Through the Eyes of Hollywood: Reading Representations of Jamaicans in American Cinema

While the Jamaican film industry is still fledgling, Jamaicans and Jamaica have made many cameos and acted as the background against which stories from Hollywood and other areas around the world are crafted. This article takes particular aim at three films: The Mighty Quinn (1989), Sharktale (2004), and Transporter 2 (2005), which are analyzed to explore the links between narrative, power, and representation and read beyond the cinematic text, exploring the shadows, the unspoken, the unvisualized, the unwritten elements of the films. The article explores the representation of the Jamaican landscape as an exoticized idyll and the representation of Jamaicans as Rasta and/or gangsters. Tied to these images are the depictions of Jamaicans as obeah workers and believers.