tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/carnival-6877/articles
Carnival – The Conversation
2023-12-11T14:50:46Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219165
2023-12-11T14:50:46Z
2023-12-11T14:50:46Z
Queer life in Africa is also full of joy – remembering the carnival in Mozambique
<p>In late colonial Mozambique, in the city of Lourenço Marques (today’s Maputo), a carnival festival was held almost every year. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the event was more than just a street parade. It also became a space of queer expression and joy.</p>
<p>As a Brazilian queer <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Caio+Sim%C3%B5es+de+Ara%C3%BAjo&btnG=">scholar</a> based in South Africa, I have been painfully aware that English-speaking contexts tend to be far better represented in queer African studies. I have chosen to focus on countries whose queer politics and history are lesser known and under-studied – such as Mozambique and Angola.</p>
<p>Which is how I came across the history of carnival celebrations in Lourenço Marques. With the support of Johannesburg’s <a href="https://gala.co.za">Gala Queer Archive</a> and LGBTIQ+ organisations such as the <a href="https://www.arquivodeidentidadeangolano.com/home-page">Arquivo de Identidade Angolano</a> in Angola and <a href="https://lambda.org.mz">Lambda</a> in Mozambique, I’ve been collecting queer histories in and from these countries. </p>
<p>In these documentary projects, I strive to balance the <a href="https://theconversation.com/ugandas-anti-homosexuality-law-is-a-patriarchal-backlash-against-progress-206681">focus</a> on “<a href="https://theconversation.com/homosexuality-remains-illegal-in-kenya-as-court-rejects-lgbt-petition-112149">African</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/lgbtiq-learners-at-risk-in-south-africa-as-conservative-christian-groups-fight-plans-for-safer-schools-194823">homophobia</a>” by finding histories and spaces in which queer African cultures have also flourished (and, at times, continue to flourish). </p>
<p>In a recent research <a href="https://www.njas.fi/njas/article/view/1085">paper</a>, I flesh out how the Mozambique festival opened up a space of freedom to the marginalised. Especially women of colour and queer people, black and white. It also built on and activated transnational networks in the wider Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world. Brazilian musicians and cross-dressing performers, for example, travelled across borders to become important presences in late colonial African society.</p>
<p>Celebrating these histories of joy is important because it allows the archive to become a site of freedom too, where one might reclaim the past and imagine a brighter future.</p>
<h2>Carnival as queer culture</h2>
<p>Like others elsewhere in the world, the carnival festival in Lourenço Marques was a period of temporary subversion of dominant morals and social hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality. While the festivity had been celebrated in Mozambique since at least the 1900s, it went through a renewal in the late colonial period. </p>
<p>From the 1950s until the early 1970s, the carnival took place in unequal worlds. It was in the racially segregated spaces of elite clubs and hotels, on the one hand, and in the most popular and racially mixed environments of the subúrbios (suburbs), on the other. These middle- and low-income neighbourhoods, such as Mafalala, Alto Maé, Xipamanine and Malhangalene, were known hotspots of African culture and creativity.</p>
<p>Transnational connections shaped the celebrations too. Carnival parties often featured Brazilian musicians and rhythms, especially <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/samba-dance">samba</a>. Mozambican playwright Manoela Soeiro <a href="https://www.njas.fi/njas/article/view/1085">suggests</a> that dancing samba and enjoying the Brazilian-style carnival offered black Mozambicans a kind of joy that was otherwise denied to them by dominant <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/mozambique#:%7E:text=The%20voyage%20of%20Vasco%20da,%27People%27s%20Republic%20of%20Mozambique%27.">colonial culture</a>.</p>
<p>Besides Brazilian musicians, Lourenço Marques also received travestis, cross-dressing queer performers. Travestis were becoming increasingly successful in entertainment culture in Brazil and elsewhere, in theatre and film and nightlife. Brazilian travestis, such as the iconic <a href="https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/cultura/noticia/2017-09/famous-transgender-actress-rogeria-dies-rio">Rogéria</a>, held artistic residencies in Mozambique in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Lourenço Marques and Beira, they performed regularly in clubs and cabarets, helping spur an emerging queer subculture. </p>
<p>The Mozambique-born Portuguese writer Eduardo Pitta <a href="https://www.njas.fi/njas/article/view/1085">explains</a> that their presence was a sign of cultural change. It signalled a relative openness on matters of gender and sexuality that reflected the global sexual revolution of the late 1960s. </p>
<p>These emerging urban and youth cultures pushed against the sexual and moral conservatism of the Portuguese colonial regime. Especially during the carnival. While travesti performances were secluded in clubs attended by a mostly white and middle-class clientele, popular forms of cross-dressing were common in the carnival. </p>
<p>A poem published in the Mozambique press in 1958 encouraged the practice as an expression of freedom: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Let go of the sorrows consuming you/ do what you feel like/ if you are a woman, wear a male mask/ do not mind being transformed/ if you are man, make yourself into a woman.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>João, a working-class black Mozambican, <a href="https://www.njas.fi/njas/article/view/1085">described</a> to me his experience of joining the street festivities dressed as a woman, even “wearing breasts”. </p>
<p>João mentioned his desire to experiment with femininity as a child, which he had never done for fear of outing himself. What was particularly compelling about the carnival, he said, was the ability to enjoy this freedom without social repercussions. Stories like this suggest that in Lourenço Marques the carnival could be a site of queer joy, however fleeting.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of independence, the ruling party Frelimo cancelled the street carnival. The socialist regime intended to build a new revolutionary culture by fighting practices associated with colonial society, including drinking and sexual licentiousness. It is not surprising that the carnival was caught up on this moralist wave. While the festival experienced a rebirth in the late 1980s, it never regained the status it once had.</p>
<h2>Remembering queer joy</h2>
<p>In gender and sexuality studies, much has been written about how desires are regulated and how gender stereotypes are produced over time. Looking at the carnival invites us to focus instead on moments of sexual transgression and gender-bending, to imagine the possibility of freedom and disruption, despite the inherent violence of the colonial situation and its aftermath.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/being-queer-in-africa-the-state-of-lgbtiq-rights-across-the-continent-205306">Being queer in Africa: the state of LGBTIQ+ rights across the continent</a>
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<p>In 2015, after 40 years of independence, Mozambique joined the growing list of countries to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-33342963">put an end</a> to colonial era “anti-sodomy” laws. Despite this legal landmark and the country’s relative tolerance towards LGBTIQ+ people, a <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc4145add2-visit-mozambique-report-independent-expert-protection#:%7E:text=In%20his%20report%2C%20the%20Independent,of%20his%20visit%20from%203">recent report</a> suggests that Mozambique still needs to more effectively fight discrimination and violence against sexual and gender minorities. </p>
<p>Spaces of queer self-expression and joy exist more visibly now, but they have also flourished in the not so distant past. In remembering the carnival, we are invited to bring joy back to the centre of our collective memory. Not for the sake of history writing alone, but also to undertake the transformative labour of queer liberation – as the queer icons and dancing queens in Mozambique remind us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219165/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Caio Simões de Araújo has received funding from the Governing Intimacies project, based at Wits University, and the Open Society University Network. He is affiliated with the Other Foundation, a LGBTI community foundation working across thirteen southern African countries. </span></em></p>
From the 1950s to the early 1970s the carnival was a place for queer expression and attracted performers from as far away as Brazil.
