Life Masquerading as Art: The Activist Artist Takes on Development v. Environment

The paper questions the role of the transformative artist within Caribbean popular culture with reference to the costumed “Mas” bands in Trinidad Carnival, using Fanon’s argument on the role of the artist as the theoretical base. Using the documentary “The Minshall Trilogy: A Modern Fable as Street Theatre” as its source of visual and contextual data on these bands, the paper examines how the artist, Peter Minshall, takes the traditional folk worldview of an agrarian 19th century Trinidad and converts it into a late 20th century discourse on industrial development, materialism, moral vales and development.