Digital identification in Jamaica

While biometric national identification systems have been examined in interesting ways in other postcolonial settings, notably on the African continent and in India, questions over state/citizenship, economy/economisation, and freedom/unfreedom take on a particular valence in Jamaica. This paper therefore builds towards two broad lines of inquiry. The first explores the obstacles to implementing national identification in the context of persistent and structurally embedded organised crime, where the border between legal and illegal is extremely blurred. The second wonders about cultural and sociological obstacles to the economisation of life, the goals of optimisation, speed, and seamlessness. Here, Caribbean cultural and political theory provides some alternative cultural resources of hope for life beyond work and profit. I am trying to chart a course between facile and romantic claims about ‘resistance’ and ‘refusal’ from below, and the more granular ethnographic studies which sometimes lose grasp of larger political and ethical questions. My interest is in restaging what kind of danger the ID4D model presents, wondering about whether and where the emphasis gets drawn in the wrong place. I am gently suggesting that automatic and visceral fears about biometrics and state overreach can obscure the more insidious, often taken-for-granted, logics of speed, optimisation and efficiency, and I want to develop a critique of these ideals through attention to vernacular culture and Caribbean cultural and political theory. This forms part of an attempt to plot some alternative ground for politics, even if the force of economisation, acceleration and nihilism seem impervious to such longings.