Caio Simões de Araújo, Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/210959
2023-08-04T19:22:47Z
2023-08-04T19:22:47Z
Toronto Caribbean Carnival should bring attention to anti-Black racism affecting communities
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541161/original/file-20230804-15-wejf60.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C0%2C7114%2C4743&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A dancer with Tribal Carnival is helped into her costume ahead of the King and Queen Show, part of Toronto Caribbean Carnival, on Aug. 3, 2023.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/toronto-caribbean-carnival-should-bring-attention-to-anti-black-racism-affecting-communities" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>Every summer Toronto plays host to revellers and spectators, visitors and locals, for one of the biggest events of the season: the <a href="https://www.torontocarnival.ca/">Toronto Caribbean Carnival (TCC)</a>. Last year’s carnival brought almost two million people and <a href="https://www.torontocarnival.ca/_files/ugd/08adeb_c1c4596d9016436d886b6809be94dc14.pdf">just under half a billion dollars to the city</a>, and similar if not greater numbers are expected this year.</p>
<p>Under the theme of “Diversity and Culture Live Here,” the Festival Management Committee that oversees carnival events is encouraging everyone to join in the fun. Many see TCC activities, especially the culminating <a href="https://www.torontocarnival.ca/event-details/the-grand-parade">Grand Parade</a>, as an opportunity to go full throttle with the bacchanal. And carnival is about play and pleasure and partying.</p>
<p>But beyond the fun and sparkly costumes are some real problems around the exploitation of the culture of a community that usually doesn’t receive positive play in the media and elsewhere at other times of the year.</p>
<p>Heavy commercialization of the TCC also results in a significant amount of money coming into the city with not much of it bringing any benefit to Caribbean communities.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541162/original/file-20230804-27-22wyvj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A dancer in a large costume on stage during a Caribbean carnival." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541162/original/file-20230804-27-22wyvj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541162/original/file-20230804-27-22wyvj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541162/original/file-20230804-27-22wyvj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541162/original/file-20230804-27-22wyvj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541162/original/file-20230804-27-22wyvj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541162/original/file-20230804-27-22wyvj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541162/original/file-20230804-27-22wyvj.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tribal Carnival’s front Princess, Caneisha Edwards, takes part in the King and Queen Show, part of the Toronto Caribbean Carnival, on Aug. 3, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Carnivals and protest</h2>
<p>In the post George Floyd era, it is even more important that these issues are acknowledged and tackled head on. One would hope, for example, that event organizers would consider explicitly framing at least some of the main events through the lens of what the world learned about anti-Black racism from the Black Lives Matter protests.</p>
<p>On the official <a href="https://www.torontocarnival.ca/donate">TCC website</a>, organizers ask for donations so that the “community and festival” can “continue to celebrate, raise awareness and to resist discrimination and oppression through our original music, masquerade performances, culinary experiences, and other expressions of our Caribbean culture.”</p>
<p>This suggests they understand the TCC can amplify and build on conversations and actions initiated during the protests. Perhaps, too, that phrasing on the website could mean an openness to embracing social critique and protest, which are hallmarks of Caribbean carnivals in other locations, such as in Trinidad and Tobago.</p>
<p>Carnival celebrations <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/arts/exhibitionists/mas-protest-how-traditional-carnival-was-born-out-of-resistance-1.4773816">born out of resistance</a> to, and which mark emancipation from, chattel slavery have long been part of the cultural experience of Caribbean peoples. Carnival traditions in the Caribbean have also long found a balance between creating a spectacle and being socially responsive, between being celebratory while also unafraid of challenging the status quo.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541182/original/file-20230804-27-2amatg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in a large multicolored costume on a stage." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541182/original/file-20230804-27-2amatg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541182/original/file-20230804-27-2amatg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541182/original/file-20230804-27-2amatg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541182/original/file-20230804-27-2amatg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541182/original/file-20230804-27-2amatg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541182/original/file-20230804-27-2amatg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541182/original/file-20230804-27-2amatg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A participant parades a costume during the King and Queen Show, part of the Toronto Caribbean Carnival, on Aug. 3, 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If the carnival’s organizers used its visibility to bring attention to structural and institutional anti-Black racism affecting communities, it would more fully embrace that Caribbean tradition.</p>
<p>So far, though, there’s not much evidence of such explicit framing. It would be a seriously missed opportunity if the 2023 festivities came to an end without engaging with the ways the community is affected by anti-Black racism.</p>
<h2>Raising awareness</h2>
<p>This 56th year of the TCC is kicking off on the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/BLM-tenth-anniversary?fbclid=IwAR0HJmw252qzvtb-NU6cw3s2xtmu2tNR4T6zr6Yi_IAVLShnFegZWCwTZsI">10th anniversary of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement</a>. This is only the second year, too, that the TCC’s main events overlap with Emancipation Day.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/emancipation-day.html">Emancipation Day</a>, observed on August 1, was made official in Canada in March 2021 in the wake of the BLM protests. The day offers Canadians an occasion to learn about <a href="https://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550653274">Canada’s history of enslaving Black and Indigenous Peoples</a> and better understand how racism continues to impact communities today.</p>
<p>TCC dates also coincide with <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/simcoe-day-canada-s-roots-in-slavery-and-the-historic-abolition-1.1303678">Simcoe Day</a>, which is observed in <a href="https://www.heritagetrust.on.ca/pages/programs/provincial-plaque-program/provincial-plaque-background-papers/chloe-cooley">remembrance of the 1793 anti-slavery act</a>.</p>
<p>So, if there was ever a time for the TCC to lean into its social commentary and protest roots, that time is now.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541164/original/file-20230804-23-ygrmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman at a demonstration carrying a Black Lives Matter flag." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541164/original/file-20230804-23-ygrmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541164/original/file-20230804-23-ygrmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541164/original/file-20230804-23-ygrmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541164/original/file-20230804-23-ygrmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541164/original/file-20230804-23-ygrmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541164/original/file-20230804-23-ygrmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541164/original/file-20230804-23-ygrmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People attend the #BLM Turns 10 People’s Justice Festival on July 15, 2023 in Los Angeles. The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of the man who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As someone who belongs to the Caribbean diaspora in Toronto, something I would like to see happen with the TCC is more overt critical engagement on the part of organizers, <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-history-of-mas-notting-hill-carnival/owVRsWygiT1m0g?hl=en">mas bands</a>, masqueraders and performers with anti-Black racism and other types of social injustice and inequity in Canada.</p>
<p>For masqueraders, that could mean choosing to play mas in ways that are more reminiscent of what people in the Caribbean call ‘ole mas.’ Bands could facilitate this socially- and politically-engaged mas by creating appropriate costumes and play scenarios for their band members.</p>
<p>Organizers could program events that promote greater awareness about the history of Caribbean carnivals. These could be public lectures, workshops and exhibits that take advantage of the reach and accessibility of virtual forums. Organizers could encourage greater engagement by artists and content producers with social events and topics, especially ones that concern Black and Caribbean Canadian communities.</p>
<p>They could also be more proactive about how corporate sponsorships and the growing commercialization of TCC events can be harnessed to benefit Caribbean and Black communities in Toronto.</p>
<p>The spotlight this summer on a post-pandemic, post-BLM iteration of the TCC could also help reignite productive public discussion about the policing of Black communities in Toronto. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/frustration-over-police-presence-at-caribbean-carnival-reflects-debate-over-anti-black-racism/article31149670/">TCC’s history with the police has not always been comfortable</a>. Toronto’s police force has repeatedly demonstrated over the years that it makes a problematic association between large gatherings of Black and other people of colour and public acts of violence.</p>
<p>Efforts have been made in recent years to address this, especially at the Grand Parade. <a href="https://thecaribbeancamera.com/toronto-caribbean-carnival-kicks-off-with-a-blazing-hot-launch/">News coverage</a> of the 2023 carnival observed that “In a departure from previous years, the Toronto Police chief was notably absent from the launch event, with only Black auxiliary officers seen near the stage.” But there is still a lot of work to do around changing how police interact with Black communities.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541163/original/file-20230804-19-77kck2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A large group of people in costumes at a carnival" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541163/original/file-20230804-19-77kck2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541163/original/file-20230804-19-77kck2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541163/original/file-20230804-19-77kck2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541163/original/file-20230804-19-77kck2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541163/original/file-20230804-19-77kck2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541163/original/file-20230804-19-77kck2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541163/original/file-20230804-19-77kck2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Masqueraders attend the Caribbean Carnival parade in Toronto on July 30, 2022. The 55th annual parade returned after the COVID-19 pandemic postponed it for two years.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Helping Black businesses</h2>
<p>The TCC is arguably Toronto’s biggest and most visible Black-owned business. But while various businesses in the city — hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, cultural attractions and landmarks — benefit financially, that has not been the case for many Black businesses, especially small ones.</p>
<p>The increasing commercialization of the TCC, such as big brand sponsorship of the bands and the trucks that accompany them along the Grand Parade route, is a significant part of this problem.</p>
<p>Current funding structures, and “business as usual” approaches exemplify how Blackness can be co-opted to serve corporate interests while Black communities are shut out of the benefits and profits. It’s Blackness on display — and only when such display is profitable — with little to none of this profit going to Black communities.</p>
<p>The City of Toronto and the TCC could demonstrate commitment to addressing anti-Black racism by rethinking the carnival’s financial participation and profit distribution models to benefit Black-owned businesses and communities.</p>
<p>There are already organizational structures in place for facilitating this. For example, the Festival Management Committee’s <a href="https://www.bbep.ca/about">Building Black Entrepreneurs Program</a> which has received funding from the federal government’s <a href="https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2020/09/09/prime-minister-announces-support-black-entrepreneurs-and-business">Black Entrepreneurship Program</a>. There’s also the City of Toronto’s <a href="https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/get-involved/community/confronting-anti-black-racism/">Confronting Anti-Black Racism unit</a>.</p>
<p>The Festival Management Committee, the City, TCC community stakeholders, partners and sponsors as well as the larger public need to have these conversations. Until then, simply focusing on jumping, waving, wining, feting and playing does a disservice to the true spirit of Caribbean carnivals.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210959/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hyacinth Simpson receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p>
Toronto’s Caribbean Carnival brings festivities and fun to the city every summer. But beyond the dances and parades, carnivals are and should be places to protest and raise awareness of injustices.
