The Five Continents of Theatre: Facts and Legends About the Material Culture of the Actor

Abstract

Vicki Ann Cremona’s Carnival and Power offers a vibrant account of the development of carnival under British rule in Malta, exploring the country’s long transition to independence through the lens of carnival performance. Cremona pursues a broad-ranging analysis of Maltese street performance and masquerade, presenting carnival as a dialectic between the spectacular enforcement of regimes of representation under colonial rule, and — conversely — as a locus of resistive renegotiation of Maltese identity. Cremona’s analysis of the function of carnival as a subaltern social text caught up in the European construction of the Other, and as an affirmation of identity and collectivity, forms a valuable contribution to the field of performance studies and postcolonial scholarship. She enriches a growing body of research (e.g., Turner 1983; Roach 1996; Riggio 2004; Irobi 2007) that attends to carnival as a site of tension between cultural resistance and social assimilation in the context of a complex colonial and postcolonial history.