116 ALISON J. VAN NYHUIS

and characters," the play has never been published (Smilowitz 65).
 Examining how the word pocomania gets deployed in the play
Pocomania shows how the play and the word become a medium for
constructing a Jamaican nation. Below I first situate pocomania in
Jamaica's religious history. Then I present two polarized perspectives
of pocomania's place in an envisioned Jamaican nation. One pole rep-
resents an assimilationist, orthodox Christian perspective. The other
represents a transgressive, Afro-syncretistic perspective. Together,
these perspectives construct what I call the orthodox Christian/Afro-
syncretistic spectrum. Pocomania, the play, repositions pocomania,
the word signifying an Afro-syncretistic religious cult, along this na-
tion-building spectrum. Both the play and the word become mediums
of imagining a Jamaican nation. By reflecting the orthodox Christian
middle- class pole's perceived differences between pocomania and their
own religion, but also projecting the transgressive, Afro-syncretistic
end of the spectrum, the play shows how Jamaicans could use an al-
ternative version of pocomania as a nation-building tool.
 After a decade of foreign missionary presence in Jamaica, pocomania
emerges as a strong religious force in the latter portion of the nine-
teenth century. Moravian missionaries first arrive in Jamaica in the
mid-eighteenth century, but widespread religious instruction does not
begin until the 1820s (Simpson 335). From the 1820s onward, Christian
missionary membership increases until it peaks in the 1840s. Then
membership declines until the Great Revival of 1860 and 1861, when
numbers of prayer meetings, worship services, and congregations in-
crease markedly. In "Revival Cults in Jamaica: Notes Towards a Sociol-
ogy of Religion" (1969), Edward Seaga links Jamaicans' increased reli-
gious involvement to Afro-Christian religious syncretism:

 The impetus, no doubt, was given by missionary Christianity... But the
 means of achieving salvation implicit in the Great '61 Revival were far
 more African than European. These stemmed from the Myal Procession
 and going even further back, from the basic African religious belief that
 the spirit world was not separate and apart from the temporal world
 but formed one unified whole; and this belief in the unity of the spirit
 world has persisted to the present day among those sections of the
 population whose cultural formation remains Afro-Christian.3 (3-4)

 :1 In "Revival Cults in Jamaica: Notes Towards a Sociology of Religion." Seaga
includes the following footnote on the Myal Procession: "Myal Procession of 1942.
The major expression of a purely non-Christian African derived cult. The word
comes from Hausa Maya (a) sorcerer, (b) intoxication (c) return" (4).