Hyacinth Simpson, Associate Professor, Department of English and Interim Director, Dimensions Program, Toronto Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/191565
2022-10-18T18:37:22Z
2022-10-18T18:37:22Z
Parintins: A remote Brazilian city overcoming isolation through a festival
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488827/original/file-20221008-43378-5zd8sl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C131%2C3940%2C2377&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People perform during the Boi-Bumbá in Parintins. The city's annual festival has shown how remote communities can thrive despite isolation. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>There are no bridges or roads that connect the city-island of Parintins to the rest of the world. This remote city in the Amazon is 369 kilometres away from Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazonas state. Parintins is home to thousands of low-income and Indigenous Brazilians and can only be reached by plane or boat. Its position along the Amazon River makes it dependent on commodities and resources that arrive from far away cities. </p>
<p>Despite these isolated conditions, the community of Parintins has developed a novel strategy that celebrates its folk and Indigenous traditions: the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-obsm5JR4CQ"><em>Festival do Boi-Bumbá</em> (meaning “bull dance”)</a>. This annual event is the second most important festival in Brazil, after Rio de Janeiro’s globally renowned carnival. </p>
<p><em>Boi-Bumbá</em>, which takes place at the end of June, fuels the local economy by attracting investment as well as thousands of visitors and artists. Over the years, the festival has become the city’s bridge from the deep Amazon to the outside world, reducing political and physical isolation while reinforcing its social capital and cultural assets.</p>
<h2>Logistical, political and organizational challenges</h2>
<p><em>Boi-Bumbá</em> has a particular feature: a competition between two traditional teams, <em>Garantido</em> (in red) and <em>Caprichoso</em> (in blue). The teams compete during three nights of artistic performances in the <em>Bumbódromo</em> — a thirty-five-thousand-seat arena built specifically for the festival. The festival transforms the city into a colorful, loud and vibrant party.</p>
<p>During the festival, the city’s population almost doubles, creating major logistical challenges that range from providing water to transportation. Thousands of visitors arrive by boat and plane from Manaus and elsewhere. But Parintins’ hotel network has limited capacity. Tourists and vendors from various social classes mix up, sleeping on hammocks, boats, and residents’ homes that are temporarily transformed into hostels.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488816/original/file-20221007-43019-nn7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man standing next to a large sculpture of a horse painting the horse's eye." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488816/original/file-20221007-43019-nn7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488816/original/file-20221007-43019-nn7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488816/original/file-20221007-43019-nn7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488816/original/file-20221007-43019-nn7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488816/original/file-20221007-43019-nn7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488816/original/file-20221007-43019-nn7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488816/original/file-20221007-43019-nn7vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artists creating sculptures for the festival.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The organizational machine to support the event is set in motion months before the festival. An army of artists, sculptors, welders, painters and tailors work day and night inside <em>galpões</em> (large hangars) to create floats up to 25 metres high and to make the costumes that dancers, acrobats, singers, and musicians will wear during the shows.</p>
<p>For low-skilled workers, most often poorly paid owners of informal businesses, <a href="https://www.thebrasilians.com/parintins-festival-is-a-major-draw-for-amazonian-tourism/">the festival remains an indispensable form of economic support</a>. For everyone in the city, being part of the festival is a question of identity and belonging.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488818/original/file-20221007-44291-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A group of people wearing red shirts gather around a bonfire and a fake cow with horns." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488818/original/file-20221007-44291-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488818/original/file-20221007-44291-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488818/original/file-20221007-44291-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488818/original/file-20221007-44291-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488818/original/file-20221007-44291-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488818/original/file-20221007-44291-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488818/original/file-20221007-44291-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>Garantido</em> (the red team) takes to the streets to dance around bonfires on the night of June 12, the eve of Saint Anthony.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Overcoming the pandemic</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/25/world/americas/coronavirus-brazil-amazon.html">The region was one of the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic</a>. Parintins introduced a curfew which limited work opportunities, especially for informal workers. <a href="https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2020/06/suspenso-por-causa-da-covid-19-festival-folclorico-de-parintins-segue-indefinido.shtml">Pandemic restrictions meant festivities were suspended for two years</a>. During that time, poverty, joblessness, crime and other vulnerabilities worsened.</p>
<p>But the <em>bumbás</em> (the two teams) provided the infrastructure and network to get people the help they needed. Festival facilities were turned into help centres for the most vulnerable. Team members <a href="https://www.facebook.com/boibumbacaprichoso/posts/pfbid0k2Fug9fAFUEtStfn8WSQRZehKhX3Yxm9WXVY5Uk28JfeaZKNofq5BmpEa1TiPH6Bl">distributed hundreds of food baskets</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/garantido/posts/pfbid02Wk7C6x1RoDmvonFiVTGugdWgQENzjRbZ4r5KAJg3v9sTnt7ghoHTMnr6VKwfS8erl">provided support during the vaccination campaign</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488821/original/file-20221007-44109-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="People paint a mural on a wall." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488821/original/file-20221007-44109-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/488821/original/file-20221007-44109-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488821/original/file-20221007-44109-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488821/original/file-20221007-44109-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488821/original/file-20221007-44109-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488821/original/file-20221007-44109-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/488821/original/file-20221007-44109-e4mr3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artists take to the streets of Parintins to celebrate the return of the festival.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mauro Cossu</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Thanks to the organizers’ efforts, the festival was still able to go ahead virtually. The 2020 edition was put in place without live spectators and was transmitted on Brazilian TV. Something similar happened the year after: the <em>“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO9Wncj6S9M&ab_channel=TVACr%C3%ADtica">Live Parintins 2021</a>”</em> was followed by a large audience on TV and by more than 20,000 people live on YouTube. According to Jender Lobato, president of Caprichoso, it also <a href="https://www.facebook.com/jender.lobato/posts/10216383619736899">generated approximately 10,000 tweets and reached more than three million people on social media</a>.</p>
<p>With fans and enthusiasts watching the event online, buying souvenirs and making donations, the <em>Boi-Bumbá</em> found new ways to exist, contribute to the socioeconomic sustainability of the community, and keep Parintins on the political map of Brazil.</p>
<h2>The return of the <em>Boi-Bumbá</em></h2>
<p>At the beginning of March 2022, the governor of the state of Amazonas, Wilson Lima, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfwLg78PEmc&ab_channel=AlvoradaParintins">announced the return of the festival</a>. Both the government and private investors increased their commitment to creating a “historic 55th edition.”</p>
<p>Streets were asphalted, the city museum was renovated, street art appeared on city walls and the <em>Bumbódromo</em> was given a facelift. Parintins’ festival has become a model for other cities and towns to emulate. <a href="https://hojetemfestadeboi.com.br/?p=322">A recent survey</a> shows the existence of more than 120 <em>bois-bumbás</em> in 23 amazon cities.</p>
<p>Relying on tradition and cultural efforts has proven to be a successful way of overcoming isolation. The <em>Boi-Bumbá</em> does not solve all the challenges facing Parintins and the Amazon region. But it does bring enormous benefits in a territory characterized by marginalization, exclusion and a chronic lack of infrastructure. It is around the festival that Parintins and its residents are able to celebrate their traditions while building a shared vision of their own future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191565/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The “Festival do Boi-Bumbá” changed the fate of Parintins, Brazil. Its success shows the crucial role that cultural festivals play in isolated territories that often lack material infrastructure.
