Description
Overall Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature
High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas-a key feature of Trinidad performance-as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he 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-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad. The second series, ""La Femme des Revenants,"" chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar'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 in southern Trinidad. ""Jouvay Reprised,"" 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; 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.
About the Author
KEVIN ADONIS BROWNE, Trinidad and Tobago, is a photographer, poet, archivist, and scholar of contemporary rhetoric and Caribbean culture. Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for HIGH MAS, Browne's previous books include Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean. He is the co-founder of the Caribbean Memory Project and he is currently based in Trinidad, where he works at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine.
Book Information
ISBN 9781496819383
Author Kevin Adonis Browne
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint University Press of Mississippi
Publisher University Press of Mississippi
Weight(grams) 1583g
Dimensions(mm) 287mm * 223mm * 27mm
High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas-a key feature of Trinidad performance-as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he 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-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad. The second series, ""La Femme des Revenants,"" chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar'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 in southern Trinidad. ""Jouvay Reprised,"" 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; 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.
About the Author
KEVIN ADONIS BROWNE, Trinidad and Tobago, is a photographer, poet, archivist, and scholar of contemporary rhetoric and Caribbean culture. Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for HIGH MAS, Browne's previous books include Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean. He is the co-founder of the Caribbean Memory Project and he is currently based in Trinidad, where he works at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine.
Book Information
ISBN 9781496819383
Author Kevin Adonis Browne
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint University Press of Mississippi
Publisher University Press of Mississippi
Weight(grams) 1583g
Dimensions(mm) 287mm * 223mm * 27mm
