Ebook: Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean
Author: Gerard Aching
- Genre: Linguistics
- Year: 2002
- Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
- Language: English
- pdf
Masking and Power uses ethnographic fieldwork, psychoanalysis, and close literary readings to examine encounters between cultural insiders as these locals mask themselves and one another either to counter the social invisibility imposed on them or to maintain their socioeconomic privileges. Aching exposes the ways in which strategies of masking and mimicry, once employed to negotiate subjectivities within colonial regime, have been appropriated for state purposes and have become, with the arrival of self-government in the islands, the means by which certain privileged locals make a show of national and cultural unity even as they engage in the privatization of popular culture and its public performances.
Gerard Aching is associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.