Mauro Cossu, PhD candidate and research assistant at the Faculty of Environmental Design, Université de Montréal
Gonzalo Lizarralde, Professeur titulaire - Faculté de l'aménagement, Université de Montréal
Lisa Bornstein, Professor at School of Urban Planning, McGill University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/180828
2022-04-11T12:09:24Z
2022-04-11T12:09:24Z
Water fights, magical decapitated heads and family reunions – the Southeast Asian festival of Songkran has it all
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456993/original/file-20220407-24-rurnnn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=72%2C20%2C3351%2C2272&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People celebrating the Songkran Festival in Luang Prabang, Laos, in April 2021.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/april-15-2021-people-sprinkle-water-to-each-other-news-photo/1232379173?adppopup=true">Xinhua/Kaikeo Saiyasane via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In many countries in Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, the arrival of spring also marks the beginning of the new year. <a href="https://www.m-culture.go.th/en/article_view.php?nid=45">Songkran</a> (สงกรานต์), as the festival welcoming in the new year is called in Thai, is often celebrated with playful water fights on city streets over the course of three chaotic days. </p>
<p>In 2022, Songkran will begin April 13 and last until the evening of April 15. The dates are calculated via the <a href="https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/121460">lunisolar</a> calendar, which accounts both for the movement of the sun through the zodiac and the moon’s cycles. Specifically, the dates mark the period when the Sun’s leaving the constellation of Pisces and entering Aries.</p>
<p>Over these days, cities turn into playful battlegrounds. Children emerge armed from their houses and bands of revelers gather on the sides of the roads ready to waylay passersby. This, though, is <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47920868">a war with water</a>. </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://berkeley.academia.edu/AndrewJohnson">scholar of Thai religion and culture</a>, I have done fieldwork in Bangkok and <a href="https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/ghosts-of-the-new-city-spirits-urbanity-and-the-ruins-of-progress-in-chiang-mai/">Chiang Mai</a> off and on for many years. I first encountered Songkran in Bangkok in 2010, and it was shocking for me. After sustaining a few discreet squirts from children in my neighborhood I emerged into a full melee; staying dry was simply out of the question. </p>
<p>In Theravada Buddhism, the religion practiced from Sri Lanka to Laos, this is the most significant holiday of the year. The day is known as <a href="https://www.phnompenhpost.com/siem-reap-insider/angkor-sangkran-again-during-new-year-period">Sangkren</a> in Cambodia, <a href="https://sonasia-holiday.com/sonabee/thingyan-festival-myanmar-new-year">Thingyan</a> in Myanmar, or simply Pi Mai in Laos.</p>
<p>In the diaspora, Songkran festivals happen wherever there is a Theravada temple, most <a href="https://thainewyear.org/">notably in Los Angeles</a> and <a href="https://www.watthaidc.org/events/songkran-festival/">Washington, D.C.</a></p>
<h2>A grand carnival</h2>
<p>The festival is a clear display of “sanuk,” the Thai emphasis on making activities fun, when many hierarchies of class and generation are suspended, at least during the water war. </p>
<p>In the days before the beginning of Songkran, roadside stalls start to sell cheap plastic water guns – many of which break by the first pull of the trigger – to “armed” groups of children, who wait to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udyok536EZ8">soak</a> adults whom they previously obeyed and respected. The most creative children fill their water tanks with ice, ensuring that the victims wince when they’re hit. </p>
<p>Along major streets in Bangkok, or around the city moat in Chiang Mai, groups gather, firing water pistols and lifting goopy handfuls of <a href="https://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/advanced/522115/the-story-of-powder">chalk powder</a> to slap on each other’s faces – the chalk, incidentally, being a traditional sunscreen, often promoted as a <a href="https://www.sanook.com/women/63815/">natural beauty aid</a>. </p>
<p>In the past two years, concerns over COVID-19 have put a damper on the festivities, as <a href="https://thethaiger.com/hot-news/songkran/songkran-2022-bma-allows-water-splashing-from-covid-safe-distances-in-private-venues">governments try to limit</a> the number of participants and contact between them. </p>
<h2>Carnival time</h2>
<p>Having spent a significant part of the past 20 years living in and writing about the region, I am struck by how Songkran mixes a public carnival and family connections. In rural villages, Songkran means reunions as well as parties. Many families are supported by remittances from members working in Bangkok or abroad, and the holiday provides a chance to return home with gifts, money and temple donations. </p>
<p>Here, too, things turn into a party. In 2015 I spent Songkran in a fishing community <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/mekong-dreaming">near Nong Khai</a>, in northeast Thailand. The town was suddenly full of new faces – people who had been working in factories in Korea, had married overseas, or simply lived and worked in Bangkok. In the mornings of each day, a tent was set up alongside the road, with dishes of spicy som tam <a href="https://www.seriouseats.com/som-tam-green-papaya-salad-5208332">papaya salad</a>, minced pork <a href="https://www.seriouseats.com/laab-moo-isan-isan-style-minced-pork-salad-5205873">larb</a> and copious amounts of <a href="https://www.singhabeerusa.com/leo-beer/">beer</a>. </p>
<p>A hose fed constantly into a series of buckets, and as cars came down the highway, each of us would carry a fully laden bucket of cold water out into the road to soak the drivers. </p>
<p>Of course, this mix of chaos and alcohol can have dire consequences. The numbers of traffic fatalities spike during Songkran week each year – in 2018, there were <a href="https://www.nationthailand.com/in-focus/30343425">418 deaths</a> linked with drunken driving in Thailand alone. </p>
<h2>Mythic origins</h2>
<p>There is more to the holiday than just a water fight. In <a href="https://learnthaistyle.com/what-is-songkran-festival/#:%7E:text=Legend,this%20challenge%20must%20be%20beheaded.">Thai versions of</a> Hindu-Buddhist myth, the day draws from the rituals surrounding the severed head of Kapila Brahma, or Kabila Phrom in Thai, a Hindu sage who challenged a poor child with a riddle. A child who guessed incorrectly would lose his head, and the confident sage announced that he himself would suffer the same fate if the child guessed right. But the child could understand the speech of animals and overheard the correct answer. The sage lost his head, but his magic was so strong that his severed head would make the rains end if tossed into the sky, or cause the seas to dry if it touched the ground. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://burmese-buddhas.com/blog/burmese-festival-thingyan/">the Burmese version</a>, this myth stems from a conflict between two groups of divinities, and the headless Brahma’s body was granted a new elephant’s head and thus transformed into the Hindu God Ganesh. </p>
<p>In each version, a group of divine women – daughters of the sage in some versions, daughters of the god Indra in others – then took the original head and enshrined it in a cave on Mt. Kailash in western Tibet. Each year, one of the daughters would mount a different beast depending on the day of the week on which Songkran falls and take the severed head in a procession.</p>
<p>This year, the appointed daughter rides a donkey, carries a champaka flower, and wears green – something which everyday believers can do, too, to increase their fortunes. In Bangkok, this divine procession takes the form of a parade and <a href="https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/2016-bangkok-wisut-kasat-miss-songkran-fashion-photos">beauty contest</a> to elect “Miss Songkran.”</p>
<h2>A time for reflection</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456995/original/file-20220407-24-za83w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman wearing a face mask pouring water over a bronze-colored Buddha statue that is decorated with flowers." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456995/original/file-20220407-24-za83w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456995/original/file-20220407-24-za83w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456995/original/file-20220407-24-za83w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456995/original/file-20220407-24-za83w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456995/original/file-20220407-24-za83w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456995/original/file-20220407-24-za83w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456995/original/file-20220407-24-za83w0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A woman pours scented water on a Buddha statue during Songkran at the Wat Pho temple in Bangkok, Thailand.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/woman-scented-water-on-a-buddha-statue-as-they-celebrate-news-photo/1232284817?adppopup=true">Anusak Laowilas/NurPhoto via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>European celebrations of the new year happen during the winter, when days are short. Those are celebrations of <a href="https://www.sapiens.org/culture/renewal-rituals/">resilience</a> amid hope that the world is about to turn toward light and warmth again. </p>
<p>But in Southeast Asia, the season of difficulty does not coincide with the winter. Indeed, <a href="https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/thailand/bangkok">daylight time differs</a> by only just over an hour between June and December, and the winter months have <a href="https://en.climate-data.org/asia/thailand/bangkok/bangkok-6313/">temperatures</a> that remain quite pleasant. </p>
<p>The significant seasonal variation is, instead, the <a href="https://eos.org/science-updates/evolution-of-the-asian-monsoon">monsoon</a>. April is the moment just before the hot and dry weather breaks, when monsoon is set to begin and agriculture is at its most desperate. The water wars acquire a sympathetic sort of magic, presaging the rainwaters to come.</p>
<p>It is also a time to thank those who have provided support and bring hope for what is to come. Each Songkran, individuals go to the temples close to their hometown, where they donate, listen to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSOMxDsBrSE">Buddhist sermons</a> or perform acts of service.</p>
<p>Many honor their elders by <a href="https://baanunrakorg.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/rod-nam-dum-hua-a-water-pouring-ceremony/">pouring water</a> over their elders’ palms and also over images of the Buddha, a symbolic giving of coolness and moisture, given the month’s nearly unbearable heat and dryness.</p>
<p>Each of these aspects – the carnival water fight, the mythic story of the rain-destroying head, the bathing of elders’ hands and the image of the Buddha – point toward the significance of water as a source of renewal. It is also a celebration of life in the midst of hardship; a sign of its resilience and, even, its joy.</p>
<p>[<em>3 media outlets, 1 religion newsletter.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/this-week-in-religion-76/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=religion-3-in-1">Get stories from The Conversation, AP and RNS.</a>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180828/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Alan Johnson receives funding from the Fulbright-Hays foundation, the Mario Einaudi Center, and the Humanities Korea foundation.</span></em></p>
In Southeast Asia, Songkran is a time to celebrate the coming year with water fights, honoring elders and offering prayers.
