The Afterlives of Sugar: Liberation Cinema, Solidarity, and the Politics of Use

Cinelogue’s recent program Material Fabulations: Afro-Indigenous Cinema from Latin America, curated by Will Furtado, brought Johanné Gómez Terrero’s Sugar Island (2024) to the platform. Following a screening of the film in Berlin and a conversation with Cuban filmmaker and researcher Mónica María Garabito around the plantation economy and anti-Haitian racism in the Dominican Republic, I began thinking about how the film might be situated within a longer history of sugar, colonialism, and resistance in the Caribbean. At the same time, I was already in conversation with Jonathan Ali, Programming Director at Third Horizon, about bringing a selection of Caribbean liberationist films from the 1950s–80s to Cinelogue. From this, and in partnership with Ibraaz, I developed The Afterlives of Sugar, a three-film series bringing Sugar Island into dialogue with Arnold Antonin’s Haiti: The Way to Freedom (1973) and Honor Ford-Smith and Harclyde Walcott’s Sweet Sugar Rage (1985). Moving across Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic, the series traces the plantation’s afterlives through histories of labor, racial violence, resistance, and collective struggle. The conversation that follows with Ali began with these histories before turning to a broader question: what might liberationist cinema teach us about solidarity and the political use of cinema today?

Rehana Esmail (RE): Sugar occupies a strange place in the colonial imagination. We encounter it as something ordinary, associated with sweetness, pleasure, and abundance, while its history in the Caribbean is inseparable from enslavement, extraction, and racial capitalism. European colonisation devastated Indigenous societies across the Caribbean, and the plantation subsequently reorganised land, labour and social life around the production of commodities for European profit. Was the plantation simply an economic system imposed on Caribbean societies, or did it produce the societies that emerged around it?

Jonathan Ali (JA): I think the first thing to say is that the plantation system in what was then the West Indies, and what we call the Caribbean now, was not an aberration. Whatever societies were created were created as byproducts of a plantation system that was engaged in the production and export of commodities for the purpose of making profit – sugar, in particular. It was a system of complete extraction. And the enslaved, as well as bonded labourers, were merely workhorses to be used for the purpose of creating this profit. The Caribbean was a complete colonial creation, and it was built out of the plantation system. Europeans came just to make money and to take that money back to Europe.

RE: That history is where Arnold Antonin's Haiti: The Way to Freedom (1973) begins. Saint-Domingue had become one of the most profitable plantation economies in the Caribbean, and then the people enslaved within that system overthrew it. But the film also points to the unfinished character of that liberation: formal colonial rule ends yet the plantation and the racial and economic structures built around it persist. What made the Haitian Revolution such a profound rupture, and what survived it?

JA: It represented the first and only time that a chattel slave population rose up and took its freedom. Across the Caribbean, from the very beginning of slavery right until the end, you had rebellions, you had attempted revolutions, but they were all eventually crushed. The one exception was Haiti. It remains the only example of a colonised Black people taking rather than being given its freedom. But almost from the beginning, when the Haitians declared their freedom on 1 January 1804, the revolution was undermined. Haiti was forced to pay compensation to France for winning its freedom, while the other Caribbean colonies were afraid that revolution could spread.

When we look at the early 1970s and the making of Haiti: The Way to Freedom, we see it as part of that wider movement for liberation in the Americas and the Caribbean. Haiti had taken its freedom, but almost 200 years later had not secured it. What persisted and continues to persist in the Caribbean is absolutely the plantation model. What was needed, and what did not happen when slavery ended, was an intervention to say: this was a crime, an exploitative system that created riches, comfort, and privilege for one set of people and was absolutely horrendous for another, and we have to undo that. In fact, the opposite happened. In the British Caribbean, compensation was paid to the former slave owners for the loss of their property, and the formerly enslaved were given nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was no recognition that the entire society and its racial ordering had to be transformed.

RE: And Sugar Island brings us into one of those contemporary afterlives. We arrive at a Dominican-Haitian batey community where sugar production remains inseparable from the exploitation of Haitian labour and anti-Haitian racism. So the plantation’s afterlife isn’t only economic; it’s also ideological. Where does that racial order come from, and how does it continue to structure the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic?

JA: I'm not a particular expert on this history, but what you have is one island separated into two countries with two different colonial histories. On one side, you had Haiti, which was French and which fought and won its freedom. And then on the other side, you had a Spanish colony.

