Document Type
Project and Program Profile
Abstract
In the summer of 1978, at Church Teachers' College in Mandeville, Jamaica, a class of advanced students participating in the Jamaica Movement for the Advancement of Literacy (JAMAL) wrote, cast, rehearsed, and performed a play that satirized several major institutions--the family, the church, and the business sector--as well as class and gender relations. This essay locates this nearly forgotten event in the context of the opportunities JAMAL offered for decolonizing knowledge and activism for poor and working-class Jamaicans. The reactions the play provoked on the micro and macro levels help to explain JAMAL's subsequent trajectory, which follows the broader trajectory of the conflicting visions for the purposes of adult education in Jamaica's pre- and post-Independence era: from the efforts of Jamaica Welfare starting in the 1930s through active decolonization in the 1970s, through global and local institutional neglect in the 1980s, to contemporary insertion into the neo-liberal global economy. Recovering this instance of popular education and performance illuminates both gaps in the historical record and possible foundations for reinvention in the 21st Century.
Recommended Citation
Gray Kristensen, Randi
(2023)
"JAMAL: Adult Literacy Decolonizing Knowledge and Activism in 1970s Jamaica,"
Community Literacy Journal: Vol. 17:
Iss.
2, Article 6.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/communityliteracy/vol17/iss2/6
