcel because “ants follow fat”; that is, he came to “make his own kingdom” with a Tulloch woman. Like many Jamaicans, Gary’s babymother now lives overseas, leaving their child in Gary’s care.

For Edie and Miss Grange, periurban Tulloch represented a different kind of future than had been possible in their rural place of origin. Miss Grange, a resident in her 40s, moved to board with family who lived in a coastal community in order to attend a good high school. She described the difference by commenting on infrastructure, speaking in present tense about the move during her bygone transition to high school.

Now, it becomes a little ladylike. […] you have you proper bathroom … now you nah bathe in a no pan so again. […] Now you have your shower. [School] uniform [can] iron. (Author Interviews, 2014)

Janet came to Tulloch when her cousin burned down her one-room house on family land. Offering a glimpse into the adjacency of state relations to the tumult of navigating land hunger, the dispute with the cousin was rooted in their different partisan affiliations; and Janet found her way to Tulloch via the local Minister of Parliament. A member of the political party to which Janet was faithful, the MP directed the homeless single mother to Tulloch, which was then owned by a state agency.

Others have left to come back for various reasons. For example, a generational Tulloch woman, now an elder, moved back to Tulloch when she took ill and was no longer able to work. She shares space with her son’s babymother and her grandchildren. Another had moved back to Tulloch when she assumed care of her granddaughter, after finding that the regularity of bills in urban Montego Bay put pressure on the irregularity of her income.

In the face of the liberal property regime’s dispossessive logic, capture land at Tulloch facilitates belonging whether one has left to come back or is newly arrived from elsewhere. Beyond this, ownershipless Tulloch arrive on or return to the estate because Tulloch is judged to be a good place. Included in this assessment is that it is not “bush”—like the rural place from whence Miss Grange arrived, or the now-deserted hillside abandoned by Miss S’s mother. Neither is it “concrete jungle”—like the dense housing schemes where Miss Grange lamented you could not even grow a peas tree or keep a goat, ensuring all one’s needs are monetized. As she describes,

[T]his is what they [the state] are doing. Mi sister live up a [C— Courts, a housing] scheme. Mi cyaan [can’t] go live thereso. Number one, you cyaan plant one soursop tree. You cyaan plant one peas tree much less one, two okra. Mi have six goat. Mi six goat cyaan [can’t] go on the [housing] scheme go live, you understand what mi a say? You cyaan just come take mi out of mi livelihood and put mi a one wilderness. Nothing nuh grow pon concrete. So wha’ mi a go there so go live fa? The place out here so, so big. Them say them a go make housing scheme. [But] them jam on how much house pon it, mi dear. (Author Interviews, 2014)

As with family land, capture land at Tulloch models how “what goes unnoticed in transplantations of past heroes and heroines into present consciousness is the tension, the dialectic, between a metaphysic of the sedentary and the mobile” (Carnegie, 2002: 141). Here, capture facilitates both an enduring relationship to place and flight—as is required by withdrawal from harm and the fashioning of alternate futures.

Grounding with one resident’s words in the next section, I further underscore the fragility inherent to the uptake of property by anticolonial traditions. What is lost when scholarship fetishizes that uptake rather than focusing on the radical epistemologies that deploy property and labour towards ends those forms do not imagine? 

“Them rob wi, wi foreparents”

I asked Mr. M, a Tulloch resident in his 60s, if he felt he had a right to land at Tulloch. He responded:

Yes I would have that deh feeling, say well wi have a right to live, yes. ‘Cause everyone have a right to live. But the right who wi would have to live here now is [regards to] the person who wi used to slave for, who control the property same way. You know, I woulda more deep down say well, wi have a right to live cause them rob wi, wi foreparents, you know?

One legitimating logic of a claim to this parcel is exploitation by its owner. Of this he is well aware, naming the fixed dyad of those who used to control the property and the ‘we’ who (literally and figuratively) slaved on the estate; that ‘we’ has paid for the land with stolen labor and premature death. Mr. M summons debts that are owed but unpayable—the violence (sometimes slow, sometimes fast) that claimed his mother’s life, and that experienced by unnamed foreparents. His words address those who slaved on this particular plantation yes, but this dyad fails to account for the fullness of time. ¹⁰

Beyond this, he hails a right-ness ¹¹ of capture that rests on the indissoluble relationship between life and land. “Everyone has a right to live.” That life unfolds somewhere is assumed; life is emplaced. However, Mr. M notes that now is different from before. Over time, under pressure from liberal notions of delimited temporal culpability, the legitimating logic derived from this dyad is made fragile.

