ABSTRACT
Written as an introduction to the University of West Indies’ production of Dennis Scott’s play An Echo in the Bone (1974), Dawes’s description attests to the relevance of his drama to contexts and moments other than those of the production. Scott’s reputation as a playwright has been overshadowed by his own fame as a poet and by dramatists such as Derek Walcott who share his focus on colonial history and its postcolonial legacy. Scott’s career as poet, dramatist, and arts administrator in Jamaica in the 1970s is part of a pre-globalization narrative that may seem irrelevant in the face of Jamaica’s current policies of a liberal, privatized economy, making it a willing although severely disadvantaged partner in the global economy. This career, however, inspired a generation of Caribbean theatre and drama workers, and Scott’s legacy continues in the experimental and socially conscious work of the Jamaican playwrights Pat Cumper and Pauline Forrest-Watson, and groups such as Sistren Theatre Collective and Jamaica Youth Theatre. As Director of the Jamaica School of Drama from 1977 to 1982, Scott’s key contribution was initiating theatre for development programs in Jamaican prisons, hospitals for the mentally ill, youth clubs, and sugar cooperatives. He wrote in an unpublished paper titled “Theatre in Development” that the kind of theatre he envisaged gave “people a chance to defi ne, choose, and extend themselves” as both participants and spectators (6). Scott’s belief in local communities as the locus of historical and political consciousness coincided with Jamaica’s
experiment with democratic socialist governance introduced by the People’s National Party leader Michael Manley. Defi ned as sustainable development within broadly socialist ideologies, democratic socialism as the state policy was abandoned in the late 1970s under international pressure to privatize the economy. Analyzing two plays by Dennis Scott, this chapter outlines multiple connotations of community and kinship towards an understanding of citizenship during this crucial period in Jamaica.