In the Dominican Republic (DR), one way this colonialism still manifests is in racism. The dictator Trujillo, who ruled the DR for 30 years in the middle the twentieth century, was himself obsessed with whiteness, lightened his skin color, and sought to bring in migrant communities who were white or light-skinned, with a eugenic plan to rid the DR of all Blackness. In some ways, that still exists. The Haitian population in the DR form a subset of the Black population. There continues to be in the DR what you might call the ‘Haitian question’ or the ‘Haitian problem’, as it is seen by Dominicans.

What we see in a film like Sugar Island dramatises the plantation system that persists there in a way that it doesn’t in other territories in the Caribbean. It persists in a form that is very recognisably colonial in the DR, and it rests on the exploitation of Haitian labour.

RE: Sweet Sugar Rage (1985), made by Honor Ford-Smith and Harclyde Walcott with the Sistren Collective, takes us into a different relationship between cinema and the plantation. The Sistren Collective was a Jamaican feminist theatre collective whose work grew out of the experiences of working-class women. In the film, they work directly with women employed in the sugar industry, using testimony, improvisation and theatre to articulate the conditions of their labour.

What strikes me is that these women aren’t simply subjects whose exploitation is being represented. Their experiences become the basis of a collective cultural and political process. Is that distinction between making work about people and making it with them fundamental to what the Sistren Collective was doing?

JA: I’m wary of characterising the Sistren example as a model, but I think the way that Sistren worked is salutary. In their work and their membership, Sistren cut across lines of class, racial, and gender. Yes, it was a feminist collective, but there were men who worked with them. They worked across nations as well. It was a Caribbean, and not simply Jamaican, endeavor, and it provided an example of this cross-class, cross-race, gender solidarity.

For them, culture-making, playmaking, and filmmaking were not only about representing but intervening in the situation of working-class women in Jamaica. It was part of a much larger, what you might call, consciousness-raising endeavor, which included political education and organising.

You see the process broken down so brilliantly in Sweet Sugar Rage. The interviews are done in the field. The problems they have are specifically identified. They bring these testimonies to the theater and then they say, ‘Okay, how can we find creative ways to dramatise these issues so that we can find solutions?’ So it’s about the process. It’s not about the final film. The external audience is secondary to the people who have worked on this thing because it’s for them. It’s for their liberation.

RE: The methodology itself becomes part of the political work: a way of collectively articulating conditions, developing consciousness, and finding ways to act on them. The external audience is almost secondary.

JA: Exactly. This is seizing the means of production in action.

We’re going out. We’re meeting these women. We’re finding out their problems directly, and we’re inviting them to come with us and work with us. Together we’re going to do something. That’s the activation. This is the fundamental dynamic of liberation cinema. It is a cinema with a purpose. The purpose is activating people so that they can make their own liberation.

RE: We use ‘political cinema’ very broadly today. Films that address colonialism, racism, exploitation, or resistance are described as political. But what you’re describing is something different: cinema intervening within an existing struggle. What makes that cinema liberationist rather than simply political in its subject matter?

JA: The making of these particular Caribbean films from the 1960s to the 80s is part of the larger anti- or decolonial movement of the Global South. Films find the form that their times demand, and these films therefore took on the character of liberation cinema. These films bear witness to liberation struggles, and they are part of these struggles. They don’t exist independently of them.

For the most part, these are nonfiction films. They’re documentaries. But they are not, and this is crucial, social issue films. A social issue documentary assumes things are essentially okay: society is fundamentally fine, but here is a particular problem that we need to address. These films were made by people trained in a Marxist, leftist filmmaking context for the revolution. They were making films as part of the revolution. They weren’t filmmakers who picked up a camera to film the revolution. It was the other way around. They were revolutionaries who picked up a camera.

There are common formal aspects to these films as well. The films have a poetics of their own, a liberation poetics, and that’s one of the features that gives them enduring appeal as films, but also as potential tools for people to use.

RE: That makes me wonder about the conditions for such a cinema now. The liberationist cinema we’re talking about emerged during a particular revolutionary period, when anti-colonial and socialist movements provided a political horizon that the films could materially participate in and contribute towards. We still have liberation struggles, of course, but the cultural and political conditions that surround them have changed enormously. Can liberationist cinema exist without that broader movement around it? Or has what we once called liberation cinema increasingly become cinema about political and social issues?

JA: That era of liberation occasioned certain films made in a certain way. There are, of course, still liberation struggles happening everywhere, but they’re happening within a different global paradigm. So the cinema being made is, by definition, going to be different.

