In Exceptional Violence, Thomas actively confronts and advocates for the relevance of culture to “to demonstrate that violence generally is not a cultural phenomenon but an effect of class formation, a process that is immanently racialized and gendered” (2011: 4). Moreover, employing “repatriation” as a framework for thinking, Thomas explores violence as forming directly from the legacy of British colonialism and plantation-based extraction, thereby resituating postcolonial discourse within a wider and more nuanced historical context (and not simply a recent “clash of civilizations” with North American culture and resentment towards “outside” influence). This concept of “palimpsestic time” is reminiscent of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge and other postmodernists’ rejection of progress, but seeks to explicitly contextualize the present as standing on the metaphorical layers of the past. In theory, this sounds like a really interesting form of exploring the relationship between the past and present and challenging incomplete and biased popular beliefs (e.g. North American stereotypes of Jamaican as inherently and a-historically violent or Jamaican resentment towards US neo-imperialism and violent media).
Additionally taking from Foucauldian thought, Thomas explores how black bodies and families, and space, are interconnected to and shape neoliberal economics, state formation, diaspora, and transnationalism, especially through narratives, representations, spectacles, and performance of violence (“discipline and punishment”). To do so in a framework of repatriation and palimpsestic time, Thomas expands the methodological toolkit of ethnography to encompass archives, literary criticisms, national cultural policy, popular music and myth, and the display of material artifacts among other things. I’d love to explore more how Thomas and other sociocultural anthropologists explore these additional methodologies in their ethnographic work and how we could develop similar frameworks in our own projects.