With the CIA plotting to assassinate Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, the United States worked to destabilise the success of the widely popular democratic socialist leader who called out all players in the Cold War on behalf of the Global South. The newly liberated Caribbean nation was rocked by violence and the government destabilised, while American institutions reaped the benefits of a displaced labor force.
In 1982, photographer Samantha Box, then aged five, moved with her family from Kingston, Jamaica, to Edison, New Jersey. “My parents were both chemists; my mother was from Trinidad and my father was a professor at the University of the West Indies and he was recruited by a pharmaceutical company,” says Box. “In the ’80s, the US was actively recruiting scientists from the Global South, places like the Caribbean, India, and China. We were part of a larger wave of migration that fundamentally reshaped central Jersey.”
As the daughter of a Black Jamaican father and Indian Trinidadian mother, Box came of age among a dazzling array of overlapping diasporas and simply could not be contained as her name might suggest. Without existing frameworks, she decided to invent her own, using photography to explore Black queer identity in her first major series, Invisible. The work, made between 2005–2018, chronicles the lives of youth living at Sylvia’s Place, an emergency shelter for unhoused queer youth in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and the city’s flourishing Kiki scene.
