The Postcolonial Below: Roots Theater and Black Enjoyment in Jamaica Available to Purchase

Chapter 4, “The Postcolonial Below: Roots Theater and Black Enjoyment in Jamaica,” analyzes Delcita Coldwater, a popular blackface character who appeared in several plays in a theatrical genre in Jamaica known as “roots theater.” The chapter argues that Delcita is conjured by and for Jamaica’s black working class to articulate a counternarrative that challenges discourses of creole nationalism. Instead of reading Delcita solely as a figure of resistance, it examines the paradoxes of black enjoyment of blackface tropes and theorizes abject pleasures and radical disregard as domains of racial enjoyment.