High mas : carnival and the poetics of Caribbean photography / photographs and text by Kevin Adonis Browne.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Browne, Kevin Adonis, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Carnival--Social aspects--Caribbean Area.

Carnival.

Popular culture--Caribbean Area.

Popular culture.

Street photography--Caribbean Area.

Street photography.

Carnival--Caribbean Area--Pictorial works.

Carnival--Social aspects.

Caribbean Area.

Genre:

Pictorial works.

Illustrated works.

Physical Description:

xii, 245 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 29 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2018]

Summary:

"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.

Contents:

Ash Wednesday

Proscenium for an aqueous humor

Deliberative daemonic : making mas rhetorica

A shot in the dark : toward a poetics of Caribbeanist photography

Series : seeing blue

Seeing blue : genesis of public executions

Series : la femme des revenants

La femme des revenants : a queen of sorrows

Series : moko jumbies of the South

Moko jumbies of the South : walking stick

Series : jouvay reprised

Jouvay reprised : a people, ground to dust.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Browne, Kevin Adonis. High mas.

ISBN:

9781496819383

1496819381

OCLC:

1027728880