The Coloniality of Power and the Limits of Dissent in Jamaica

The Jamaican 1960s represented a critical phase in the island’s political history. The era provoked a second round of decolonization politics as the culturally Eurocentric political class that won power in the first round, during the 1930s, encountered stiff opposition to its autocratic power, antiblack racism, and perceived accommodation to the island’s dependency on the economic, cultural, and political institutions of the world system. A myriad of dissident organizations, personalities, and social forces challenged this dependency and rejected the unapologetic “coloniality of power” that defined political rule in Jamaica. However, despite success in discrediting this power, serious weaknesses—including disunity, belief in radical will, all-consuming preoccupation with taking power, and naïveté about the modern power arrayed against them—kept dissidents at bay, with little success in winning the majority of Jamaicans to their cause.