On 24 May 2010, soldiers and police officers entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens in search of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who became a fugitive after the United States sought his extradition. After almost four days, at the end of this operation, Coke remained at large, but at least 69 civilians and three members of the security forces lay dead and with two others disappeared.   Examining photographs, video footage, and what remains fugitive in these sources, Northwestern Professor of Art History Krista Thompson speculates on why the hunt for a single fugitive led to the detainment, containment, and killing of so many.     
   
This presentation is part of a larger book project, which explores how fugitives and the photographic representations surrounding them in Jamaica informed a fugitive sociality, opening up social, political, and representational possibilities for those seeking to reimagine the existing parameters of the colonial and postcolonial state.    

This Art History Lecture Series event is co-presented by the Art Galleries at Black Studies and the Graduate Student Art History Association in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. 

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Please note that in order to ensure the timeliness of confirmation emails with Zoom link information, this registration link expires at 5pm on April 28, 2021 the day before the event. Those who have registered for the event during this timeframe will receive an email with Zoom information. For those that have not, please email Jill Velez for late registration.

Krista Thompson  is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois.   She is the author of  An Eye for the Tropics  (2006) and  Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice  (2015), recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association (2016). Thompson is currently working on  the manuscript  The Evidence of Things Not Captured, which examines notions of photographic absence, fugitivity, and disappearance in Jamaica (Duke University Press, forthcoming).  She is also writing  Black Light, a manuscript about electronic light artist Tom Lloyd.   

Scheduled

Virtual