Results by title

An ambitious reassessment of the political uses of masking.

Does the mask reveal more than it conceals? What, this book asks, becomes visible and invisible in the masking practiced in Caribbean cultures-not only in the familiar milieu of the carnival but in political language, social conduct, and cultural expressions that mimic, misrepresent, and mislead? Focusing on masking as a socially significant practice in Caribbean cultures, Gerard Aching’s analysis articulates masking, mimicry, and misrecognition as a means of describing and interrogating strategies of visibility and invisibility in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Martinique, and beyond.

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 regimes, 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.

A consideration of other-than-human elements defining history in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Latin American and Caribbean regions’ historical trajectories have been shaped by complex human-nonhuman interactions. In these histories, people are important, even crucial, actors, but not the only ones. Offering a novel approach to the writing of Latin American history, this book brings eight thought-provoking chapters together with a historiographical introduction and critical afterword to center nonhuman beings and things. The oscillating glare of the sun, the allure and resourcefulness of animals, the reluctant genetic malleability of plant seeds, and the life-giving and intractable impassivity of rivers are some of the other-than-human agents driving history in the volume’s chapters.

This book problematizes Latin American(ist) historiography’s tendency to frame “nature” as a separate ontological domain that is only acted upon—conquered, manipulated, devastated—lacking the self-propelled dynamics capable of shaping the course of events. With broad regional and temporal coverage across Latin America and the Caribbean from the pre-colonial period to the present day, More-than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean responds to environmental history’s call to write biophysical environments into the human past—a reconsideration of historical agency that, in this era of climate change, is more necessary than ever.