Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean (review)

This study by Gerard Aching is a welcome addition to the growing canon of analytical works devoted to the complex intersection of identity, literature, representation, and popular culture in the Caribbean region. Drawing on literary works from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean, Aching attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of the constituent elements of regional Carnival, emphasizing the tensions beneath those moments where the conjunction of masking, performance, and verbal, visual, and musical traditions occurs to produce local patterns of ideological self-recognition and self-representation. Texts from the independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago, the French overseas department of Martinique, and revolutionary Cuba are employed in order to highlight regional commonalities; at the same time, the author manages to eschew a reductive pan-Caribbean approach even as he interrogates specific cultural strategies of mimicry and visibility that are the foundation of social conduct and national identity.

Aching locates Carnival's colonial origins as the site of its initial paradox, highlighting the fact that in their beginnings over two hundred years ago, these revelries "became events through which colonial authorities exercised, measured, and reaffirmed their power. As a result, the "satire, parody, caricature and witticisms" that were part and parcel of Carnival were transformed into "highly charged and complex modes of subversive communication" (4). Aching sees this subversive element as having been appropriated and displaced by a creeping class-consciousness that was the corollary of the middle-class takeover of Carnival during the modern era. Beginning with Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance, Aching illuminates the paradoxical nature of specific moments of (de)masking in the Carnival culture of Trinidad and Tobago, particularly the ways in which the contradictions of the postindependence period subvert the apparent self-possession of the masque (or mas') and transform it into patterns of alienation and dispossession. Carnival's fusion of revelry and rebellion thus came to articulate the pressures and paradoxes of community identity. In the case of Cuba, Aching draws on the use of the choteo, a discursive strategy of hyperbole, as it operates in Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres. Aching claims a specifically Caribbean character and context for the irreverent, transgressive nature of this discourse, allowing both discourse and user to manipulate and interrogate traditional tropes of respectability and disrespect (or, in today's parlance, political correctness). Deployed within a Carnival context of fun and frolic, the choteo undermines traditional values and practices such that even the "shifting, socially constructed and racialized configurations" of popular culture ultimately remain undefinable. Finally, in Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique, Aching mines the intersection of conteur, audience, and a discourse of nostalgia that emerge from the account of the inquiry into the protagonist's death at carnival's end to illuminate the ongoing neocolonial domination of her overseas departments by France even as the narrative mourns the sense of powerlessness and loss of community brought about by the clash of oral, visual, and political regimes within the complex, authoritarian framework of departmentalization's modernities.

Aching's goal in this book is the construction of a broad paradigm for the vagaries of the carnivalesque in the Caribbean, patterns of language, social relations, and popular culture that mine the tensions between resistance, invisibility, and collective revelry to explicate the transformations being wrought by politics and privatization upon these "highly contested, representational sites of national and regional cultural identities" (3). In these terms, the text correctly emphasizes ideological demasking as a form of hierarchical social engagement leading to an obligatory, and often difficult moment of self-awareness predicated on social inequalities and their attendant systems of power and imposition. Aching, who is Trinidadian, assembles a marvelous analytical armature to accomplish these readings, ranging from Freudian and Lacanian principles of alienation to Bhabha on ambivalence and mimicry to Glissantian principles of Reversion and...