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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01g732dd366
Title: “Nation in the Making”: Art, Politics, and Statecraft in Jamaica after 1962
Authors: Womack, Jessica R
Advisors: Okeke-Agulu, Chika
Contributors: Art and Archaeology Department
Keywords: art exhibitions
Caribbean art
Jamaican art
Jamaican politics
nation-building
visual culture
Subjects: Caribbean studies
Black studies
Issue Date: 2024
Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University
Abstract: This dissertation, “Nation in the Making”: Art, Politics, and Statecraft in Jamaica after 1962, examines Jamaican art of the post-independence period. By tracing the mid-to-late-twentieth-century negotiations, partnerships, and tensions between artists, arts institutions, and government agencies and officials, it probes the politics and practices of exhibition and display in Jamaica at the time. It endeavors to understand how these relationships were informed by—and also shaped—broader diplomatic, political, economic, and artistic concerns as Jamaica transitioned to statehood. In this analysis, I take seriously the idea that art and visual culture act upon their environment. Showing how government officials and agencies employed Jamaican art in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—by creating advertisements meant to attract wealthy US tourists and hosting art exhibitions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere—I argue that Jamaican leaders were aware of visual material’s potent capacity to articulate the new nation’s racial identity, as well as its cultural and economic autonomy. Key political figures, such as Prime Ministers Michael Manley (1972–80, 1989–92) and Edward Seaga (1980–89), and agency employees, including Jamaica School of Art principal Robert Verity, strongly supported the visual arts and saw them as integral to the nation-building process. While these officials leveraged art to benefit the nation-state, artists—such as Karl Parboosingh, Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, and Dawn Scott—and groups including the Caribbean Artists Movement used their artwork and exhibitions to forge solidarities, critique sociopolitical conditions, and challenge state hypocrisy. Ultimately, my project focuses on the role of art and artistic production in mid-to-late-twentieth-century Jamaican society, as individuals of various backgrounds worked to create a coherent national identity in the wake of British colonialism. These efforts were also taking place during the Cold War, as US leadership sought to curb communism’s influence in their “backyard.” Drawing on extensive reading and analyses of visual art, tourism advertisements, exhibition catalogs, letters, memos, and interviews, I show that art served as a powerful tool that artists, arts institutions, and government officials used—sometimes in tandem, other times at odds—to visualize and make real their ambitions for a postcolonial Jamaica. 
URI: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01g732dd366
Type of Material: Academic dissertations (Ph.D.)
Language: en
Appears in Collections:Art and Archaeology

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