Professor Jean Besson: Building Zion: Narratives and Strategies of Development

Goldsmiths Anthropology welcomes Prof. Jean Besson, presenting her new book: Building Zion: Narratives and Strategies of Development in a Jamaican ‘Squatter’ Settlement.

Building Zion tells the story of a community (named Zion) of informal land occupiers, including Revival-Zionists and Rastafarians, established on the margins of a former slave plantation. The story of the builders of Zion highlights the resourcefulness of a ‘squatter-peasantry’ and their significance in Jamaican nation-building within the paradoxical contexts of decolonization and persisting social inequality.
Building Zion is the third in a trilogy of ethnographies based on research in Jamaica. These include Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (2002), which focuses on post-slavery villages with family land, and Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons: Creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica (2016) discussing maroons with sacred common land.

The talk will contextualize the study of Zion within this ethnographic trilogy, showing that post-slavery family land, maroon common land, and captured land in squatter settlements are variants of customary tenures found across the Caribbean region. These tenures, rooted in community, kinship and a history of slave resistance, reflect dynamic processes of peasantization and Caribbean culture-building. Such Afro-Creole tenures are transforming the legacy of the colonial slave-plantation system, rather than being obstacles to development as Eurocentric perspectives suggest.
A postscript will touch on the devastating impact of Hurricane Melissa on the Zion community, a month after the publication of the book.

Jean Besson is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths. She taught at Goldsmiths from 1991-2014, where she established courses on the Caribbean Region and contributed to the MA Applied Anthropology and Community and Youth Work and the University of London’s MA in Caribbean and Latin American Studies.

Jean has held visiting appointments at the University of the West Indies and the Johns Hopkins University, USA, and is an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and the Institute of the Americas, University College London. She is a founder member, past chair and elected Honorary Life Member of the Society for Caribbean Studies in the UK. She was an advisor and contributor to the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum’s exhibition ‘Breaking the Chains’ (2007-2009) commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade.

In 2024, Professor Besson served as a consultant to Transatlantic Trafficked Enslaved African Corrective Historical (TTEACH) Plaques for designing the ‘Black Lives Matter’ plaque installed in Deptford Town Hall acknowledging the lives of Africans trafficked by Britain and their descendants consigned to chattel slavery. The plaque marks Deptford Town Hall as a Site of Conscience, supported by teaching and research at Goldsmiths.

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