Sistren Theatre Collective emerged during the brief period of progressive yet tumultuous social change brought about by the People’s National Party (PNP) government led by Democratic Socialist Michael Manley, which was in power from 1972 to 1980. The spaces that emerged during this short-lived time of people-focused idealism in Jamaican history engaged with, both critically and creatively, Jamaica’s history of British colonialism and North American cultural and economic imperialism. The Manley government attempted to bridge the colour-class divisions in Jamaican society by engendering pride in the island’s African heritage, recognising women’s oppression, providing greater opportunities for working-class Jamaicans, and fostering decolonial responses to the local and global inequities made manifest by late global capitalism. Despite these good intentions, the government’s rhetoric and reforms gave rise to a socio-political and economic climate which saw working-class Jamaicans having to fight to survive in a society bitterly divided along ideological lines and made violent and impoverished by the finance-oriented values of neoliberalism. The introductory chapter discusses Sistren’s emergence in 1977 and its trajectory from this era of Democratic Socialism to the current time, looking at the way shifts in Jamaican politics shaped the group’s politics, cultural production and engagement with space and place.