“It is us”: An Exploration of “Race” and Place in the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival

The presence of the blackface minstrel mask within the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival has been a source of divisive and prolonged local, national, and international debate. But the mask also invites us to consider both the procession's historical relationship to slavery and its participants' contemporary, though fleeting, occupation of a postcolonial, postapartheid urban center.