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‘Who ent dead, badly wounded’: The everyday life of pretty and grotesque bodies in urban Trinidad

In Trinidad two distinct bodies scar everyday cultural life. One is the Carnivalesque – a naked, commodified, and sexualised body of the popular bikini and beads type of Carnival portrayals called ‘pretty mas’. The other body is the grotesque – a dead, maimed, and murdered body appearing frequently in news media and in daily discussions on social media as the murder rate locally reaches one person every day. From the mid 1980s to the present, the numbers and visibility of these bodies in the same everyday spaces has increased. While there is no causal connection, fieldwork suggests cultural conversation between two representations of the body, between laughter and grief, jouissance and mutilation, celebration and fear exists in Trinidad. Through ethnographic fieldnotes, historical data, discourse analysis and the cultural theories of Guy Debord, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lloyd Best and Antonio Benítez-Rojo, this article explores the cultural correlation between everyday images (sexual and violent) of the body in Trinidadian society and their impact on the constitution of subjectivity, nationhood and segregation locally.