ABSTRACT
“Capture land” is a Jamaican colloquialism for land occupied against the wishes, or without the knowledge of, the landowner. The term emerged in the 1970s to describe a pattern of expropriation by the people, coinciding with the height of the postcolonial state’s anti-imperialism. Supported by ethnographic data, the chapter looks back from the present to locate capture land in the plantation’s afterlives. By tracing a history of the present, the chapter puts capture land into relation with multiple material and epistemological threads of anticolonial land claims that oppose the monopolization of land as property. In the present, anti-squatting policy enacts a processual land grab that is rationalized by implicating the squatter as symptom and catalyst of national crises. Ultimately the chapter aims to unsettle how current policy discursively severs the postcolonial land question from legacies of genocide, land theft, enslavement, and exploitation, and in so doing, naturalizes dispossession.
