Contested territory: American film spectatorship, colonial mimicry and British Empire

Abstract

This essay examines an account of cinema spectatorship in 1920s Jamaica as relayed by a British librarian's treatise advocating for the extended use of film in education. He details how African Jamaican women attended mission churches dressed in the flapper style, mimicking the American movie stars they had seen at the local cinema. Like similar stories of ‘primitive’ spectatorship, this account of movie mimicry is meant to function as evidence of the relatively new medium's unprecedented powers of persuasion over colonial subjects, children, women, and other individuals characterized as feeble-minded. As such, it seems to confirm the imperial fantasy of the superiority of the colonizing culture. But as I demonstrate, this instance of colonial mimicry also triggered anxieties about American cultural hegemony in the British Empire because the Jamaican women chose to mimic the American movie stars they saw on screen rather than the other, competing models of white femininity they were exposed to at the mission. I therefore argue these Jamaican women's mimicry may be read as an appropriation of an American popular cultural form as resistance against British colonial hegemony and suggest how further study of similar stories will open up new avenues for thinking about what constitutes resistant spectatorship.