Fortifying Home and Yard: Metal, Vegetation, and the Embodied Practice of Middle‐Class In/security in Jamaica

Abstract

Abstract A middle‐class residential aesthetics defined by fortification and security has emerged in Kingston, Jamaica, in response to the city's crime rate. In this article, I foreground the material fortification of a middle‐class property as a means by which to theoretically analyze the Caribbean home and yard as canvases upon which to envision alternate configurations of security worlds. By centering the embodied and affective performance of middle‐class choreographies of in/security, I consider the ways in which historically situated racialized and gendered narratives impinge upon middle‐class residents as well as those deemed outsiders and become implicated in the creation and curation of fortified space. This article takes seriously the Caribbean middle‐class body, metal architectures, and residential vegetation as sites upon which in/security, in its varied contours, is performed. In so doing, it illuminates both the exclusionary and emancipatory possibilities that are central to the creative making of the Caribbean's middle class.

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