Andrew Alan Johnson, Visiting Scholar of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/168849
2021-11-05T02:36:34Z
2021-11-05T02:36:34Z
Big Mouth, an animated series about periods, masturbation and anxiety. What’s not to like?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423519/original/file-20210928-14-1ycl0uv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2041%2C1150&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Still : Andrew Glouberman, a character in the Netflix's animated comedy Big Mouth watches a condom demonstration from mother.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Animation and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ari-Chand/publication/307610006_Breathing_Life_into_a_Character_Vol_11_Issue_2_2016/links/592cec6e0f7e9b9979b38552/Breathing-Life-into-a-Character-Vol-11-Issue-2-2016.pdf">character design</a> allow us to hold a mirror up to society. We get to see humanity, warts and all, and understand the complexity of what it means to be human. But this reflection of ourselves ties back to a very old artform: the ideas of masking our real selves in the festivity of the Roman Catholic concept of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Carnival-pre-Lent-festival">Carnival</a>. </p>
<p>One of the strongest contemporary adult animated shows right now is <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6524350/">Big Mouth</a>, the nuanced, lewd, coming-of-age series on Netflix. The show investigates the complex, awkward and often taboo experiences of pubescent teens: cultural identity, sexual identity and inclusivity, social media, pornography, periods, masturbation, anxiety and depression.</p>
<p>Through the use of carnival, Big Mouth tells complex stories about what it means to be a teenager with a monster-verse of shoulder angels. Shoulder angels (or representations of our conscience) have traditionally been a small angel or devil, representing good or bad. </p>
<p>Big Mouth draws on a rich history of adult animation while also making the genre entirely its own. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430420/original/file-20211105-23-1undi0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A cartoon dressed up as Beyoncé in Lemonade." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430420/original/file-20211105-23-1undi0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430420/original/file-20211105-23-1undi0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430420/original/file-20211105-23-1undi0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430420/original/file-20211105-23-1undi0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430420/original/file-20211105-23-1undi0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430420/original/file-20211105-23-1undi0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430420/original/file-20211105-23-1undi0m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Big Mouth uses popular culture references to explore complex ideas about teenagehood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NETFLIX © 2020</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Disarming the viewer through play</h2>
<p>Animation allows us to disassociate from reality and create a visual dimension to explore ideas: the drawings act as a mask through which viewers engage in a form of role playing, hidden identity and a sense of play.</p>
<p>Masks have been an important part of many cultures from the <a href="https://www.nihonsun.com/tengu-matsuri-in-tokyo/">Tengu Matsuri</a> mask, <a href="https://www.bahamas.gov.bs/wps/portal/public/Culture/Junkanoo/">Junkanoo</a> masks, <a href="https://philippines.travel/events/dinagyang-festival">Dinagyang</a> masks, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/day-of-the-dead">Dia de los Muertos</a> masks, Venetian carnival masks, to the masks of the Hindu Gods.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429861/original/file-20211103-15-1a5yqk9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429861/original/file-20211103-15-1a5yqk9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429861/original/file-20211103-15-1a5yqk9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429861/original/file-20211103-15-1a5yqk9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429861/original/file-20211103-15-1a5yqk9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429861/original/file-20211103-15-1a5yqk9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429861/original/file-20211103-15-1a5yqk9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429861/original/file-20211103-15-1a5yqk9.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This engraving from 1875 shows a Carnival masquerade party in New Orleans.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">James Wells Champney, Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Carnival-pre-Lent-festival">Carnival</a> was traditionally a Christian celebration in the last three days before Lent, where the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1016/0304-4181%2887%2990036-4">sumptuary laws</a> – the restraint on consumption and luxury – were suspended. During this time, people could wear a mask and break from the conventional rules of society, their identity, hierarchies and become other-than-self. </p>
<p>Like the Carnival, the Russian philosopher <a href="https://g.co/kgs/3tU4Gj">Mikhail Bakhtin</a>’s notion of <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095550811">Carnivalesque</a> is a literary device used to assist people in unshackling themselves: using a mask to explore the complexities of experience without consequence. </p>
<p>In animated form, Carnivalesque utilises <a href="https://g.co/kgs/U2eSCw">four techniques</a>: laughter, bodily excess, <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/billingsgate">Billingsgate</a> (or vitriolic language) and inversions of normal social roles. Big Mouth employs a range of these elements in the character design and dialogue to engage the audience in social commentary.</p>
<h2>From family fare to adult sitcoms</h2>
<p>The animated sitcom has been evolving since the middle of the last century, and with it questions of what is “appropriate” for viewers. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024404/">Betty Boop</a> first appeared in 1930s. Drawing influences from burlesque, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/06/17/betty-boop-the-original-lewdie-toon/e24d8859-1205-4f5b-ac41-6cc934c4707d/">lewd nature</a> of the show was highly criticised. Soon, censorship would play an important role in limiting sexually suggestive content.</p>
<p>From 1934 to 1968, animation was self-censored by the <a href="https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/early-hollywood-and-hays-code/">Hays Code</a>: a set of guidelines preventing profanity, suggestive nudity, excessive violence and sexual content. This gave rise to the closed morality tale built around the nuclear family and patriarchal structure presented in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053502/">The Flinstones</a> (1960-66) and the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055683/">The Jetsons</a> (1962-63).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430422/original/file-20211105-28-15m2h9a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Flintstones" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430422/original/file-20211105-28-15m2h9a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430422/original/file-20211105-28-15m2h9a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430422/original/file-20211105-28-15m2h9a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430422/original/file-20211105-28-15m2h9a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430422/original/file-20211105-28-15m2h9a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430422/original/file-20211105-28-15m2h9a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430422/original/file-20211105-28-15m2h9a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cartoons of the 1960s were family-friendly morality tales.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1989, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096697/">The Simpsons</a> moved animated content into the adult frame, each episode dealing with a particular cultural and moral issue. </p>
<p>With the advent of cable television, cartoons could move even more firmly into the adult realm. We saw the rise of absurdity in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105950/">Beavis and Butt-head</a> (1993-2011) and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182576/">Family Guy</a> (1999-) and the introduction of crude language and sexual innuendo in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121955/">South Park</a> (1997-). 2001 saw the launch of US cable network <a href="https://www.adultswim.com/">Adult Swim</a>, with its suite of adult-focused content.</p>
<p>Even in this age, Big Mouth is not without its critics. It is often vulgar and has been criticised for sexualising puberty too much. Critics have asked: has it gone too far? Is this really how these issues should be explored?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-gods-of-ancient-egypt-as-seen-through-bojack-horseman-156565">The gods of ancient Egypt as seen through 'BoJack Horseman'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Hormones become monsters</h2>
<p>At the heart of good animation is character design, with strong characters translating the human experience – goals, mannerisms, habits and worldviews – into moving abstract versions of ourselves. Animation manipulates the character to give a drawing life. We view the characters in the carnival as if they could be our experiences.</p>
<p>In Big Mouth, chemicals and inanimate objects become personified, allowing the show to explore complex topics.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pkfrBZFpS8U?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcfKg23Xf_4">Maury</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U11H-3j3Ho">Connie</a> are “Hormone Monsters”, who become the internal conversation around the rushes of chemicals influencing teen decisions. Tito the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM3TB6dvSXo">Anxiety Mosquito</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7808478/">Depression Kitty</a> introduce the way mental illness can feel and operate. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13014326/">Gratitoad</a> and other characters explore the positivity we experience together, and eats anxiety. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjKGZGoLoNI">Pam the Sex Pillow</a> and the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7808456/?ref_=ttep_ep3">Shame Wizard</a> present ways we feel in response to other people. </p>
<p>In the new fifth season we are introduced to Lovebugs and Hateworms. All of these characters help communicate the relationship we have with our experiences.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430421/original/file-20211105-19-1dqwq6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A pink fairy sits above a girl's shoulder." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430421/original/file-20211105-19-1dqwq6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/430421/original/file-20211105-19-1dqwq6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430421/original/file-20211105-19-1dqwq6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430421/original/file-20211105-19-1dqwq6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430421/original/file-20211105-19-1dqwq6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430421/original/file-20211105-19-1dqwq6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/430421/original/file-20211105-19-1dqwq6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Season five introduces new Carnival characters to the cast, including Sonya the love bug.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NETFLIX © 2020</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Breaking taboos</h2>
<p>Big Mouth creator Nick Kroll has described how using animation allows them to tell stories which they “might not be able to discuss” in live action shows starring actual teens or tweens. A character like a hormone monster or shame wizard, <a href="https://youtu.be/kt3EqlHcc0I?t=126">he says</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>gives us a lot of latitude to have these more complicated discussions and delve into the subjects kids are dealing with.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Growing up is never easy, but visualising complex ideas can enhance our shared experience. Watching a coming-of-age show as an adult allows us to reflect and better communicate the complex experience of puberty. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/21st-century-character-designs-reflect-our-concerns-as-always-40382">21st-century character designs reflect our concerns, as always</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/168849/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Growing up is never easy, but visualising complex ideas can help. Animation and character design allow us to put a metaphorical mirror up to society.
