Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean

Abstract

book, literary scholar Gerard Aching examines visual and verbal masking in Caribbean carnivals and other forms of popular culture, principally through readings of novels by three major writers: Earl Lovelace (Trinidad), Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who was from Cuba but lived in London from the 1960s until his death in 2005. Aching states that his objective is to examine relationships between observers and masked subjects in an effort to comprehend how masks and masking activities in the contemporary Caribbean mediate social relations both within and outside (p. 2). His study's introduction, which constitutes one third of the book, is an intricate theoretical argument about the dynamics of masking. With references to the ideas of Jacques Lacan, Mikhail Bakhtin, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Derek Walcott, Homi Bhabha, and numerous other writers, Aching discusses such issues as masking and social hierarchies, visibility and invisibility in public spaces, cultural mimicry, and self-recognition through encounters with masked others. Carnival is central to the structure and themes of the first novel that Aching examines, Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance (1979). After a review of the characteristics of the dragon mas' (masquerade) in Trinidad, he focuses on the shifting significance of this mas' in Lovelace's fictional community of Calvary Hill, in the struggling Laventille area of Port of Spain. Aldrick, a young unemployed man, lives to play dragon each carnival as a way of giving visibility to the dispossessed Calvary Hill residents. One year he decides to stop playing dragon and, subsequently, participates in a militant protest in downtown Port of Spain, with rhetoric reminiscent of Trinidad's 1970 Black Power demonstrations. Aching interprets Aldrick's actions in relation to the decline of traditional carnival masquerades as effective symbolic resources for local communities, and the alternative of direct protest as a means of demasking the ideological structure of Trinidadian society. (He also considers Aldrick's personal quest for self-possession.) Given that the last two chapters of his

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 179 citations exist upstream.