Cinema and cultural memory in the Bahamas in the 1950s

Abstract

Abstract This thesis is a cultural, social and historical research of cinemagoing and the memory of cinema audiences in the city of Nassau, Bahamas in the 1950s. Drawing from the methodological toolkits of New Cinema History and Memory Studies, the research situates oral history narratives within the broader contexts and underlying structures of cinemagoing as a social activity in a particular place and time. It is an exploration of everyday life in this small British colony through the recollections of persons who would have been young adults during the 1950s, at a time when the Bahamas was going through a period of social and political challenges to the status quo in this post war era. This history of the cultural effect of cinemagoing is revealed through the locations of cinemas and cinema space; the positioning of cinemagoing in the leisure activities of the Bahamian youth during that epoch; the influence of racial divides; and the impact and significance of the remembered film texts. The thesis offers a history of the cinema trade in an island nation, documenting the city’s main commercial cinemas, as well as their management and film supply structures. It then aims to understand how the cinemas worked as places within the city, and how they fit into the population’s leisure practices. This investigation reveals the profound effect of race relations on the distribution and exhibition of films and the practice of cinemagoing during this selected decade. It offers an audience perspective on segregated and mixed cinema spaces, as well as on the different experiences of the city according to gendered and racial divisions. This thesis thus provides not only cinema history for the designated time period, but it also contributes to the social and cultural history of The Bahamas. Accordingly, it is a memory study that reveals how race, space, location and leisure choice evolved around the memory of cinemagoing in the 1950s in Nassau, Bahamas and the contribution of those remembered experiences to the development of their future lives and the evolved history of a nation.