This article is part of a series focusing on underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2024 Craft Archive Fellows, and organized in collaboration with the Center for Craft.
Contagious and unbridled, it was the kind of laugh that filled the room with joy, that offered an ephemeral vision of a little girl unburdened by life’s woes. I almost always forgot what the joke was about, so tickled was I by the sight of her writhing in her red-velvet-upholstered mahogany armchair. She hurled her head back and forth, gripping her belly, all thirty-twos on full display as she struggled to reach the punchline — a rare, vigorous, and beautiful sight. Few things brought me so much joy at Christmastime as when my mother recounted the story of how her sister, my aunt, ran from the Jamaican masked masqueraders known as Jonkonnu and tripped over her own feet.
“Jonkonnu a come … Jonkonnu a come!” she would exclaim in her full-bodied reenactment of how my aunt dashed in fright at the announcement that this grim parade of masqueraders was quickly approaching their doorstep. My aunt would often be present for this retelling, cloaked in both shame and amusement. She would fight to withhold her smile, but it was hard to resist the humor. Once the air of amusement grew thin, my aunt would snidely say, “Mi still nuh like dem.”
The Jonkonnu parade is an essentially rural experience; as a sheltered child in urban Jamaica, my only encounter with the practice was through this tale until I was around 20 years old. But in December of 2013, at a Christmas Fair in Kingston, I finally encountered my aunt’s nemeses. The sight of children screaming, crying, and running in all cardinal directions in desperate search for refuge behind their guardians was a prelude to what I saw next: Pitchy Patchy, Belly Woman, Devil, Policeman, Horse Head — masked characters in roughly constructed outfits, lurching forward with menacing glee. This encounter with the enigmatic figures of Jonkonnu was my initiation into a world of complex histories, resistance, and survival strategies. These figures were not just symbols of a Christmas festivity; they were echoes of a people’s resilience and self-affirmation, passed down through generations.
The Mask, The Myth, The Legend
The origins of Jonkonnu are still shrouded in mystery. Some attribute the name to John Conney, a celebrated cabocero (chief) at Tres Puntas in Axim on the Guinea coast. Conney, a successful Gold Coast merchant, ruled over three Brandenburg trading forts on the coast of present-day Ghana. By 1724, the Dutch had taken control of his official residence, the Great Fredricksburg Castle. Despite being displaced, Conney continued to be celebrated in stories carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans.
Yet the phonetic transformation from John Conney to Jonkonnu (or its variations like John Canoe, Junkanoo, John Kuner, and others) is still debated. Some scholars, such as Richard Allsopp, suggest a connection to the Yoruba word “Jonkoliko,” referring to one elevated as a figure of humor or disgrace. This link is compelling, particularly given the visual similarities between Jonkonnu masks and Egungun, the annual Yoruba masquerade festival.
Despite its obscured origins, Jonkonnu’s cultural significance is profound. Fellow artist Marie Kellier posits that Jonkonnu has two faces: joy and resistance. I’d dare to say there’s a third face — accommodation. It is a craft and condition that constantly transmutes, adapting to shifting social, political, and cultural environments. This triadic framework of joy, accommodation, and resistance provides a lens through which to understand Jonkonnu’s enduring relevance across geographies and temporalities.
Jonkonnu Has Three Faces: Joy, Accommodation, Resistance
Historian Elizabeth Fenn, in her 1988 paper entitled “‘A Perfect Equality Seemed to Reign’: Slave Society and Jonkonnu,” aptly describes the practice of Jonkonnu or “John Kunering” as akin to releasing a steam valve: Plantation owners would only allow the enslaved one day out of the year between the observation of Christmas and the New Year to collectively celebrate marriages, births, and newfound freedom; to mourn deaths; or simply to release angst in complete abandon.
In the Bahamas, Jonkonnu is celebrated as Junkanoo, a vibrant carnival-like festival that embodies the joy of collective identity-making. The festival’s flamboyant costumes and energetic dancing are expressions of a shared history that has transformed and adapted, syncretizing elements from West African masquerades and European festivities.
In Jamaica, on the other hand, the practice of Jonkonnu is more ambivalent in that it wields the dual function of masquerade as both a tool for assimilation and a subtle critique of colonial authority. On one hand, performers donned elaborate regalia inspired by European aesthetics in an attempt to project a sense of dignity that could rival their colonizers. These costumes, with their ornate decorations and regal motifs, were strategic choices aimed at demonstrating refinement and humanity, challenging the dehumanizing stereotypes imposed on the enslaved population. By adopting the colonizers’ own symbols of prestige, the enslaved and freed performers sought to elevate their status and claim visibility within a social structure designed to exclude them.