To take Palestine as an example – because we can’t get away from talking about Palestine – quite a number of the films being made in and about Palestine now are, in a sense, politically pessimistic films that are saying: ‘What is the power of the image now? How many times can we show the violence, and nothing changes? What can we do?’ Well, that is the fundamental and old revolutionary question: What is to be done?

There’s still something to be done. It’s not a question of what but how. And that is what film and film form in particular is asking: how can cinema deal with this? Social issue films and reportage have their place. I’m not saying they don’t. But there’s a difference between that and the kind of cinema that involves the people themselves in their own liberation.

RE: This brings me back to sugar, but in a slightly different way. Sugar reaches us as an ordinary commodity. We consume it without having to encounter the land, labour, enslavement, and colonial violence embedded in its history. The commodity becomes detached from the relations that produced it.

I’ve been wondering whether something analogous can happen to cinema. A film can emerge from a political struggle, or from conditions of historical violence and exploitation, and then circulate through festivals, museums, universities, and streaming platforms as a cultural object. We can watch it, discuss it, restore it, canonise it. But what happens when the film travels much more easily than the struggle from which it emerged? Can political cinema also become detached from the material relations that gave its politics meaning?

JA: I’m reminded of a story that one of the members of Sistren Collective told me. Sweet Sugar Rage screened at the Havana Film Festival in 1985, and a couple of the members of the collective went with the film to Havana, but they missed the premiere because they were looking for Fidel. They wanted to meet him. I guess taking the film to Havana was just an excuse for them to be part of the revolution. Whatever glamour might have been attached to the festival presentation of the film, that was less important.

Certainly now, and particularly in the Global North, we have this whole industry around cinema and festivals that is part of the neoliberal project and paradigm. So-called political cinema gets co-opted and presented within that context. Festivals are very happy to show so-called political films, but they don’t want the filmmakers to make political statements. We’ll show your film, but you’re not supposed to make any political statements because we have to keep cinema and politics separate.

RE: I recognise that very much from contemporary cultural spaces: ‘Don’t be so explicit. You don’t need to say it. Let the films speak for themselves.’ There’s almost a kind of unspoken censorship at work. The political position can exist safely within the film but becomes a problem when somebody articulates it outside the screen. And perhaps that’s also part of how the film itself becomes detached from the politics that produced it.

JA: Yes. And this ignores a whole history of liberation cinema, of revolutionary cinema, of useful cinema, cinema with a purpose, Third Cinema. In recent years, a lot of these films from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s have been rediscovered and restored. They’re presented – usually in the first instance within these Global North festival spaces – as museum pieces, historical artifacts from a different place and time.

When I see these films now, I’m alive to the context within which they were made and the possibilities that they could still have for people who still need them. And that’s to a large degree divorced from the circuits these films navigate in the Global North. These films were meant to be used. They weren’t meant to be put on a shelf and taken down every once in a while and very carefully projected.

When we talk about rediscovery, rehabilitation, representation, we also talk about repatriation and restitution. What does that really mean if those discussions are happening in the Global North, and they’re not connecting with people elsewhere, where the films came out of?

RE: I think about this a lot because, for me, restoration isn’t complete without restitution. What does it mean to restore these films if they still don’t reach the people and places from which they emerged? Particularly when so much of this cinema is held in Western archives and institutions, there is a danger that rediscovery becomes another form of extraction: the films are preserved, restored and canonised, but remain inaccessible to the communities whose histories and struggles they carry.

At the same time, I don't think restitution means these films shouldn’t circulate in the Global North. The histories they document aren’t external to it. Colonialism, plantation economies, and systems of extraction produced enormous wealth here, and our consumer lives continue to depend on forms of extraction elsewhere. There is a political necessity for people in the Global North to encounter the conditions from which their societies have benefited and continue to reproduce.

So perhaps both things have to happen: these films need to return to and circulate among the people and places from which they emerged, while also confronting audiences in the Global North with histories and structures in which they are implicated.

JA: We go back to the exhortation of Haiti: The Way to Freedom: ‘This film may be used by anyone to bring attention to the struggles of the Haitian people.’

Prints of these films were screened in churches all over the country. They were screened in community spaces. They were not screened in cinemas, and they were not screened for paying audiences. They were screened for the people. Again, we live in a different age and time, so it’s not the same. But we have to seize the possibilities where they exist.

RE: And I think that’s where the question of solidarity becomes important. If we can’t simply reproduce the political conditions or modes of circulation these films emerged from, then what does it mean to ‘seize the possibilities’ that exist now? What relationship can cultural work have to the people and struggles it speaks about today?

