The paper proposes to discuss Patricia Powell’s exploration of the gendered, cultural, and race-specific identities in relation to experiences of cultural dislocation in her novel The Pagoda (1998). In so doing, I consider the negotiation and reconciliation of identities generated, or denied, by displacement. The novel, which is set in nineteenth-century Jamaica, addresses questions such as self-definition, shifting and fragmented identities, and masks in relation to otherness and diaspora. The novel examines the limitations set on individual identity by a complex web of intercultural relations in an emergent multi-cultural community. By creating characters who challenge the boundaries of gendered and racial spaces by wearing multiple overlapping masks that conceal complex gendered, racial, and cultural identities, Powell explores the shifting, oscillation, and, eventually, dissolving of the masks. Furthermore, the novel addresses the appointed and self-imposed boundaries of masculinity and femininity in relation to the community’s limitations and the individual’s affordances.