Ari Chand, Lecturer in Visual Communication Design, University of Newcastle
Jack McGrath, Lecturer in Animation at the University of Newcastle, University of Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/114570
2019-04-07T14:58:32Z
2019-04-07T14:58:32Z
The new Brazilian government is devoid of ideas
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267592/original/file-20190404-123437-1vvrem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro walks past the Granaderos presidential guard during a recent welcoming ceremony in Santiago, Chile.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Esteban Felix)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Brazil, Latin America’s largest country, had some good years between 2003 and 2013. In 2010, the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-economy/brazil-economy-surges-in-2010-growth-seen-cooling-idUSTRE7222QZ20110303">Brazilian GDP increased 7.5 per cent</a>, almost two times more than the world average of 4.3 per cent and three times North America’s index of 2.6 per cent.</p>
<p>Western media during that period often referred to Brazil as a <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brazil-the-worlds-next-economic-superpower-09-12-2010/">rising star</a>. </p>
<p>However, for many reasons, the rise was brief. </p>
<p>Since 2013, the country has faced many uncommon situations, including the tightest, most polarized election in the nation’s history in 2014, two major GDP retreats (-3.7 per cent in 2015 and -3.6 per cent in 2016), the impeachment of former president <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/31/dilma-rousseff-impeachment-brazil-what-you-need-to-know">Dilma Rousseff</a> in August 2016 and the controversial arrest of its most popular political leader, former president <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/05/americas/brazil-lula-ruling-corruption-election-intl/index.html">Lula da Silva</a>, in April 2017, followed by corruption and money laundering convictions.</p>
<p>In this chaotic scenario, many Brazilians saw the 2018 general elections as an opportunity to return to normal and bid a final farewell to political crisis. Jair Bolsonaro, a former Army captain elected six times as a congressman, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/oct/28/brazil-election-2018-second-round-of-voting-closes-as-bolsonaro-eyes-the-presidency-live">won the election with 55 per cent of the popular vote</a>, defeating the leftist Workers Party candidate. </p>
<p>Bolsonaro is well-known, especially because of his <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/29/brazil-election-jair-bolsonaros-most-controversial-quotes.html">innumerable controversies and explosive comments</a>, including his infamous statement that “the mistake of Brazilian army dictatorship was not to have killed 30,000 people, starting with the president.” He says he’s in favour of torture and ordered celebrations for <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20190401-bolsonaro-coup-anniversary-brazil-protest-dictator">the 55th aniversary of a military coup</a> that left more than 400 dead, resulted in thousands of people being tortured and lead to the shuttering of parliament from 1964 to 1985. </p>
<p>Women and LGBTQ people are among his primary targets. He said in 2011 that would be <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/world/americas/conservatives-star-rises-in-brazil-as-polarizing-views-tap-into-discontent.html">unable to love a gay son</a> and would prefer a homosexual son die in an accident. To a rival congresswoman, Bolsonaro said in 2014: <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/12/11/jair-bolsonaro-rape_n_6310460.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuY25iYy5jb20vMjAxOC8xMC8yOS9icmF6aWwtZWxlY3Rpb24tamFpci1ib2xzb25hcm9zLW1vc3QtY29udHJvdmVyc2lhbC1xdW90ZXMuaHRtbA&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALf2PepBwopf5bdqLXQInh2lw0-tPZ1K7deThfv5dCFnLWFmWQ0a7FlFHuGIl1CyfIC7qTgMzyatnEhGYhg2TRALcE24Q8FZFiIGgIvRruouF7mmMh04_VVMbf7vHvYQygnTv5dp5LBKWR279zLbN3Ke6MT73sOQfFc3_92Xmvon">“I would never rape you because you’re not worthy of it.”</a> </p>
<h2>How did he win?</h2>
<p>So how was someone like Bolosnaro able to win the election in a country like Brazil? Several factors explain his victory.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267619/original/file-20190404-123434-gnmtqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267619/original/file-20190404-123434-gnmtqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267619/original/file-20190404-123434-gnmtqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267619/original/file-20190404-123434-gnmtqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267619/original/file-20190404-123434-gnmtqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267619/original/file-20190404-123434-gnmtqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267619/original/file-20190404-123434-gnmtqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267619/original/file-20190404-123434-gnmtqo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bolsonaro is seen in a recent photo at the presidential palace in Brasilia, Brazil.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the election campaign, the left was divided into two candidates in the first round. Additionally, the Workers Party — once helmed by former presidents Rousseff and da Silva — was immersed in several corruption scandals, especially related to briberies involving the Brazilian state oil company. Polls showed almost 50 per cent of the Brazilian electorate had rejected the left as the election neared.</p>
<p>Less than a month before the first-round poll, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45441447">Bolsonaro was stabbed</a> at a public rally as he walked among hundreds of supporters. His life in danger, he underwent emergency surgery and remained in the hospital for some weeks. </p>
<p>Brazilian police arrested the alleged attacker, a former leftist party member. Now the victim of an attack, the incident worked in Bolsonaro’s favour. In the final October poll, Bolsonaro was elected the 38th Brazilian president, winning more than 55 per cent of the vote.</p>
<h2>More controversy, lack of preparedness</h2>
<p>In the months since, however, many Brazilians who voted for him in the hopes of leaving political crises behind them are disappointed. His government has <a href="https://en.mercopress.com/2019/03/21/bolsonaro-s-aura-and-approval-ratings-rapidly-fading">only a 34 per cent</a> approval rate. A spate of social media controversies involving not only the president but his three sons, all politicians and equally polemic, helps to explain. </p>
<p>During the recent Brazilian Carnival, when thousands of tourists come to the country, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/06/bolsonaro-carnival-pornographic-tweet-ridiculed">Bolsonaro tweeted out a sexually explicit video of two men on the street during a Carnival parade</a>. </p>
<p>“I don’t feel comfortable showing it, but we have to expose the truth to the population (…). This is what many street carnival groups have become in Brazil,” the president wrote to his 3.4 million followers. </p>
<p>He was mocked by progressive Brazilians.</p>
<p>Bolsonaro’s perceived lack of initiatives is also bothering many Brazilians. <a href="https://www.apnews.com/0fb07d84d14c4d948f7028907c60f23f">On education, in particular, policy has been seemingly ignored</a> in place of Bolsonaro speeches “in defence of the traditional family” and against “Marxist indoctrination,” “Communism” and other imaginary enemies. </p>
<p>An official document entitled “message to congress” was recently sent to Brazil’s parliament; just 10 of its 285 pages pertained to education, and <a href="https://www.bnamericas.com/en/news/bolsonaro-overlooks-ict-in-message-to-congress">contained the same vague ideas from Bolsonaro’s campaign platform</a>. </p>
<h2>‘Where are the goals?’</h2>
<p>At a recent education commission hearing, 25-year-old congresswoman Tabata Amaral directly asked the education minister: “Where are the projects? Where are the goals? What are the expected results?” She concluded that after three months, the document showed by the minister to the commission was not a strategic plan, but a simple “wish list.” The video of the exchange <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ViHSJaosW0">went viral</a> on social media in Brazil.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0ViHSJaosW0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>In a style similar to Bolsonaro’s, Education Minister Ricardo Velez Rodriguez has become notorious for unfortunate statements. <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/brazil-education-overhaul-aims-ousting-marxist-ideology-60877090">In an interview with the country’s biggest magazine</a>, he said: “The travelling Brazilian is a cannibal. Steals things from hotels, steals plane’s lifeguard seats; he thinks he leaves the house and can take everything.” The outcry was even louder since Rodriguez is not a native Brazilian; he was born in Colombia.</p>
<p><a href="https://brazilian.report/power/2019/03/28/brazil-disastrous-ministry-education/">It’s not just education</a> that the government is allegedly neglecting. There has been scant policy on health or social welfare either. </p>
<p>In recent weeks, just a few months after Bolsonaro’s election, many Brazilians are waking up to the reality that if they’d hoped to escape political corruption, they have chosen a seemingly ill-prepared president. </p>
<p>The most accurate definition of Bolsonaro’s term so far was arguably made by a mayor and former presidential ally: “The government is a <a href="https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/03/30/jair-bolsonaro-brazils-apprentice-president">desert of ideas</a>.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114570/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lenin Cavalcanti Guerra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The popularity of Brazil’s new president has decreased significantly in just a few months. Why? Too much controversy and too few ideas.