Contemporary culture also places enormous value on individual authorship, visibility, and recognition. Even work that speaks the language of collective liberation can circulate through a system organised around individual cultural capital. I hesitate to put it this way because I don’t want to dismiss sincere political commitments, but can solidarity itself become something we consume or perform? How do we distinguish solidarity as a political practice from solidarity as a cultural performance?

JA: I think people today are searching for something. We live in a time of leftist pessimism. People look back to these histories because they want to understand what people did before. There are artists who are sincerely grappling with these questions. There are filmmakers who are descendants of these movements, who are trying to understand these histories and what they mean now. But there are also filmmakers who co-opt the language of liberation and revolution for their own ends, who have no interest in real solidarity and organizing and agitation. It’s very easy to say you’re in solidarity with something, but solidarity as political practice means something else.

RE: I think the most important part of solidarity is recognising that we’re not necessarily the protagonists. And by ‘we’, I mean those of us in the diaspora and the Global North who position ourselves in solidarity with people most directly affected by these structures, particularly cultural workers (curators, programmers, filmmakers) who have access to platforms and institutions through which such work and struggles circulate.

The question isn’t simply how we represent a struggle, but what relationship cultural work actually has to the people living and organising that struggle. That’s what feels so striking to me about Sistren: the cultural producers don’t stand outside and turn other people’s conditions into an object. The work emerges through their relationship to the struggle.

JA: We’ve lived through a neoliberal capitalist era that has really taught us to see ourselves as individuals, and that’s bound up with political questions of identity. We’ve come to see, to a large degree, individual struggles or the struggles of individual groups as separate from those of other groups, which wasn’t always the case.

I think we need to find a way to get back to this idea of struggles being interconnected. Part of the challenge is that people’s struggles are different. But you can’t privilege one over the other. You have to make the connections, and you have to take a broader view of things.

RE: I agree, and I think both things have to be held at once. Connecting struggles shouldn’t mean collapsing their differences. Each has its own history and conditions that demand specific attention. It becomes complicated when we create hierarchies of solidarity – where certain struggles become more culturally legible, visible, or easier to mobilise around than others.

I often wonder whether identity politics has contributed to that fragmentation. It has been enormously important in making forms of violence visible that universalising political movements often failed to address. But there is also a danger in stopping at the level of identity or representation, rather than asking what larger political and economic structures produce and sustain racial, gendered, or colonial violence. We can become very attentive to the symptoms while losing sight of the structures underneath them.

For me, intersectionality offers a way of thinking through that tension: understanding the specificity of different struggles while tracing the structures and relations that connect them. And I don’t think the responsibility for making all of those connections should fall on the people most directly affected by violence. Those of us with greater distance, access, mobility, or institutional resources have a particular responsibility to do some of that connective work – to bring people and struggles into relation without making them interchangeable or speaking on their behalf.

Maybe that brings us back to these films and what it means to put them into circulation now. When you screen Haiti: The Way to Freedom or Sweet Sugar Rage to  an audience fifty years later, what do you actually hope happens? Do you see them primarily as historical documents of liberation struggles?

JA: I certainly hope that’s not what people see when they see these films – that they just think of them as historical documents of a time and place that’s alien or separate from them. You hope that people see that these films have a purpose now, that they have something to offer in the present moment, even if not exactly in the way that they were intended at the time.

But at the very least, what you want is for people to be able to say: people did something. They tried to intervene in the realities that they were facing. You have to start from the position of: we have to do something because something needs to be done. The times are different now from what they were then. You have to work with all sorts of organisations and people now because it’s a globalised capitalist system, and making cinema is still expensive. But that doesn’t mean that you just acquiesce.

RE: Maybe that’s also what it means to encounter these films now without turning them into objects of nostalgia: to not romanticise the political moment they came from, or imagine that we can simply reproduce it, but to take seriously, and to take inspiration from, the fact that people tried to intervene in their conditions.

I feel a responsibility when distributing this kind of cinema, particularly films that emerged from liberation movements. Whether I’m negotiating the rights to a film, organising a screening, or even editing a reel from it for social media, I’m always trying to remain conscious that I’m handling something that was made with a political intention. I want to present these films in ways that remain accountable to that intention, and to keep asking how they can reach beyond the cultural spaces in which they now circulate.

Maybe that’s part of their political use in the present. We can’t replicate the movements or conditions they came from, but we can take responsibility for how we carry their work forward.