Performing Postcoloniality in the Jamaican Seventies: The Harder They Come and Smile Orange

Abstract

This essay examines two Jamaican texts from that decade, the film The Harder They Come and the play Smile Orange, to read the ways in which the cultural products of that period demonstrate an engagement with a no longer anticolonial, not yet fully postcolonial context. The Harder They Come and Smile Orange highlight performance as a response to this context. Performance and masculine resistance have been figured as incompatible by thinkers like Fanon, but examining how performance functions in these two texts sheds light on postcolonial as opposed to anticolonial attitudes towards the strategy.