On the other hand, Jonkonnu’s use of animalistic and grotesque elements functioned as a form of satirical mimicry that turned the gaze back on the colonizers. Through exaggerated performances and beast-like masks, the masqueraders mirrored the colonizers’ brutality — a condemnation the British failed to recognize, dismissing it as merely “exotic” or “primitive” African spectacle. As Judith Bettelheim asserts, Jonkonnu’s embrace of British folklore was not merely an act of submission but a complex interplay of assimilation and subversion, where the enslaved used the very symbols of their oppressors to both survive and resist.
The evolution of Jonkonnu in New Bern, North Carolina reveals how its initial faces — joy and resistance — have transformed into a more subdued and regulated form, presenting its third face: accommodation. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jonkonnu became a battleground for asserting cultural and political power. Under the control of officials like Mayor S.H. Fishblate, the annual performances were regulated, contained, and at times banned entirely, reflecting a broader strategy to suppress Black cultural expression and assert White dominance. This struggle has left its mark on the modern-day version of Jonkonnu, now “sanitized” as a tourist attraction at Tryon Palace.
The two primary characters of this new form of Jonkonnu, the Fancy Man and the Ragman, embody the racialized dichotomy of refinement and degradation, offering a palatable spectacle that obscures the tradition’s deeper histories of subversion and resistance. Through these figures, the conditions that shaped Jonkonnu’s original expressions become caricatured, transforming a powerful performance of selfhood into a controlled reenactment for public consumption. There are those, however, who are trying to re-introduce that element of agency into the practice. The now-retired African-American Outreach Coordinator at Tryon Palace, Sharon C. Bryant, has been the sole vanguard of the practice in New Bern since 1999 and is committed to protecting its existence independent of the Tryon Palace administration, in hopes of reclaiming its true form.
These varied iterations of Jonkonnu reflect a shared impulse to negotiate power and identity in environments defined by domination and resistance. Any attempt to pinpoint Jonkonnu’s origins or distill its essence into a singular narrative would be reductive. Instead, Jonkonnu must be understood as a complex craft and cultural performance that mirrors the nuances of Black life across the diaspora.
A Festival of Rags: Material Resistance
Jonkonnu costumes are a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of its practitioners. From the tattered rags of Pitchy Patchy to the exaggerated forms of the Belly Woman, these garments are more than mere adornments. Crafted from whatever materials are available — rags, animal skins, paper, and found objects, these costumes in turn craft the self. This “festival of rags” is both a nod to the resourcefulness born out of scarcity and a deliberate inversion of colonial expectations of propriety and order.
These costumes may very well have birthed elements of Hip-Hop and Black queer fashion culture through their bold and evocative stylings, as the contemporary echo of Jonkonnu’s sartorial defiance can be seen in events like Durag Fest in Charlotte, North Carolina. This annual summer festival is a celebration of Black hair culture and style that subverts stereotypes of the durag as a symbol of criminality, reclaiming it as a marker of cultural pride and creative expression. Like Jonkonnu, Durag Fest is a space where Black people can assert their identities on their own terms, using fashion as a form of resistance and self-affirmation.
Masking, as practiced in Jonkonnu and events like Durag Fest, is not just about concealing one’s identity. It is about transforming the self, embodying new personas, and navigating the boundaries of the seen and unseen. It is a way of inhabiting multiple realities — past, present, and future — simultaneously.
Masking As An Embodied Craft and Praxis
Masking is waymaking. It is a craft that intertwines body and memory, spirit and materiality. American theater historian and scholar Joseph Roach, in his 1996 publication titled Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, argues that a body that carries its social memory — what might be called its “spirit” — is, in essence, a body that reclaims a sense of self-possession. In legal terms, it is almost akin to owning oneself, echoing the language once used by Anglo-Americans to assert so-called inalienable rights.
As a Black queer nonbinary Jamaican-turned-United States citizen, my own journey to becoming has been parallel to my geographical migration, bringing me into a deep engagement with the various ways I, too, have practiced the act of masking. Like the Mardi Gras Indians who dance to reclaim their ancestral memories and resist being reduced to mere spectacle, I remain curious about how Jonkonnu might have hybridized with the Black trans experience, where we too are often caught between visibility as spectacle and denigration. This complexity is what makes Jonkonnu sacred: it is not just a festival, but a living archive of intersectional Black life, one that can only be brought to life through those willing to preserve it.
Jonkonnu’s power lies in its refusal to be binary and static, constantly evolving in response to its environment. Whether in the masquerades of Jamaica, the Junkanoo parades of the Bahamas, or the regulated performances in North Carolina, it is a testament to Black resilience, creativity, and resistance. At its core, Jonkonnu embodies the ongoing struggle for self-definition and liberation. Through the interplay of joy, accommodation, and resistance, it boldly declares: “We will be seen. We will be heard. We are here.”