Now, “the person who we used to slave for” no longer controls the land. Mr. M acknowledges that, per the Law, the encounter with history has become abstracted from the estate by the change in ownership of the dehistoricized parcel.

Marking this shift holds his pragmatic assessment of the precarity triggered by the eviction notices. Implicitly, Mr. M acknowledges the hegemony of liberal property. However, “deep down,” below transparent space, a “black sense of place” (McKittrick, 2011) requires critique of the logic that insists the land be lived not as Earth but as mere land. ¹² As mere land, it is fungible, synonymous with alienable property (Wynter, 1970: 38). Now, this mere land is owned by new pirates against whom liberalism would displace the moral underpinning of a claim by all of ‘we’ who used to slave here; the naturalization of land’s fungibility severs their relationship to the parcel, displacing it from ongoing robbery. Liberal notions of time and space do the work of absolution.

I am reminded of “the crew” in Jovan Scott Lewis’s (2020) research. The crew make an ethical claim to the scam by asserting that it appropriates stolen wealth from “the same white people,” collapsing present-day US neo-imperialism with that of the postcolonial republic’s former life as a British colony, like Jamaica. The crew refuse the geometry of fungibility; the presentist spacetime that makes dispossession appear inevitable, erasing land theft, labour exploitation, and the entanglement of land with life.

Mr. M reminds us that a “black sense of place […] innovatively worked within, across, and outside commonsense cartographic and topographical texts” (McKittrick, 2011: 949) will be made fragile, made to appear irrational. In part, it is the elision of the “historically present” (McKittrick, 2011) plantation through the workings of mere land that renders ownershipless Tulloch displaceable. ¹³

Capture land instead renders questionable a property regime that creates scarcity in the midst of plenty. Ownershipless Tulloch critiques the attempt to exclude them from land that capital has left idle; as Jacob, a resident in his 70s said regarding the extent of Tulloch, “it would take the whole of [the parish] to farm it.” This condemns the eviction, which imagines ownershipless Tulloch as placeless, excluding them from land that “no one had seen the beauty of” (Author interviews, 2014) for over a generation, except its ownershipless stewards.

But with the eviction’s reassertion of mere land, ownershipless Tulloch is left “cotched on wi eyebrow”—precariously perched, liable to drop off at any moment one should make a movement as seemingly ineffectual as the mere squinting of an eye, or as careless as a yawn.

Mr. M relates this to the fact that Tulloch is now on what he called Jamaica’s “front page” as a result of recent spatial shifts in tourism-related real estate development. These changes initially appeared as a welcome end to its abandonment—e.g. the infrastructural decay that left Tulloch subject to regular flooding, even as they have no running water. Would the construction of new roads and new water mains lessen the struggle to make place habitable in the face of abandonment? However, with the return of capital, life becomes more, not less precarious. This is made even more palpable by the sharpened gradient between abandonment and development. Making life at Tulloch is marked by time-space expansion (Katz, 2001) in both senses—a restructured political ecology that demands an expanded field of social reproduction, and a closer vantage to the kind of life that is enriched by one’s impoverishment.

With the sale of adjacent land for hotel construction, in an area where there had been no tourism before, Tulloch once again became prime real estate. The parcel was put up for sale, an unmarked piece of paradise. As prime real estate—ripe for exploitation for a new extractive industry, Tulloch as a site of racial capitalist encounter is made less palpable. As alienable property, it is wiped clean of “untidy historically present geographies” (McKittrick, 2011:  950). This renders its capturers displaceable, rather than rooted in generations who have always been here.

This production of placelessness also belies the reality that the plot has been tethered to the plantation; it is a deceit through which abolition geographies are made productive for capital. Drawn into providing subsidy to the wage economy, this externalized sustenance is made both necessary and deniable, subject to the mobility and porosity of a boundary around the so-called formal economy (Goffe, 2023a).

However, the departure of ‘old pirates’ (or their geopolitical reconfiguration) does not mean the theft did not happen. Capture land allows its practitioners to situate themselves in relation to shifting uneven geographies of development and underdevelopment (Rodney, 1972), in relation to the interface between “forgotten places” (Gilmore, 2008) and the “front page” of emerging landscapes of racial capitalist investment. These landscapes include the repurposing of former plantations for new tourism enclaves that materialize new forms of extractive globalization. In the face of all this, the very ubiquity of capture land is a challenge to the naturalization of mere land and the ways this naturalization undermines claims made by all of ‘we’ to Tulloch and its elsewheres. In the next section, I show how capture land can undergird an enduring claim to place that references belonging, rather than property.

