ABSTRACT
This chapter presents how emotion and location intersect by focusing on transnationally circulating media representations and their more local appropriations. The relationship between media and place is a main concern of the emerging field of media and communication geography. From the 1980s onwards, Jamaican gangs became notorious for their success in building transnational crime networks. The gangs' geographical reach largely corresponded with the cities and countries where Jamaican immigrants settled. Their networks built on and extended earlier patterns of narcotics trafficking, but became more geographically diverse and more violent as the focus shifted from marijuana to cocaine. This chapter explores how mass-mediated depictions of crime intersect with what can be understood as a transnational affective geography. It shows residents' responses to these images of transnational Jamaican crime as part of a process of relational place-making, in which belonging to Downtown Kingston is construed through connections to a broader network of urban places and through licit and illicit translocal flows.
