High Mas: Carnival And The Poetics Of Caribbean Photography
by Kevin Adonis Browne /
2018 / English / PDF
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"High Mas explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, Browne delves into Mas as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays give the viewer an opportunity to see how performers are or wish to be perceived, as well as how the photographer is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness. The first series, "Seeing Blue," features Blue Devils from the village of Paramin, whose performances signify an important revision of the post-emancipatory tradition of Jab Molassie in Trinidad. The second series, "La Femme des Revenants," chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar-Charleau's La Diablesse, which reintroduced the "Caribbean femme fatale" to a new audience. The third series, "Moko Jumbies of the South," looks at Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, a pair of stilt-walkers from the performance group Touch de Sky from San Fernando. "Jouvay Ayiti," the fourth series, follows the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performing a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain on Emancipation Day in 2015. Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, the book interrogates what audiences understand about the role of the participant-observer in public contexts. The book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience, representing the uneasy embrace of tradition and the reappropriation of complementary cultural expressions, and, through Mas performance, suggests an explicit refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, colonialism, and the myth of independence." provided by publisher.