“We’ve always been here”

“We’ve always been here” was the general response to the eviction relayed to me by ownershipless Tulloch. Some of what this means is demonstrated by the following quote from Miss Grange. Of the eldest Tulloch resident at the time of the eviction, Miss Grange said,

She [Miss Joy, a woman in her nineties] had been here from a child work[ing] on the cane farm. It was from up [Morass Cove] and come down, so she go nowhere else more than just on the farm, and it was one owner. ¹⁴ And she had her children and her grandchildren, great grand …you know; it was nowhere else to go and live. If you’re in [Jacob] situation, [Jacob] over sixty years old. And [Darlene] the very same way, where do they go? Everybody live on the plantation. (Author Interviews, 2014)

While Jacob, Darlene, and Miss Joy were amongst those whose families had customary tenure within the plantation, for others, daily life had involved a circular path between the plantation and the adjacent village and back. Up until the 1990s, Tulloch was active for largescale agriculture and many people living in the village worked for the estate, and walked to work every day; their work was within what was considered to be walking distance—up a steep incline after a day of hard physical labour. In this historical labour geography, workers going home up the hill routinely crossed over into what some Tulloch elders referred to as “Black Man Land.” Land in the village was owned by Black Jamaicans, in distinction to the plantation.

It is the synthesis of village and plantation together that is referenced by the statement, “We’ve always been here.” Here is the geography through which ownershipless Tulloch had sustained “we” for generations. Here is a refusal of the property boundaries referenced by the eviction notice, instead spanning the unauthorized appropriation of coconuts and other provisions growing on the estate, labour on the estate, and the creation of forms of tenure off of the estate that refuse their exclusion from property ownership. Here is expansive, incited by the spacetimes of sustenance, refusal, and epistemology that inhere in the plot (Wynter, 1970, 1971). Being served notice to vacate contradicts one’s belonging here.

“We’ve always been here” shows how an eternal stake in the land can be mobilized through a place-based mapping practice that is “outside the official tenets of cartography” (McKittrick, 2011: 949), contrasting with the reliance on liberal property as a means of securing an inalienable belonging to place. “We’ve always been here” asserts an endurance that remains unpunctured by journeys, sojourns, elsewheres. Much as here is capacious enough to hold absence without loss of belonging, “we” mirrors neither juridical notions of family, nor lines of descent. Instead, “we” collects those with whom one makes life, every day.

“We” thus implies continuous presence, a refusal of the uncertainty in which ownershipless-ness is sedimented. This uncertainty undermines the individual capacity to stay in one place. For, when making life prompts relocation, the ownershipless are thrown back into criminal trespass—the first year of unauthorized possession. This is relevant, in part, because land law requires an individual to maintain continuous possession of the parcel in order to either avoid the criminal status of trespasser, or to attain the rights-bearing status of adverse possessor. ¹⁶

Even as “We’ve always been here” mirrors one legal pathway to formalization, the expansive “we” rebuts the possessive individual that property law demands. Thus ownershipless Tulloch refuse the spatiotemporal limitation on their relations to the earth that are posed through the individualization of pirates, land parcels, and adverse possessors. “We’ve always been here” instead asserts a logic of continuity based on belonging to place and to community. Together the sections above give some insight into capture land as abolitionist spatial practice: the fluidity asserted by, “Up there cyaan suit wi again”; the critique that refused how, “Them rob wi, wi foreparents” and instead made enduring anticolonial claims to place such as, “We’ve always been here” inspired by epistemologies such as that invoked by Mr. M—that, “Everybody has a right to live.”

Capture land as life in rehearsal

Charles Carnegie, in his 2002 intervention in Caribbean Studies, highlights the seldom acknowledged spatiotemporal complexity of the traditions of rebellious ancestors. He argues that the common representation of these traditions sedentarizes them, imbuing them with static transcendence, as when one collapses the struggle over relations with the Earth into a struggle for property.

As Carnegie observes, “What goes unnoticed in transplantations of past heroes and heroines into the present consciousness is the tension, the dialectic, between a metaphysic of the sedentary and the mobile that lies at the core of their rebellions” (2002: 141). His call to attend to spatiotemporal complexity of anticolonial tradition resonates with the “unbounded participatory openness” that Gilmore apprehends in tradition’s “infrastructures of feeling” (2017: 237). If tradition is not singular, but composed of accumulated structures of feeling, then it is also always incomplete—relational and emanant, reconfiguring spacetime and subjectivity.

