On a Walking Tour to No Man’s Land: Brokering and Shifting Narratives of Violence in Trench Town, Jamaica

Abstract

Tourists who visit Trench Town are drawn in by the neighborhood’s rich musical heritage. They want to see the birthplace of reggae and witness the circumstances depicted in many famous Jamaican songs. Knowingly venturing into marginalized territory, into the “ghetto,” travelers expect to encounter spectacular forms of violence. Yet what the walking tour of Trench Town reveals is an experience of another kind, an excursion that exposes poverty as structural violence, and that points to the historical and political struggles that are constitutive of the area’s social fabric. In this article, drawing on an ethnographic vignette of a walking tour that starts in Bob Marley’s rehearsal grounds and ends by an empty plot locally known as “No Man’s Land,” I focus on the entanglements of violence and tourism and present the discrepancy that exists between touristic desires and the reality of the tourism commodity. This analysis reveals how residents of Trench Town simultaneously choose to address and disregard different (un)spectacular forms of violence during the tourism encounter and I argue that in so doing, local tour guides productively leverage violence to denounce and grapple with structural and historical brutalities.