Smaddification (Dance and Decolonization in Jamaica)

In Smaddification, Amanda Michelle Reid uses performance and dance studies to consider body politics in mid-twentieth-century Jamaica following its independence. According to Jamaican scholar and artistic leader Rex Nettleford, cofounder of the National Dance Theater of Jamaica, “smaddification” refers to the process of becoming someone: of self-actualization through movement, spectacle, and taking up space. Through this lens, Reid traces a dynamic approach to Jamaican decolonization wherein the arts, and movement in particular, became central to activist-dancers’ performances and theories of freedom. She also takes up the work of artists and scholars like Katherine Dunham, Ivy Baxter, and Sylvia Wynter to bring the maximalist and expressive dance theatre productions of this period to life, arguing that their embrace of the spectacular demands that we expand our understanding of Jamaica's vanguard contributions to global black nationalist aesthetics. Bringing a queer and feminist approach to interpretating this moment of liberation, Smaddification follows the processes through which Jamaican dancers identified, defined, and institutionalized how to move freely as black people in a newly independent nation.