Carnival, Cultural Identity, and Mustapha Matura's ‘Play Mas’

Abstract

Carnival has been appropriated in many ways – by cultural critics after Bakhtin, who expanded the pre-Lenten festival to embrace all such inversions of the established order; by elegant maskers imposing their own social status on the celebration; and more recently by popular entertainers, creating the kind of mass event typified by the midsummer carnival at Notting Hill, divorced alike from religious and calendric associations. Here, Raimund Schäffner considers the critique dramatized in Mustapha Matura's Play Mas (1974) of the appropriation of carnival by the dominant political forces of the state in the context of the Trinidadian inheritance of social and racial tensions, colonial and post-colonial – the context also for the dismissal of the event as socially divisive rather than socially critical by such a figure as Derek Walcott. Raimund Schäffner teaches English and post-colonial literature in the English Department at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of a book on David Edgar and British political drama after 1968, and of articles on David Edgar, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, and Doug Lucie.