Sistren Theatre Collective: Struggling to Remain Radical in an Era of Globalization

The lyrics of Bob Marley's famous song—"get up, stand up, stand up for your rights"—capture the spirit of post-independence Jamaica, when hope for change and empowerment permeated working-class and ghetto communities. The 1972 electoral victory of the People's National Party (PNP), and the 1974 declaration by its leader, Michael Manley, that the country "had been converted to socialism," augmented this atmosphere of hope and national pride (Payne 34). With the government ideologically on their side, "people from the laboring poor were analyzing, making demands and being openly critical of the forces holding them back" (Ford-Smith, "Jamaican Women's Theatre" 87-88). As political scientist Anthony Payne has noted: "During the 1970s many black Jamaicans did come to feel for the first time that they were full members of a national community, entitled to be treated as citizens on an equal basis with others of a lighter skin" (6). Founded in 1977, during this transitional moment in Jamaican history, Sistren Theatre Collective began using popular theatre techniques to give voice to Jamaican women's experiences of oppression. Through fully staged theatrical productions and more informal workshops, Sistren formed a grassroots theatre company whose goals included empowering women to struggle against oppression by taking action to improve their lives.

Before arriving in Kingston in 1996 to work with Sistren and study their theatre techniques, I had read much about the collective and had participated in a workshop they conducted in Toronto in 1993. Everything I read celebrated Sistren's work and its ability to empower working-class Jamaican women; their work seemed to represent the intersection of my two great passions, feminist theatre and grassroots theatre. So when I arrived in Jamaica, I was not prepared to find what I did: Sistren was no longer the vibrant, radical, and powerful theatre company I had read about in articles and interviews; rather, it seemed to be struggling artistically and administratively to stay alive. Honor Ford-Smith, former artistic director of Sistren, suggested I read her book, Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: A Case Study of Funding and Organizational Democracy in Sistren 1977-1988, which criticizes the internal structure of the organization and its struggles for funding. But the book doesn't discuss the increasing challenges Sistren faced, starting in the mid-1980s, to achieve its goals of personal and community empowerment. After I returned home, I gradually began to understand the extent to which a swirl of forces beyond Sistren's control was responsible for these difficulties; the economic and cultural transformations wrought by processes of globalization had posed challenges to Sistren's work and mission to which they were struggling to respond.

Globalization, a much-used and much-contested term, refers to the transformations wrought by two concurrent phenomena. The first is the broadening horizon and deepening penetration of capitalism and the "world market" into more geographic regions and more aspects of life. Secondly, the increasing speed and ease with which information and people can travel—aided by technology—is intensifying and radically altering global social relations. Networks linking far-away places and people, tourism, diasporas, and other relocations are creating a more culturally, financially, and ecologically interconnected world. This increasing interconnectedness, combined with the myriad ways in which people, culture, and information travel (both willingly and unwillingly), is transforming the nature and constitution of communities. Moreover, national borders are becoming increasingly irrelevant demarcations of community, identity, and belonging.

The cultural consequences of these transformations are profound. Many theorists have warned against understanding cultural globalization as synonymous with the process of Americanization or homogenization, even if American television and film dominate the global visual landscape. Most agree, however, that these global forces are changing both the nature of locality and the ways in which communities are imagined. As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai asks, "What is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized...