“Worthless rainbows”? Power and Performance in the Costume Tropes of Sam Selvon and Mustapha Matura
Maber, Peter (2023) “Worthless rainbows”? Power and Performance in the Costume Tropes of Sam Selvon and Mustapha Matura. In: ‘Fashioning London: Streets, Styles and Storytelling’, London Literary Society Conference 2023, 6-7 July 2023, Northeastern University London.
Abstract
This paper considers ways in which Sam Selvon and Mustapha Matura, in their novels and plays respectively, represent clothing in relation to issues of power. The focus is on their London works of the 1970s and early 80s, and their representations of people of colour in the London of the times. Both authors draw on their Trinidadian heritage in bringing to London carnival tropes, which function at multiple levels. The figures of the trickster and the Carnival King are adept at turning the world on its head and shifting power dynamics; but their ambivalence is disorientating, so that there is no straightforward correction of injustice and moral wrong. Clothing in these authors’ works functions as a carnival trope, which can lead in multiple directions. For Selvon, clothing is bound up with performances of power in both *Moses Ascending* (1975), in which reversals of hierarchy as well as performances of gender and sexuality are figured through trends in fashion; and in *Moses Migrating* (1983), in which reversals become transatlantic as the protagonist becomes the figure of Britannia at the Trinidad Carnival itself. The pioneering plays of Mustapha Matura, meanwhile, use clothing conceits to expose capitalist power dynamics, as in *Play Mas* (1974), in which costume, politics, and the Trinidad Carnival collide, while in *Bread* (1976), set in London, the playwright tries to envisage ways out of capitalism’s pervasive performances. Reading Selvon alongside Matura reveals a politics of fashion and of self-fashioning, in which power and identity are unstably performed.
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