118 ALISON J. VAN NYHUIS

 hope these lawyers will be equal to the task, for these orgiastic revival
 dances-this Pocomanism which seems to be more common than
 should be possible at this date of our history-undoubtedly do much
 to frustrate the efforts made by educationists and the religious
 organizations in the country. (qtd. in Simpson 410)

For members of the orthodox Christian middle class, pocomania pro-
moted sexual licentiousness rather than proper sexual behavior, "ex-
pressed most clearly in (Christian) marriage" (Koningsbruggen 99).7
The orthodox Christian pole of the nation-building spectrum suggested
the Jamaican state should suppress pocomania because it promotes
disrespectable sexual acts that destabilize the foundations of an envi-
sioned educated and respectable Jamaican nation.
 On the transgressive, Afro-syncretistic end of the spectrum, mem-
bers of Jamaica's middle class used pocomania's African ties to facili-
tate the construction of their envisioned Jamaican nation. One of Edna
Manley's sculptural series shows how pocomania gets deployed as a
nation-building tool in Jamaica during the late 1930s. Exhibited in
Kingston in 1937, the series includes Negro Aroused (1935), Prophet
(1935), and Pocomania (1936).8 In Edna Manley: Sculptor, David Boxer
interprets Negro Aroused as a symbol of the awakening of black Jamai-
can consciousness, and therefore, the genesis of envisioning a Jamai-
can nation (24-25). The placement of Edna Manley's Negro Aroused
below the "A time of ferment" section heading in Norman Manley Wash-
ington and the New Jamaica: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1938-1968
affirms Boxer's reading of Negro Aroused. The juxtaposition suggests
the sculpture illustrates Norman Washington Manley's message. In "A
National Jamaica: 1938," Norman Washington Manley writes,

 In the last analysis only an awakened national will can pull us together
 and enable us pulling together to make the effort which alone can
 prevent the dire results that will follow a failure to develop and educate
 that national will. The emotions of our people are aroused and there is


 7 Koningsbruggen more specifically focuses on Trinidad in this chapter. I cite
his definition and explanation of respectability even though he uses it in a
Trinidadian rather than Jamaican context because it seems to succinctly express
links between respectability and class, religion, and sexuality that also appeared in
Jamaica.
 See David Boxer's Ednu Manley: Sculptor for commentary on and photographs
of Edna Manley's sculptures.