Making Mas: TruDynasty Carnival Takes Josephine Baker to the Caribbean Carnival

Jacqueline Taucar, in conversation with Thea and Dario Jackson, investigates the sculptural qualities of the Josephine Baker Mas for the Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Festival in 2011. This article traces the conception, construction, and complexities of choreography for this carnivalesque reimagining of Baker in Paris of the twenties for a contemporary Canadian ambulant expression. This Queen Mas talks back to the objectification by Parisians and embodying Queen Mas as an instance of female empowerment

Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern

Is the fetish the only way to understand glamour, especially when it comes to the glamour of racialized women? How do we talk about agency and embodiment for a mediated figure? How does celebrity affect a subject whose body has been overembodied yet depersonalized? This essay suggests that the unlikely conjunction among celebrity, glamour, and racial difference may be the place where we are compelled to confront the intimacy, rather than opposition, between person-hood and objectification. Turning to Anna May Wong, an iconic “race beauty” in the early twentieth century, this essay argues that Wong's glamour is achieved neither through her apparently racialized performances nor through her uncomplicated assumption of female agency but rather through a paradoxical staging and erasure of her own body and skin. By asking how a celebrated body might operate subjunctively rather than materially, we can begin to question the imperatives of personhood that drive both celebrity and race studies.</jats:p

Ornament and Law

Who constitute “natural persons”? How do we move from a biological person to a legal standing? And what does a superficial, minor, and feminized category like the ornament have to do with these large questions? This chapter introduces a case that is little known but arguably one of the most significant habeas corpus cases in the nineteenth century in order to track the surprisingly critical role that racialized and feminized objects played in forming juridical ideas of natural and unnatural persons, legal and illegal subjects, citizenship and criminality. What this case reveals about how a body comes to be legally discernible holds profound implications and challenges for how we conceptualize citizenship and civil rights today.</p

The Wayward Life of Objects

What is reading; what can it do; and can we imagine a hermeneutics beyond suspicion? This brief essay meditates on the possibilities of what might be called a hermeneutics of susceptibility that can accommodate our ideological and aesthetic complicity in any act of reading while still understanding the political risks and gains of such acknowledgment. This is also an argument about how we read surfaces: the surfaces of texts, bodies, and objects.</jats:p