This presentation is based on an ongoing study of Jamaican textbooks that explores what these texts tell students about their history, culture, and therefore, their identity as Jamaicans. Close readings of history, social studies and Caribbean Studies secondary school textbooks reveal a central tension between Jamaican-focused depictions of history and culture and the persistence of coloniality – the British-derived, imperialist web in which Jamaicans have been caught for centuries. Overall, the textbooks present a “third space” wherein the margin (Jamaica) and the core (Britain) are enmeshed in ways that have negative repercussions for young Jamaicans’ sense of identity. In this hybridity lies marginalization, as some texts de-centre Jamaicans in their own stories. Coloniality’s epistemological assumptions and models are often left unquestioned, even as efforts are made to present Jamaican subjectivities. For example, information rooted in Eurocentrism is presented as neutral fact, and is interspersed among actual factual details. This both obscures the need for extrication from the Eurocentric web and makes that disentanglement very difficult. The textbooks are complicit in epistemicide: in this case, the destruction and/or stigmatisation of African-based ways of knowing. They reinforce and reproduce the liminality that has long been ascribed to Jamaican identity: the “battle for space” between the European and African, the push and pull of imperialist vs resistance traditions, have meant that Jamaican identity has long been constituted by uncertainty and ambiguity. This project adds to the anthropological work on Jamaica that tries to unpack its complex identity formation, and makes a critical link between the latter and the educational system. Ultimately, it calls for an envisioning of a future free of marginality and uncertainty through a decolonial reimagining of the curriculum.
