New Open-Access Book Reframes Emotion and Identity in African Masquerade

In Western European languages, the word mask exerts a powerful presence as a figure of speech.

To masquerade is to pretend to be someone or something one is not. By extension, unmasking is a heroic metaphor for exposing a hidden truth. But what if the mask is not a means of obscuring but a method of redirecting attention? Humans are hardwired to home in on the face to read expression. Masks interfere with this process, forcing engagement with what lies beyond the face and its instructive cues: when the face is obscured, the body emerges as the primary site of communication.

In African Masks and Emotions: In Theory and in Practice (Getty Research Institute, FREE), author Z. S. Strother uses African case studies to offer an alternative vision of masquerading. She explores the aesthetic emotions aroused by masks, or more precisely, by “dances of masks”: joy, wonder, awe, fear, and the release of laughing out loud. She also investigates the uncanny—a sensation of “delicious shiveriness” triggered when familiar spaces and individuals become strange and changeable. Inspired by Strother’s studies in DR Congo and comparative studies across Central and West Africa, African Masks and Emotions moves emotion from the periphery to the center of analysis. Strother’s insights resonate across disciplines, from art history and anthropology to theater and psychology.