Carnival Art, Culture and Politics

Performing Life

Michaeline Crichlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415692762
• eBook ISBN: 9781135751432
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on rich insights from cultural, post-structural and postcolonial studies, this book demands that we rethink 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 Carnival's 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 people's spaces that are being weaved by carnival's 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 tacitically 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.

INTRODUCTION

Carnival praxis, carnivalesque strategies and Atlantic interstices

Michaeline A. Crichlow^a and Piers Armstrong^b

^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 é só no black pau

Que bloco é esse? Eu quero saber.

É o mundo negro que viemos mostrar pra você.

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

Tu tomavas banho de piche, branco e, ficava negrão também.

E não te ensino a minha malandragem

Nem tão pouco minha filosofia, não

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.

It’s the black world that we came to show you

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

You’d bathe yourself in tar and become a Black man too

And I’m not gonna teach you my artful dodging

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

A multidisciplinary symposium on carnivals and the carnivalesque

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 view’s 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.

Carnival per se

Carnival was originally a Catholic festival, lasting for three-five days, just prior to the 40 days of Lent which precede Easter and are marked by a penitential restraint which is empathic to Christ’s impending agony. The etymology of the word is contested, but apparently derives from the Italian, carne levare (the removal of meat). Since it has not traditionally existed in Anglophone societies, there is some awkwardness in English usage of the term. ‘Carnival’ usually refers to a temporary amusement park, and Americans use a French term in New Orleans, mardi gras (Fat Tuesday), when people would eat up all the meat and fat proscribed in Lent, which starts the following day, Ash Wednesday, the day of ritual mourning that follows carnival. Since Lent was a time of penance and discipline, the preceding days became, in contrast, a time of liberation from the usual social and moral constraints, a public party. In medieval times, carnival was part of an organic cycle of discipline and liberation. For a day the fool or the fattest glutton in the town became ‘king’, and, to a lesser extent, or at least by implication, the ‘king’ (i.e., the local baron or the mayor or other leading burgher) became a ‘fool’. Usually, instead of leading to actual liberation, carnival was politically useful to the powerful as a harmless escape valve for oppressed people. It was, nevertheless, predicated psycho-socially on a symbolic inversion of status which is highly ambiguous: if carnival helped to maintain the status quo, it uniquely allowed for bold expressions of dissidence and thus pointed to a ‘revolution in the mind’ in the form of a kind of alternative reality. Carnival was also singular in precipitating a gregarious, compacted assemblage of townsfolk of different stations in a general clime which embraced both meddling with order and individual eccentricity. Finally, at a deeper spiritual level, carnival was profoundly enigmatic in that it preserved links with pagan practices and sensibilities, and presumably initially emerged as a political accommodation, by the Church, of enduring pre-Christian values. From this point of view, carnival is simply a mask for the continuity of Bacchic rites which are traced back to Roman festivities and, beyond that, to pagan principles of the earlier ancient world.

In the early modern historical period (after the Middle Ages and before the Industrial and French revolutions), the enigmatic ritual aspects of carnival receded with economic development. Given the political volatility of this period of national consolidation, carnival became an arena for expressions of changing patronal power (for example, when a powerful burgher sought to mark his ascension in a town). The line that carnival constantly sketches between the potential and the real was sometimes broken, and the margin of unruliness tolerated in carnival occasionally broke into purposeful violence because of the links to extraneous political agendas. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s rigorous study (1979) demonstrates how carnival was used as a venue to channel hostility deriving from anger over taxation and corruption in the linguistically divided southern French town of Romans, culminating in widespread violence in 1580 and the massacre of two dozen artisans. In a different vein, Teofilo Ruiz (2001) documents the consistency of non-cataclysmic manipulations of carnival for political assertion and for internecine or inter-class intimidation. In the later modern period in Europe, carnival generally lost both its ritual and political edges and evolved into placid communitarian celebration, aesthetic stylization and commodification. The most patent manifestation of this is the carnival of Venice. Largely because of tourism, this carnival has remained illustrious despite the fading away of the economics and politics which saw its rise. In a short but brilliant study, Peter Burke (1987) traces its gradual evolution through the early modern period. What now appears as the most stable carnival, with a sacrosanct aesthetic transposition (the use of ancien regime masks), was in fact constantly adjusting, both logistically and aesthetically, in reaction to changing power relations.

During this relative metropolitan decline, and particularly in the twentieth century, the carnival became gradually more important in the non-Anglophone colonies and former colonies of the Americas (based on its distinct colonial history, we can include New Orleans in the non-Anglophone Caribbean). While Rio’s is the most famous, Brazil has several major and distinct carnivals, and the carnival is the longest official holiday period of the year. Lesser known carnivals are central national events in Caribbean states such as Haiti, Cuba and Martinique. Trinidad (i.e., Trinidad and Tobago) occupies a special place at the carnival cross-roads. Colonized first by the Spanish and the French, it is perched with the previous States at the Afro-Latin fulcrum of New World carnival. Eventually an Anglophone colony, it was also a full participant in the vibrant popular cultures of the British Commonwealth, in which, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, there were often thematic overlaps between political and cultural independence. In Trinidad, carnival is the central arena of popular cultural articulations. Additionally, Trinidadian culture and carnival are infused with East Indian culture, thus going beyond the usual concepts of the ‘Black Atlantic’ or ‘trans-Atlantic’. This global triangulation should be distinguished both from the Afro-Latin core of most Caribbean and Brazilian carnivals, and from the mestizo Afro-indigenous interfaces of Spanish America which have their own carnival expressions (in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, etc.). The New Orleans and the Recife (Brazil) carnivals feature a rich Black assimilation of indigenous totems. The Rio carnival functions as a spectacular ecumenical ritual of national inter-ethnic unification, and clearly as an escape valve. The Bahian carnival (also Brazil), meanwhile, has been a central site of Black rejection of the ‘racial democracy’ ethos articulated in Rio. While the Bahian and Trinidadian carnival constantly evolve, it is revealing that the enduring format of the Rio carnival was established during a quasi-Fascist dictatorship in the 1930s. In fact, the populist political dimension of New World carnival is constant. For example, Scher (2002) examines the deployment of carnival for state purposes in Trinidad and Averill (1994) and Largey (2000) have shown how the contemporary carnival of Haiti (Rara) serves to consolidate state power on a cruder level. This process, further radicalized, is elucidated by emerging African theories of the carnivalization of state power in that continent’s post-colonial states (Mbembe, 1992, 2001). In the future, these theories of the carnivalesque may illuminate analyses of Middle Eastern cultural mechanics which problematize the Western project of hurriedly imposing democratization.

