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Abstract
This essay examines the 1985 documentary film, Sweet Sugar Rage (co-directed by Honor Ford-Smith and Harclyde Walcott), and its methodologies of renewable resistance to the enduring choreographies of planter's pageantry in the postcolonial Caribbean. Produced by Jamaica's Sistren Theatre Collective – a radical community theatre group formed in 1977 – the film (the collective's first) documents a set of dramatic interventions focused on women's labour exploitation in Jamaica's sugar cane fields. A series of workshops and plays depicts the historical and current material conditions of cane workers and aims to support participants in the practical navigation of plantation labour. In staging the material conditions of post-independence Jamaican plantation labour, including the gendered hierarchies of union organising, these counter-choreographies of workers' solidarity re-occupy the cane field as a historically dense site of collective resistance. Furthermore, I argue, in their rejection of the ubiquitous and insidious staging of the plantation as an ahistorical, hyper-aestheticised dreamscape of leisure and play, these local counter-choreographies intervene on the scale of global history. The essay articulates the stakes of this refusal by historicising the installation of plantation heritage tourism as a nostalgic site of planter's pageantry that continues to erase the violent legacies of enslaved and indentured labour into the present day. Engaging the aesthetic and political consequences of these competing choreographies, the essay looks towards the future of the Caribbean as a global proscenium of postcolonial possibility.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Kadeem Oak, who curated the exhibition Abundance ∼ in ∼ Togetherness at Cubitt 30 Screening Room (where I first saw Sweet Sugar Rage); to Cinenova Feminist Film and Video (where I subsequently accessed the film in order to write this piece); and to my dear friend Sally Moussawi at Cubitt Artists (who knew how much this film would mean to me).
Notes
1 Recalling, for example, the plantation’s architectural and social structures that facilitated and secured the racialised project of ‘overseeing’ as a precursor to modern policing, and the colonial legacies of the tropical picturesque that continue to shape the visual imagination of the Caribbean.
2 For example, Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake launched his Plantation line made from natural materials (predominantly cotton and linen) in 1981 to great success. More contemporaneously, Pantone continues to produce 18-0832 TCX Plantation for a vast array of consumer and manufacturing uses. More specifically, the imagination of the plantation as a ‘paradise’ has a wealth of origin stories, expressions, and material homes, all indispensable to the imperial/colonial project as it was and as it continues in altered form.
3 As of October 2023, Rose Hall is offering Halloween Haunted Night Tours: https://rosehall.com/tours/.
4 Hakewill’s drawings transcribed these fanciful visions, but also helped to further prescribe and thus command this view of plantation landscapes into a matter of lawful and orderly society.
5 Even Manley’s institution of the Kariba suit as part of acceptable dress code for official government business speaks to an awareness of postcolonial performance and self-fashioning as intrinsically political acts.
6 Credited in the film as Pauline Crawford, Beverley Elliott, Lana Finiken, Lillian Foster, Lorna Haslam, Rebecca Knowles, Vivette Lewis, Jasmine Smith, Cerene Stephenson, May Thompson, and Jennifer Williams.
7 While this quotation is from a proposal that dates from the mid-1990s, these were the same goals that Sistren set for itself in the 1970s.
8 As noted by Honor Ford-Smith, many other discussions of Sistren’s work include Batra; Shakes; Ford-Smith, ‘Ring Ding in a Tight Corner’; and Smith, ‘Demystifying “Reality” in Sistren’s Bellywoman Bangarang’.
9 I borrow this framework of simultaneous hypervisibility/invisibility from the scholarship of Emanuela Kucik, which addresses what she terms the ‘visibility paradox’ of Blackness and Black suffering. In the context of planter’s pageantry, the plantation as an aesthetic matrix is positioned as spectacle, and also obscured.
10 As Ford-Smith wrote in 1981, ‘A group like Sistren need not choose theater as the end product of its educational process. The drama can be used for consciousness-raising and skill training in any field, because it offers a way of approaching and investigating problems’ (‘From Sistren’ 331–32).
11 This delineation refers to race and class-based societal divisions in Jamaica, with ‘roots’ connoting working-class Afro-Caribbean folk traditions and land-based practices and ‘uptown’ referring to the wealthier urban/suburban upper classes.
12 As Karina Smith notes, ‘the company played a leading role in the Caribbean women’s movement, providing feminist analysis of women’s issues in Jamaica and entering into transnational alliances with women’s organizations in the Caribbean region, North America, the UK, and Europe’ (‘From Politics to Therapy’ 87).
13 The song was composed by Winston Bell and Sistren Collective, arranged by Michael ‘Ibo’ Cooper, and performed by ‘Ibo’ Cooper, ‘Cat’ Coore, and Richard Daley of Third World Band with Junior Bailley of Mighty Diamonds.