Taking cues from Carnegie and Gilmore, I emphasize that capture land does not look back to the plantation to pattern freedom on inclusion in the property regime. Rather, thinking with the spatial practices of ownershipless Tulloch I note how, in leaving property to make a place that “suit wi,” in declaring that everybody has a right to live, and in enacting an expansive we who have always been here, they reveal ancestors too-often neglected.

Although here maps a stake in the land that does not rely on property for legitimacy, the practice of capture land is nevertheless future-oriented. How might we think with capture land to reimagine land, integral to life, beyond the horizon of property, in a register that recognizes the provisionality of making life as not just making do, but as rehearsing freedom as a place (Gilmore, 2017: 2020)?

Meditating on the word play of Chronixx’s (2013) song “Capture Land,” Ronald Cummings (2023) notes the linguistic ambiguity of the term. Scholar and lyric both point to the way that the Jamaican colloquialism references “colonial modes of possession enacted through papers and titles,” even as it “subverted and challenged” those modes (Cummings, 2023: 116). Cummings explores this ambiguity as a legacy of “critical contestation” that points towards “another grammar, another register to talk about the geography of unbelonging within the long experience of colonialism” (Cummings, 2023: 117).

Even before the eviction raised the question of negotiated elsewheres (i.e. relocation sites), ownershipless Tulloch was enacting futures removed from the everyday violence discussed above. Facety employers. Abusive partners and family members. Overcrowded or contested family land. Both bush and concrete jungle. Other people’s kingdoms. The impossible juncture between the regularity of bills and the irregularity of income. Places even more abandoned than Tulloch, like hillside plots without road access. Ownershipless Tulloch enacts futures removed from still other familiar everyday violence. The low returns to labour of the local farmer’s life. Households to which they were “given away” as children. And more. ¹⁷

Although much of this withdrawal into captured land is either directly or ultimately the result of hierarchies of race, gender, class (and more) that are reinforced and exploited by capital, capture land displays a spatiotemporality of placemaking that is not reducible to dispossession. Indeed, the first person to capture land at Tulloch did so amidst a wave of similar actions that used capture to place people who had been made to appear marginal to Jamaican life on land whose centrality was transparent (Goffe, 2023b). But now, even in the place that “suit wi,” violence—of the state and of dispossession—appears on Tulloch’s horizons. Miss Jameson took to reading me newspaper headlines about the places the state had offered to relocate ownershipless Tulloch, displaying that their refusal of these relocation sites, though prolonging their precarity of tenure, was a refusal of the precarity of places plagued by acutely premature death. This too is the significance of charting a new map that declares, “We’ve always been here.” Capture land indexes traditions that neither presume settlement as equivalent to freedom, nor hold up a place beyond as a prerequisite to “freedom dreams” (Kelley, 2022).

The final chapter of Lose Your Mother (Hartman, 2007) tells of one response to the deathly trade in human beings. Destined for terror in coastal dungeons, and from there a journey from which there was no return, flight inland took them beyond wars and the trafficking of flesh. Daily life was marked by the knowledge that the thing may not stay elsewhere; in fact, its very drive towards expansion ensured that over there would edge ever closer. Through the determination to make life beyond, new collectives emerged, less invested in the exclusion of strangers. Instead, mutual recognition was called into being through repeated journeying. Here, “we” made place in an unstable remove; flight, placemaking, with the possibility that the thing would catch up, requiring continued flight in order to remain in a place beyond.

Marronage is often understood as flight, expanded by Roberts (2015) to include sociogenic rather than physical remove. In resonance with Roberts, Shauna Sweeney offers a historical examination (during the era of legal enslavement) of “market marronage” (2019). Rather than the peripheries typically identified with marronage, market marronage is interstitial to everyday plantation geographies. This contrasts with literatures that conceptualize a spatiotemporal duality of spatial sovereignty (grand) vs. temporary flight (petit). Markets were weekly destinations for enslaved people who sold surplus provisions they raised on their grounds (plots). While markets were bounded places that stabilized the plantation, Sweeney shows that they were also complex aquaterreous infrastructures. Spanning routine journeys to and from the plantation, these infrastructures served as a potentiality for the destabilization of the plantation (Scott, 2018; Sweeney, 2019, cf. Mintz and Hall, 1960). These journeys knit plantations to plots—whether carved out inside, or beyond the physical bounds of the plantation (Wynter, 1970, 1971). ¹⁸ Integral to the colony, these “fugitive infrastructures” (Cowen, 2017) were at once a site of colonial anxiety, and a production of space by the enslaved that ritualized the rehearsal of abolition. ¹⁹ Indeed, these infrastructures were what enslaved people on the island sought to expand upon legal emancipation.