Theories

The dusk was a raucous chaos of curses, gossip and laughter, everything performed in public … [To] colonials … the self-inflicted role of martyr came naturally, the melodramatic belief that one was the message-bearer for the millennium … Centuries of servitude have to be shucked; but there is no history, only the history of emotion. Pubescent ignorance comes into the light, a shy girl, eager to charm, and one’s instinct is savage: to violate that ingenuousness … because she too moves in her own hallucination: that of a fine and separate star, while her counterpart, the actor, sits watching, but he sits next to another hallucination, a doppelganger released from his environment and his race. Their simplicity is really ambition. Their gaze is filmed with hope of departure. The noblest are those who are trapped, who have accepted the twilight …. Every state sees its image in those forms which have the mass appeal of sport, seasonal and amateurish. Stamped on that image is the old colonial grimace of the laughing nigger, steelbands-man, carnival masker, calypsonian and limbo dancer. These popular artists are trapped in the State’s concept of the folk form, for they preserve the colonial demeanour and threaten nothing. The folk arts have become the symbol of a carefree, accommodating culture, an adjunct to tourism … (Derek Walcott, 1970)

Scholars vary in focus and concern as they read political, social and aesthetic meanings and functions, on the collective and individual planes. Given the complexity of this phenomena, what are we looking for on the ground? First, carnival in a postcolonial frame precipitates questions including the racial condition in the New World, its slave post-slavery and indentured labour contexts, of its contestations and cultural politics in reaction to the increasing social and cultural heterogeneity of Europe, hybrid praxes and identities, and the question of ‘roots and routes’. Second, carnival precipitates political and economic questions, on the one hand with a view to scrutinizing (top-down) state interventions and impositions, and, on the other, with bottom-up or horizontal carnivalesque subversions and general manoeuvres. By horizontal, we mean to eschew binarisms of race, class, gender and state that wittingly or unwittingly convey power as lived through structural determinations and thereby the cosmovision of dominant groups and identities. Third, following Bourdieu and his key notion of sociocultural domains (‘habitus’), we should be attentive to the interaction and mutual influence between carnival performance genres and sociabilities and the power matrices that inform them:

[T]he states or social contexts associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. (Bourdieu, 1990, pp. 53–56)

Fourth, while performance may imply politics and/or be a reaction to one’s social position, it manifests aesthetically and warrants analysis as such. Finally, while carnival in its classic form is scheduled and anticipated, the carnivalesque refers to things which can be said to ‘happen’, whether in spontaneous outbreaks of carnivallike practices, or in strategic actions inspired by carnival. The carnivalesque may also emerge organically from traditional practices as something new (and thereupon possibly be integrated into a recast of the ‘traditional’), or it may be extracted from external sources in the global imaginary.

Carnival studies begin with Bakhtin and since attempts to go beyond still tend to go back to him, the result is that it is never clear whether the Russian literary philosopher is one part of carnival theory or, rather, the reverse. Bakhtin’s seminal ideas of carnival were framed as an introduction to a doctoral thesis on Rabelais (submitted in 1941, published in 1965, translated to English in 1968). His interest is more in the carnivalesque — for him, bottom-up societal propulsions to dissidence and pluralism which manifest in carnival, and the complementary nature of this moment to normal time and order — than in carnival ethnographies and in situ studies per se. Since Bakhtin lived under Stalin, it is difficult not to read his recuperation of the late medieval popular as a couched reaction and a symbolic counterpoint to early Marxist dismissals of the popular as alienation. This only exacerbates the lack of ethnographic groundedness, especially if contrasted with the great socio-anthropological studies of popular culture which emerged from the Americas in the twentieth century (such as Boas and later Geertz in the USA, Freyre in Brazil and Ortiz in Cuba), European social historicism (such as Eric Hobsbawm, and E.P. Thompson), later cultural studies of New Historicism (such as Greenblatt), and various recent African, Latin American and Asian theorists of cultural particularism (such as Thiong’o, Said...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction Carnival praxis, carnivalesque strategies and Atlantic interstices
• Carnival time versus modern social life: a false distinction
• Feathered footsteps: mythologizing and ritualizing Black Indian processions in New Orleans
• Bahian carnival and social carnivalesque in trans-Atlantic context
• ‘The return of Crazy Mother': The cultural politics of carnival in 1930s Dijon
• Ethnic identity and elite idyll: a comparison of carnival in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay, 1900–1920
• Incremental art: negotiating the route of London's Notting Hill Carnival
• Carnivals against capital: radical clowning and the global justice movement
• Carnival time in the Kingdom of Coal
• Index