Exceptional Violence is a sophisticated examination of postcolonial state formation in the Caribbean, considered across time and space, from the period of imperial New World expansion to the contemporary neoliberal era, and from neighborhood dynamics in Kingston to transnational socioeconomic and political fields. Deborah A. Thomas takes as her immediate focus violence in Jamaica and representations of that violence as they circulate within the country and abroad. Through an analysis encompassing Kingston communities, Jamaica’s national media, works of popular culture, notions of respectability, practices of punishment and discipline during slavery, the effects of intensified migration, and Jamaica’s national cultural policy, Thomas develops several arguments. Violence in Jamaica is the complicated result of a structural history of colonialism and underdevelopment, not a cultural characteristic passed from one generation to the next. Citizenship is embodied; scholars must be attentive to how race, gender, and sexuality have been made to matter over time. Suggesting that anthropologists in the United States should engage more deeply with history and political economy, Thomas mobilizes a concept of reparations as a framework for thinking, a rubric useful in its emphasis on structural and historical lineages.

Product Description: Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas argue that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, this state-of-the-art collection of essays explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization...read more

In this study of what is often considered to be Dickens's most important novel. Thomas asserts that Hard Times can be understood as a "fable of fragmentation and wholeness." Dickens conceived of Hard Times as a severe critique of the industrial and philosophical excesses of industrial England in the mid-nineteenth century. The problem of fragmentation is one mode by which Dickens expressed this critique. Thomas structures her analysis around five key areas in which fragmentation is the dominant theme. As Dickens shows in Hard Times, the machinery of nineteenth-century industry had the capacity to dismember and destroy the bodies of individual workers. Thomas provides detailed information about the unfenced machines and industrial accidents of Dickens's time, greatly enhancing her readers' understanding of these brutal facts of Victorian life. As Thomas demonstrates, this physical fragmentation had its counterpart in the social thought of Dickens's times. Utilitarianism, a philosophy that imposes a strict rationalism on all human endeavor, and an educational system that provides a "strict diet of facts," are two forms of intellectual fragmentation pervasive in Dickens's novel and explicated by Thomas in this study. In addition, industrial relations that reduce workers to "hands" represent a form of emotional fragmentation, which Dickens emphatically criticizes in Hard Times. The inaccessibility of divorce for the majority of individuals also led to emotional fragmentation, separating individuals trapped in unhappy marriages from potential happiness. Thomas explores this last issue in light of contemporary debates on divorce-law reform, as well as Dickens's own deeply unhappy marriage.

Product Description: Slavery fascinated Thackeray. For him, the essence of slavery consisted of treating people like things. Thomas examines relationships in Thackeray’s fiction in which people have been reduced to objects and power is an end. These relationships include not only actual slaves and blacks, but also servants, dependents of all races, upper-class women sold into marriage, and children struggling to escape parental domination...read more

Product Description: Book by Thomas, Deborah A.