As with marronage in the island’s interior forests that Moulton writes of, these market infrastructures also “instantiate a counter-hegemonic spatial–ecological logic to the colonial order” (2022: 4). However, markets’ fugitive infrastructures were distributed points at the very heart of the colonial order. Within market infrastructures, Sweeney traces those “who pursued itinerant freedom within slavery” (2019: 203), “hiding in plain sight,” at times even “pass[ing] as enslaved in order to remain free” (2019: 212; see also Scott, 2018).

This bold affront to property regimes in land and flesh thus toyed with the property form towards ends it did not describe. Planters conceived of the internal marketing system as cheapening the sustenance of enslaved people, and the plot as bait that would tie the enslaved to a plantation where they held customary tenure. Both were subverted towards freedom , but in the acknowledged centre of racial capitalism.

Like marronage, village and family land have been framed as archetypal spatial figures of freedom dreams inhered in Caribbean placemaking. Though enacted via “papers and titles” (Cummings, 2023: 116), villages were sometimes formed through unruly appropriations of the liberal property regime, with some originating in land seizure (Besson, 2000). Located at plantation peripheries, villages were necessary to plantation persistence following emancipation, even as they became the basis for an alternative geography modelled on routine withdrawal rather than sustained, or temporary flight. As Carnegie has argued regarding family land, and as we learn from Tulloch, villages have often been theorized as sedentary, attributing to them more fixity than they are lived.

Though they are the legal trappings of colonial settlement, “papers and titles” are the foundation of a property system that values capital’s uneven spatiotemporalities, which require both fixity and fluidity; stasis—such as security of title and representations of value, facilitates motion—such as that inhered in the making of uneven geographies of organized abandonment and investment. It is this tension that manifests Tulloch as a “forgotten place” (Gilmore, 2008) temporarily abandoned by capital. Willie Wright (2020) maps the morphology of marronage to spaces that capital deems deficient or uninhabitable as well as those he calls “commodities-in-waiting,” temporarily forgotten in the face of capital’s search for never-ending motion. In this latter sense, capture land at Tulloch was aided by the organized abandonment of a former sugar estate and threatened by its reappearance on the “front page.” Taking up Gilmore (2008), Winston explains: “the conceptualization of capital’s waste land—and its potential to kindle freedom dreams beyond racial capitalism—can be extended to include sites such as poor, urban and rural ‘forgotten places’” (2021: 2188). In contemporary Jamaica, the enactment of capture land shows that, as with flag independence, psychic investment in land reform and accommodations to the property regime has failed to live up to its promise. In these moments of exhaustion, radical traditions offer a resource from which to reselect “liberatory lineages” (Gilmore, 2017: 237). In the face of change (whether capital-genic or not), capture land makes a way for the rebellious making and remaking of life-giving place, rehearsals that do not settle (Gilmore, 2017: 238).

Like Anansi, capture land is tricky. It is tactical. It is unruly. ²⁰ At Tulloch, it asserts the continuity inhered in law, but subverts it towards a right of return. It reveals the lie of the property line that bisects lives lived here. In contrast to family land’s affordance to locate “fractions of blood on fragments of soil,” capture land is a grammar for a wholesale transformation of relations with the earth towards a future that values life—which is both mobile and rooted. Capture land calls on sentiment, and tragedy but not towards a stifling fixity. For, in spite of navel strings and yard burials, home is elusive.

The ownershipless have made and remade place—in the village, on family land, away from bush and from concrete jungle. In so doing, they have ‘left to come back,’ not unlike the journeys people in the region have taken to make life, straddling the shores of the archipelago (Carnegie, 2002), straddling borders on other shores (Trotz, 2011), all without extinguishing the thread that connects them to ancestral homes. A poem by Lorna Goodison (2010) muses on her migration as a moment in diasporic life in multiple overlapping timescales of dispossession noting, “we never call ourselves exiles.” Instead she says,

We see our sojournings as “making life.”