Michaeline Crichlow - Carnival Art, Culture and Politics: Performing Life

Drawing on rich insights from cultural, post-structural and post-colonial studies, this book unlike any other, demands that we re-think Carnival and the carnivalesque as not just celebratory moments or even as critical subtext, but also as insightful performatives of social life anywhere, given the entangled times and spaces of these performances. The authors review Carnivals performative aspects not merely as a calendrical festival, but rather center attention on the relationship between carnival and everyday life, and on how people negotiate their social spaces and possibilities in the context of modern power. The book therefore seeks to highlight the knotted time-spaces of power and to demonstrate the dynamic interplay between state spaces and peoples spaces that are being weaved by carnivals interlocutors. It demonstrates how Carnival and the carnivalesque become analytic optics through which the relations of power in the social and political life of subjects who seek to tactically or strategically vary their given identities, can be productively engaged.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture.

Michaeline A. Crichlow is a Professor of Sociology and Global Caribbean Studies, teaches in the African and African American Studies department at Duke University, USA, and is the author of Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (2009) and Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development (2005). She has written and published on informality, creolization and development in several journals and edited volumes, and is currently researching for book projects on citizenship and migration and the question of place and space.

First published 2012

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

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2012 Taylor & Francis

This book is a reproduction of Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, volume 16/issue 4. The Publisher requests to those authors who may be citing this book to state, also, the bibliographical details of the special issue on which the book was based.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN13: 978-0-415-69276-2

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books

Publishers Note

The publisher would like to make readers aware that the chapters in this book may be referred to as articles as they are identical to the articles published in the special issue. The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen in the course of preparing this volume for print.

Part I - Holistics: carnivals and their respective cultural systems

Part II - Hierarchies: carnival histories and state interventions

Part III - Horizons: transplanted carnivals, and carnivalesque strategies in contemporary cultural politics

Michaeline A. Crichlowa and Piers Armstrongb

aDepartments of African and African American Studies & Sociology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; bLatin American Institute, University of California, Los Angeles; Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles

Somo crioulo doido e somo bem legal

Temos cabelo duro s no black pau

Que bloco esse? Eu quero saber.

o mundo negro que viemos mostrar pra voc.

Branco, se voc soubesse o valor que o preto tem,

Tu tomavas banho de piche, branco e, ficava negro tambm.

E no te ensino a minha malandragem

Nem to pouco minha filosofia, no

We be crazy Creole and we be very cool

We have kinky hair and we just go in Black Pow

What carnival club is this? I want to know.

Its the black world that we came to show you

Whitey, if you knew the value of the Black man,

Youd bathe yourself in tar and become a Black man too

And Im not gonna teach you my artful dodging

or my philosophy either, no. (Que Bloco Esse, Paulinho Camafeu)

In the summer of 2005, 11 scholars who had studied and participated in carnival and carnivalesque moments, gathered at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City for a colloquium on carnival. Their respective core disciplines included sociology, anthropology, history, folklore, visual arts, theatre, performance, and foreign languages and literatures. The carnivals they studied were predominantly of the Americas (with a Caribbean cluster of Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba and New Orleans, and an Eastern South American cluster of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) but also included France, the Trinidadian-derived Notting Hill carnival in London, a carnival-like Catholic festivity in the Philippines, and on the carnivalesque front a G-8 protest in Scotland and well-humoured coal industry protests in West Virginia. All used interdisciplinary perspectives and methods in their work, and the colloquium fostered exchanges of a comparative nature regarding both instances of carnival and its disciplinary frames. The conceptual orientation deriving from the profile of case studies examined, meant combining a focus on post-colonial issues of emancipation with aesthetic performatives and the expression of personal fantasies. We sought to explore carnival beyond its traditional festive sites, and to rethink it, less through overarching binaries such as Western/non-Western or domination/subordination, and more in terms of its cultural flows, hybridities, negotiation, dialogics, and unintended consequences.

An inclination to rely on binaristic notions in earlier carnival literature, particularly within Marxist and certain ethnographic studies, tended to underscore the grotesque anomalies in a visual politics of presence or place. But the cultural turn in social studies, with its emphasis on translation, negotiation, constructions of subjectivities, and on liminality, allows more for a perspective of open-ended transformations and relational histories, and hence a stress upon the contingent, provisional formation of social spaces, subjectivities and temporalities. This views value has been enhanced with the recent overflow of certain carnivals beyond their historical sites and temporal constraints. The essays in this volume offer then to rethink carnivals and the carnivalesque principally in terms of its movements, boundary crossings, convivialities, creative bricolage and fantasies, which are maneuvers open to anyone state elites, folk and visitors, players and observers.