Lenin Cavalcanti Guerra, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Saskatchewan
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111560
2019-03-05T11:36:49Z
2019-03-05T11:36:49Z
Le mariage burlesque: Carnival cross-dressing in the French Caribbean
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261880/original/file-20190304-110137-1jefp1a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C56%2C2516%2C1650&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The mariage burlesque of the Plastic System Band carnival group in Lamentin,
Martinique, 2012.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Charlotte Hammond</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Anyone in the French Caribbean islands of Martinique or Guadeloupe during the carnival festivities will witness a unique and wonderfully subversive tradition: <em>le mariage burlesque</em>.</p>
<p>As a legacy of the refusal to assimilate into a French model of marriage and family, <em>le mariage burlesque</em> parodies the idealised fiction of a heterosexual nuclear family unit. Each year on lundi gras (the first Monday of the carnival) men and women perform each other’s conjugal role by cross-dressing as their gendered other. So the man masquerades as the (often pregnant) wife and – to a lesser extent – the woman dresses and performs as the husband. The happy couple is followed by a wedding procession and are “married” by a registrar and a priest along the carnival route.</p>
<p>The late Martinican theorist <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KlJ7AAAAMAAJ&q=glissant+discours+antillais&dq=glissant+discours+antillais&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjfqIaToK_gAhXS8OAKHYXlBeoQ6AEIKDAA">Édouard Glissant</a> described the tradition as a critique of the family structure imposed by the colonising French republic. He wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is an occasion in Martinique in which men and women both agree to give a performance of their relationship. This is the tradition of the burlesque marriage during carnival, a critique of family structure. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In recent years there have been <a href="https://theconversation.com/liberte-egalite-fraternite-france-and-the-gay-marriage-debate-14852">debates</a> on the traditional role of family in France. A universalist notion prevails – the model of family promoted by the French Republic is made up of a heterosexual couple who live together, whether married or not, with children born of (or adopted by) the two parents. </p>
<p>Controversy around alternative forms of conjugal union, including legislation to enable <a href="https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/04/23/le-mariage-pour-tous-et-ses-ennemis_1645281">same-sex marriage</a>, gay adoption and <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/droitcultures/3566">surrogacy</a>, have prompted fierce debates on the continued relevance of this traditional model. And, given that recent changes in legislation apply to France’s overseas territories, these debates have questioned the continued relevance of the French values of marriage and family in Guadeloupe and Martinique.</p>
<h2>Family after slavery</h2>
<p>French colonial discourse <a href="https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://scholar.google.co.uk/&httpsredir=1&article=3330&context=cq">related marriage to “civilisation”</a>. According to this racist logic, the African – who was considered subordinate – was unsuited to marriage. In the French Caribbean, unions between enslaved men and women of the same plantation were encouraged as they would produce another generation of slaves for the profit of the owner. Marriage between slaves (with the permission of their master) <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zKXdXLKyIR4C&pg=PA194&dq=soeurs+de+solitude&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjW7brhzKfgAhW7VRUIHXeLAk0Q6AEINzAC#v=onepage&q=soeurs%20de%20solitude&f=false">became legal from 1664</a> – but, in reality, the plantation system constrained the development of strong family units which would often be broken up when slaves were sold on to other plantations. This tended to disrupt the pure parent-child line of descendance or “filiation” promoted by the French state.</p>
<p>Following the abolition of slavery in 1848, French policies of assimilation (into <em>la grande famille nationale</em>) reinforced a desire for official marriage among its “daughters”, or <em>les filles</em>, as Guadeloupe and Martinique were disparagingly known. The extended family, in which grandparents, aunts, nannies and godparents are as likely to raise children as mothers, therefore came to signify not only resistance to a dominant social order of family imposed by slave owners, but also its imposition on French Caribbean territories during the aftermath of slavery. </p>
<p>In 1946, the islands voted to become overseas <em>départements</em>, granting them a distinct political status in relation to mainland France that promised full integration into the French Republic. However, this status has resulted in many <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HdtoCgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=yarimar+bonilla&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj_4fbpwangAhWqQRUIHVkrDH0Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=yarimar%20bonilla&f=false">social and economic disparities</a> including severe unemployment, high cost of living and persistent racial discrimination.</p>
<p>As researchers in the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YPDHXd0fOroC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Interrogating+Caribbean+Masculinities:&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjAi4_71afgAhUxtXEKHVpYAJYQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Interrogating%20Caribbean%20Masculinities%3A&f=false">social sciences have shown</a>, family in this context – as the product of both African kinship traditions and its restructure during slavery – did not conform neatly to the model of family promoted by the French Republic.</p>
<p>Traditionally, <em>le mariage burlesque</em> was a ritual (with both European and African roots) to promote the birth of new unions during the festival period in the run up to Lent. Men would often adopt women’s roles during carnival through male-to-female cross-dressing. Today some <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UFMpAAAAYAAJ&q=david+ab+murray+opacity&dq=david+ab+murray+opacity&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjq5bzn2KfgAhWZSxUIHc4aCO4Q6AEIKDAA">gender studies scholars</a> have argued that cross-dressing in the context of Caribbean carnivals merely reaffirms gender difference and masculine domination. </p>
<p>Yet in this context, where Eurocentric understandings of sexuality and gender are so often cut and pasted without attention to local histories and traditions, <em>le mariage burlesque</em> represents the contradiction imposed on French Caribbean citizens who continue to uphold a European (and heterosexual) model of marriage and family as the norm despite the co-existence of alternative family structures. </p>
<p>The “lesser” presence of women during <em>le mariage burlesque</em> has been addressed directly in the work of Martinique-based artists Annabel Guérédrat and Henri Tauliaut. In 2016 Guérédrat and Tauliaut performed the Marcel Duchamp-inspired <em>La Mariée mise à nu par son célibataire même</em> (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor) during the <em>mariage burlesque</em> parade of Fort-de-France, Martinique.</p>
<p>Guérédrat, dressed as a dominatrix bride in white and cradling a black dildo, sheds an oversized wedding veil and leads Tauliaut, in full gimp mask and black gown, along the carnival route. This commanding female performance subverts normative gender relations in a Martinican society which remains largely macho and a carnival space where male-authored representations of women dominate.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0E2-r4nOQjc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The tableaux concludes with the couple departing on a boat against a tropical Caribbean landscape in the background. This parody of tourist brochure clichés that depict the Caribbean as a honeymoon paradise destination evokes the inequities of a global tourism industry that often replicates an uneven master/slave dynamic. </p>
<p>Each year carnival in Guadeloupe and Martinique attracts tourists from France and the rest of the world who come to enjoy this vibrant theatre of the street. For both visitors and locals the <em>mariage burlesque</em> masquerade ensures a collective memory of the cultural and political transvestism of the overseas departments, dressed up to resemble France and its universalist values. It is an embodied reminder of the enduring one-sided marriage between the islands and France.</p>
<p>
<section class="inline-content">
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/249588/original/file-20181210-76968-jfryp4.png?h=128">
<div>
<header>Charlotte Hammond is the author of:</header>
<p><a href="https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/43064/">Entangled Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean</a></p>
<footer>Liverpool University Press provides funding as a content partner of The Conversation UK</footer>
</div>
</section>
</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111560/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Charlotte Hammond received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to carry out this research. </span></em></p>
The annual Carnival rituals subvert traditional French notions of family and sexuality.
Charlotte Hammond, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/98890
2018-07-30T21:43:51Z
2018-07-30T21:43:51Z
Joyous resistance through costume and dance at Carnival
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229153/original/file-20180724-194140-ft447x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Underneath the façade of the Caribbean carnival, historical, cultural and political undercurrents run deep. A parade participant performs during the Grand Parade at last year's Toronto's Carnival. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We partied morning to morning, and a joyous spirit permeated everything; speech, customs and appearances. The centrepiece of it all were wheeled fantasy islands (floats) inhabited by amazingly glamorous yet exquisitely vulgar costumed creatures played by Carnival masqueraders. The best part of the whole affair? People from the community created everything.</p>
<p>With Toronto’s famous <a href="https://torontocarnival.ca/">Caribbean Carnival</a> around the corner, these memories from my adolescence in the Caribbean return. </p>
<p>Acquaintances from my grandmother’s neighbourhood, La Risueña in the city of Santiago de Cuba, spent a whole year working on their carnival wares. They practised their moves in secret. Their goal was to outdo other townsfolk’s floats, costumes, music and choreography. </p>
<p>Growing up in Cuba, people of all ages and walks of life waited for summer’s arrival. Not because of the heat and humidity (we unanimously loathed that), but because of carnival season. </p>
<p>The carnival served as <a href="https://earlymodernnotes.wordpress.com/2004/08/31/carnival-and-the-carnivalesque/">a collective social valve.</a> This was a time of the year when all conventions and codes of behaviour were thrown out the window. A carefree and tolerant spirit reigned, albeit for a short window of time. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229151/original/file-20180724-194128-ih0ztc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229151/original/file-20180724-194128-ih0ztc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229151/original/file-20180724-194128-ih0ztc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229151/original/file-20180724-194128-ih0ztc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229151/original/file-20180724-194128-ih0ztc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229151/original/file-20180724-194128-ih0ztc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229151/original/file-20180724-194128-ih0ztc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carnival in Toronto is an opportunity to publically honour diverse ideals of beauty. Parade participants perform during last year’s Grand Parade.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Toronto’s heterogeneous population, <a href="https://theconversation.com/fifty-years-of-celebrating-island-culture-at-torontos-caribbean-carnival-82123">the Caribbean Carnival is an opportunity to partake in a communal celebration of diversity</a> and to publicly honour non-mainstream ideals of beauty. </p>
<p>Most people are familiar with how Caribbean-style carnivals look. They recall a sea of extravagantly costumed bodies swaying to the same beat. But there is something very special to the West Indies’ brand of bacchanal. Underneath the façade of the Caribbean carnival, historical, cultural and political undercurrents run deep. </p>
<h2>Colonial authorities mocked</h2>
<p>Caribbean carnivals share roots with European traditions, but African and Indigenous influences fundamentally shaped and flavoured their culture. That culture has marinated for more than 500 years in colonial syncretism — a fusion of cultures, symbols and religions. Since the majority of the Caribbean population was of African and Indigenous descent, the region’s carnivals evolved into celebrations of anything contrary to dominant European culture.</p>
