Abstract:

Invoking the Spirit of Canboulay examines three discrete but overlapping public sites where middle class actors negotiate, perform and enact identities that inform an emergent cultural and spiritual citizenship within the framework of the multi-cultural nation-state. Through field-based research and historical analysis of Carnival, Emancipation and Orisha my study offers an ethnographic examination of diverse Canboulay practices (critical poetics); three distinct perspectives on the Afro-Trinidadian middle-class which inform differing pathways of cultural and spiritual citizenship. Specifically, masking becomes an effective trope for viewing the negotiation and positioning of identities in these sites of performance and leads to the main argument undergirding the study, i.e. that through sites of public performance Afro-Trinidadian middle-class positionalities must be interpreted as plastic sites of being that inform a differentiated and complex Afro-Trinidadian middle-class.

Less than fifty years into their post-colonial period, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is self-consciously engaged in the process of nation building. One active site of this engagement, indeed often held to be a primary site, is the cultural field; more specifically the fabric of cultural practices that are brought together in a series of public events throughout the year, directly engaging significant portions of the population. Within the rich field of festive culture in Trinidad this study focuses on three sites, all exemplars of Canboulay cultural practices: Carnival mas' and fetes, Emancipation commemorations, and Orisha public rituals. In the dissertation I argue that belying their apparent distinctiveness is an underlying cultural logic that links these sites together as differing aspects of festival life that engage, through performative practices, a shared critical vocabulary that incorporates mas' (short for both masquerade and masking), doubling, picong (a local term for a critical rhetoric conveyed in a playful manner) and other forms consistent with signifying practices of the African Diaspora. Invoking the Spirit of Canboulay explores the Afro-Trinidadian middle class performance of diverse positionalities (esp. in relation to Africanness/blackness) as revealed in critical practices of Canboulay (Orisha, Emancipation and Carnival) through tropes of masking to reveal the anxiety and ambiguity of multiple, conflicting orders of modernity, and argue that these expression of vernacular modernities inform new forms of cultural and spiritual citizenship, ultimately contributing to the project of decolonization in the post-colony.

Keywords: Middle class, masking, festival, cultural citizenship, blackness/Africanness, Trinidad