To Own Ourselves: Dancing Caribbean Radicalism in Post-Independence Jamaica

Abstract

“To Own Ourselves: Dancing Caribbean Radicalism in Independent Jamaica” is a political history of the West Indies grounded in dance as a decolonizing epistemology. This work charts the development of staged concert dance in Jamaica, particularly the choreography and community of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica (NDTC) from 1962-1976. Led by Rex Nettleford, a choreographer, public intellectual, and cultural consultant to the Prime Minister, the NDTC’s diaspora aesthetics and theories of race and nation directly affected cultural policy. This dissertation shows that dance pedagogy and performance informed a specifically West Indian strategy of embodied radical politics, and that dance was central to nationalist efforts to identify a practice of freedom as bodily self-ownership in response to the failures of the state’s vision of post-coloniality. Using movement analysis, queer theory, black studies, and transnational history methodologies, this project explores how migration, regional aesthetics, and Caribbean diaspora all formed the relational system through which Jamaican dancers theorized erotic agency and bodily autonomy. “To Own Ourselves” contends that the NDTC’s performance history constitutes a queer archive of West Indian nationalism and black radicalism during the decade that followed independence, when anti-racist social movements in the region and the circum-Caribbean migratory sphere sought to transform standards of physical virtuosity, ability, and value for black bodies. The NDTC drew on what this dissertation identifies as the performance strategy of “smaddification,” or the use of spectacle and exaggeration as a political tactic to protest the erasure and flattening of representations of gendered blackness within Jamaican multi-racial nationalism. The NDTC’s concerts became a space of participatory democracy not only for company members but for the general public, who used dance as an occasion to critique state-sanctioned ideas of Jamaican identity. The shifting criteria by which audiences and state actors judged the NDTC’s ability to represent the nation reveal the instability of Caribbean systems of racial legibility and national belonging, as well as the creatively adaptive ways that black Jamaicans reenacted their history to assert their claims to social citizenship.