This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2024-2025.
On Wednesday 16th October 2024, for Black History Month, Professor Emily Zobel Marshall gave a talk on her research and involvement in carnival and its role in society. Her talk, ‘The Power of play: Comparative Caribbean Carnival Cultures from Leeds to Martinique’ took us on a journey explaining the beginnings of Caribbean carnival culture through to its worldwide impact today.
Professor Zobel Marshall, being ‘Martinican royalty’ (according to Professor Maeve McCusker who chaired the talk) due to her famous grandfather, spoke briefly about her connection with Martinican author Joseph Zobel, and how this lineage had influenced her interests and research from an early age. Although an esteemed academic, Professor Zobel Marshall explained how her research into carnival culture was an endeavor to ‘blur the lines between academia and art’ through various projects. She spoke of this breaking down of barriers between the academic and artistic worlds and detailed just how important that is for her.
The beginnings of carnival culture across the Caribbean islands, according to Professor Zobel Marshall, started as something of a mélange culturel, or cultural mixing. She spoke of the initial introduction of the masquerade (today known familiarly as ‘mas’) as hybrid cultural form – a fusion of the religious rituals of French Catholic colonisers and the musical and performance traditions of enslaved Africans. As a form of resistance, enslaved peoples further developed their own version of the masquerade where plantation owners could be mocked and ridiculed, giving power to the disempowered.
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