Similarly to Mandy, I found Thomas’s use of “reparations” as a “framework for thinking” to be particularly interesting. I don’t know if it’s more that I expect quantitative data/research mindsets more (perhaps because of my computer science background) but when I first read that statement my mind jumped towards the “activist reparation politics” idea of there being a quantifiable way to use the concept of reparations in investigating Jamaica. Of course, like a page later, Thomas goes on to explain that she is also using this reparations framework to contrast the “liberal human rights” framework we normally use. Admittedly, this kind of confused me because I didn’t really know what she meant and thus had to reread that paragraph a few times to sort of understand the sort of “rights” vs “reparations” argument she was presenting.
I guess my question comes from the very end of this explanation, when she says that “using reparations as a framework for thinking makes available a political project that other models of state formation and political transformation in the Caribbean and beyond—such as Marxist proletarian revolution—have not” (page 7). How exactly does a reparations framework help us to identify various “political projects” that the common human rights one might not? Or am I just misunderstanding her meaning?