Mas’ Movements

  • Date: February 18, 2022
  • Time: 2:00 pm—3:30 pm
  • Location: Paul Robeson Gallery Workshop B
  • Speakers

Natalya Mills (Chief Erelu Awo)

Trinidad and Tobago Carnival is a complex, creolized ritual and urban performance. Like most cultural performances, Trinidad and Tobago Carnival is an example of cultures emerging out of an anthropocene and has been adapted for a variety of purposes. Interrelationships in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival display the ways in which the “repeating islands” of the Caribbean region have a dialogue with themselves and the world. Trinidad Carnival specifically, is a site for transgression, a space for understanding creolized identities and a tool for the suspension of social norms, laws, and restrictions. Trinidad Carnival scholarship has paid much attention to topics such as art, culture, race, socioeconomics, and social-political issues. My intent in this paper is to extend the conversation by examining Trinidad Carnival as a lived creolized, philosophical concept. To support this claim of Carnivalizing philosophy, I will refer to philosophers and postmodern thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Fernado Ortiz, Kwame Braithwaite and Homie K. Bhabha. I will argue that creolized Trinidadian Carnival can provide a model for re-reading ideas surrounding inclusivity based on the concepts of creolization, transculturation, and hybridity. This paper will confront seemingly impossible points of contention such as globalization, cultural appropriation, and technological (mechanical) reproduction in the performance arts. The Caribbean region and Trinidad Carnival will be employed to de-center critical theory in the western canon and reimagine the complicated notions of inclusivity by subverting its pre-existing theories and beliefs. 

Leveraging Cultural Phenomena To Enhance Cognitive Development: Children’s Mas And Pathways Of Being And Becoming.

Kenwyn Murray

This paper explores Children’s Mas/Children’s Carnival and its ecosystem of activity as a point of interaction between the child, the imagination, play and the creation of a sense of self within the context of the Caribbean. It locates the cultural activity known as ‘Children’s Mas’ a site of cognitive apprenticeship through which unique and effective modes of instruction can be applied. The spotlight on Children’s Mas or Children’s carnival is two-fold. Firstly, it presents Children’s Mas as a multi-disciplinary, multi-modal apparatus: A cultural phenomenon that has the flexibility and social real-estate to accommodate varying pedagogies of effective transformation. Secondly, it connects the highly interactive, highly inclusive, and highly entertaining space of Caribbean carnivals to methodologies of teaching and learning. This paper deconstructs Children’s Mas, as a visual, kinetic, participatory form, and its utility for engaging experiences and conceptual learning within the educational landscape of the Caribbean diaspora.

As a phenomenon Children’s Mas specifically seeks to engage young minds in the activity of imagination and modes of representation. This opens the door for discussing the Caribbean child within matters of ontology. The essay argues, in this vein, that Children’s Mas is a worthy location for exploring concepts of Caribbean being and becoming – an area that has not had heavy focus academically.  Ultimately this essay critically analyses the experiences of Children’s Mas and its capacity for making effective interventions in the social experiences of the child and how they engage their environment as a 21st century learner. The essay positions Children’s Mas as a representational practice that is suitable for influencing ideological perspectives and their imaginings of themselves; of being and becoming within the global landscape. 

Lauren Baccus

This proposed paper responds to the 2017 Trinidad Carnival King presentation of “The Dying Swan – Ras Nijinsky in drag as Pavlova”, designed and orchestrated by mas men Peter Minshall and Jha-Whan Thomas. Here, a stilt walking and dreadlocked Black man performs as Odette, the principal ballerina of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a reengineering of disparate yet fused diasporic roots. Through Ras Nijinsky at play, Minshall and Thomas draw from a history of drag masquerade as resistance and sexual identity and expression as public performance. Through our “Queen of the Swans”, we examine the possibilities that gender transformation through play offered masqueraders of the past and a disruptive framework for Afro-Caribbean futurist thought and being.


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