Join us on Zoom for a conversation with Kevin Adonis Browne, author of High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture, and Harvey R. Neptune.
High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas―a key feature of Trinidad performance―as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness.
Presented by the Center for Black Visual Culture (CBVC)/Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA)-New York University; Co-sponsored by 370J Project, Dept. of Photography & Imaging-NYU Tisch School of the Arts and NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Kevin Adonis Browne is a Caribbean American photographer, writer, and speaker. His award-winning visual and written work exist at the intersection of fine art, documentary, street photography, creative nonfiction, and memoir in what he calls: “A discourse on the legacies of light as a way to understand the poetics of Caribbean culture.” Born in Trinidad and Tobago, he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in English at Medgar Evers College (CUNY) in Brooklyn, later earning a Master of Arts in English in 2006 and a PhD in English in 2009 from The Pennsylvania State University. is the author of two books: Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean (2013) and HIGH MAS: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (2018). https://www.kevinadonisbrowne.com/kevin
Harvey R. Neptune is an Associate Professor of History at Temple University. Neptune is the author of several published articles (appearing in journals including The American Historical Review, Small Axe, Anthurium and Radical History Review) and a book, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the US Occupation (UNC Press, 2007). Interested generally in the cultural politics of diaspora-, empire- and nation-building, he is currently working on a book titled The Big Lie in US History: the making of the “Consensus school,” which reconsiders the politics of US historiography in the postwar decades. Beyond the world of academic scholarship, Neptune is an enthusiast of “playing mas” — high, low and especially in-between!