<p>They started off as <a href="http://www.kariculture.net/en/guadeloupe-carnival-a-very-rich-heritage/">Christian religious processions</a> and <a href="https://www.caribbeanandco.com/item/barbados-crop-over-festival/">end-of-harvest festivities</a>. Over time, the saintly and agrarian elements fell by the wayside. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229672/original/file-20180727-106524-1ey2p13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229672/original/file-20180727-106524-1ey2p13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229672/original/file-20180727-106524-1ey2p13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229672/original/file-20180727-106524-1ey2p13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229672/original/file-20180727-106524-1ey2p13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229672/original/file-20180727-106524-1ey2p13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229672/original/file-20180727-106524-1ey2p13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Revellers decorate costumes with colours symbolizing African and Indigenous deities in Havana, Cuba in 2012.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In western Cuba, carnival metamorphosed from the “<a href="https://www.203challenges.com/the-lesser-known-carnival-in-havana-three-kings-day-in-january/"><em>Dia de Reyes</em> (Kings’ Days)</a>” celebration. At this week-long event, societies of colour (called <em>Cabildos</em>) had their processions and paraded their kings and queens. In eastern Cuba, carnivals coincided with the end of the tobacco and sugar cane harvests. </p>
<p>At these celebrations, slaves and free people of colour wore hand-me-down or borrowed clothes from the masters. Others donned attire fashioned to look European. They mischievously decorated costumes with colours symbolizing African and Indigenous deities. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229495/original/file-20180726-106499-1nft68z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229495/original/file-20180726-106499-1nft68z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229495/original/file-20180726-106499-1nft68z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229495/original/file-20180726-106499-1nft68z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229495/original/file-20180726-106499-1nft68z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229495/original/file-20180726-106499-1nft68z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229495/original/file-20180726-106499-1nft68z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229495/original/file-20180726-106499-1nft68z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Deomonic characters made their way into the festivities. A reveller is seen here on J'ouvert Morning, the party before the carnival parade in Trinidad.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/eduardoskinner/">Eduardo Skinner</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Revellers also adopted exaggerated affectations and customs from colonial society. Eventually, more and more openly Afro-Caribbean, Indigenous and syncretic symbols and conventions populated the carnivals. These included <a href="http://www.guardian.co.tt/carnival/2014-02-24/raising-new-generation-devils-and-demons">demonic characters</a>, degrees of nudity and widespread adoption of percussion instruments. </p>
<p>Colonial powers may have introduced the carnival, but it morphed into public events where <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/up-close-at-trinidads-carnival-45542504/">a mix of African and Indigenous cultures were celebrated</a>. All was conducive to African and Indigenous-influenced forms of collective dancing and the mockery of colonial authorities. </p>
<h2>Celebration and transgression</h2>
<p>Even in their original incarnations as religious and agrarian celebrations, the Caribbean’s carnivals were a community affair. Representatives of the different strata of society coordinated the festivities. It was only natural that a competitive spirit promptly developed. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229487/original/file-20180726-106508-p4kdi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229487/original/file-20180726-106508-p4kdi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229487/original/file-20180726-106508-p4kdi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229487/original/file-20180726-106508-p4kdi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229487/original/file-20180726-106508-p4kdi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229487/original/file-20180726-106508-p4kdi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229487/original/file-20180726-106508-p4kdi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carnival is a community-building activity. A carnival parade in Old Havana, Cuba.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/runneralan/">Alan Kotok</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Battling among classes and neighbourhoods isn’t just part of the Caribbean carnival. Competition is central to Caribbean carnival’s traditions. This is visible in the rivalry among Brazil’s Samba Schools and the distinction between the upper class <a href="https://www.discovertnt.com/articles/Trinidad/The-Birth-Evolution-of-Trinidad-Carnival/109/3/32#axzz5L7Ggfq5P">“Pretty Mass” and traditional festivities such as “<em>J’Ouvert</em>” in Trinidad’s carnival</a>.</p>
<p>Spending summers with Afro-Cuban relatives in Santiago de Cuba, I witnessed friends and family preparing for carnival. While female participants <a href="http://www.lahabana.com/content/carnaval-de-santiago-de-cuba/">worked hard for a top spot in the floats</a>, males wanted to be <a href="https://www.bandbcuba.com/blog/traditions/carnival-of-santiago-cuba/"><em>caperos</em> (cape bearers)</a>. Capes are flag-like, embellished with symbols and the colours of the neighbourhood. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229673/original/file-20180727-106511-gdqmge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229673/original/file-20180727-106511-gdqmge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229673/original/file-20180727-106511-gdqmge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229673/original/file-20180727-106511-gdqmge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229673/original/file-20180727-106511-gdqmge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229673/original/file-20180727-106511-gdqmge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229673/original/file-20180727-106511-gdqmge.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Utmost secrecy is important when preparing for carnival. Carnival of Santiago de Cuba.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Christian_Pirkl">Christian Pirkl</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Later, at the Universidad de las Artes (then the Superior Institute of Arts) in Havana where I went to school, two of my classmates belonged to opposing carnival troupes. Hailing from Remedios, a town in central Cuba, they collaborated in school projects and art exhibits, but never discussed their neighbourhoods’ plans for <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/las-parrandas-de-remedios-bright-lights-shine-cubas-oldest-festival-180953685/">Las Parrandas de Remedios</a>. Utmost secrecy surrounded their carnival teams.</p>
<p>Carnival in the Caribbean is raw community at its best. Racial and class distinctions are erased; individuals toil, create and sweat side-by-side — unless they belong to competing carnival troupes. This is a sanctioned space for celebration and transgression. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZeIMmKuxGEk?wmode=transparent&start=70" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A video capture of carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Bodies of disruption</h2>
<p>At carnival anywhere in the Caribbean, part of the focus is on the human body. Carnival bodies come in many shapes, sizes, complexions, genders and <a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-carnival-idUKN0629886620080206">states of dress</a>. This makes carnival into a primarily embodied experience. </p>
<p>The body was the only agency left to African, Indigenous and people of colour in a colonized context. Bodies are also central to artistic expressions in African and Indigenous cultures where fine arts, dress and performance are on equal levels. </p>
<p>The body in motion is the ultimate form of social, aesthetic and spiritual expression. Such centrality of the body was fostered by colonization and the <a href="http://www.discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/routes/places-involved/west-indies/gods-on-plantation/">plantation</a> model of production. Embodied cultural expressions then found their perfect outlet in the carnival. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229491/original/file-20180726-106511-1xiwclt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229491/original/file-20180726-106511-1xiwclt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229491/original/file-20180726-106511-1xiwclt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229491/original/file-20180726-106511-1xiwclt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229491/original/file-20180726-106511-1xiwclt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229491/original/file-20180726-106511-1xiwclt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229491/original/file-20180726-106511-1xiwclt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The carnival body is a collective expression. A reveller on J'ouvert Morning in Trinidad.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/eduardoskinner/">Eduardo Skinner</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During carnival, people of colour have a spatial-temporal opportunity within colonial society to publicly inhabit their cultural bodies. Tangentially or directly, the carnival body — adorned with colourful costumes, headdresses, feathers, body paint and different states of nudity — is a reflection of the cultural subconscious of people of colour in the Caribbean. </p>
<p>Carnival costumes contrast Judeo-Christian and European norms, ideals of beauty and modesty and instead celebrate African and Indigenous cultures. </p>
<p>Caribbean carnival’s style of dress became full-frontal outrageous during the 1970s when body-centric approaches reached an all-time high. Multiculturalism and global <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/may/14/art">Afro-centric</a> tendencies greatly shaped the carnival dress during this decade.</p>
<p>The cultural significance of carnival bodies has far-reaching implications well beyond the visual immediacy of the celebrations. As collective entities, carnival bodies constitute political commentary. A parade of decorated bodies performing in unison has a real persuasive power.</p>
<h2>Carnival politics</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/12/244563532/photos-reveal-harsh-detail-of-brazils-history-with-slavery">With slavery finally abolished in the late 19th century</a>, carnival’s space for cultural expression and disruption widened. By the 1920s, Caribbean carnivals also became an instrument for social and political campaigning. Under the guise of mindless revelry, <a href="http://www.thecubanhistory.com/2012/03/ae-ae-ae-la-chambelona/">coded political messages were disseminated as songs and slogans</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229675/original/file-20180727-106530-1jyibyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229675/original/file-20180727-106530-1jyibyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229675/original/file-20180727-106530-1jyibyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229675/original/file-20180727-106530-1jyibyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229675/original/file-20180727-106530-1jyibyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229675/original/file-20180727-106530-1jyibyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229675/original/file-20180727-106530-1jyibyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1925 photo of Sexteto Habanero in Havana, Cuba.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Caribbean <a href="https://www.amnesty.no/aktuelt/flere-nyheter/arkiv-reportasjer/brazil-carnival-oppressed">carnivals continue to serve as megaphones for political and social platforms</a>. An extreme case was Fidel Castro, who used the carnival to attack a Cuban army garrison in 1953. <a href="https://haciendapublishing.com/articles/fidel-castro-and-26th-july-movement">Although unsuccessful, the attempt sparked the Cuban revolution.</a></p>
<p>Currently, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/17/rios-carnival-goes-political-and-a-little-known-samba-school-ignites-a-firestorm/?utm_term=.10e92a0994f5">carnivals in Brazil serve as platforms for political debates</a>, including the <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/rio-carnival-dancers-with-a-message/a-37740382">fate of Indigenous populations</a>. Meanwhile, <a href="https://thenassauguardian.com/2017/06/20/fate-of-bahamas-junkanoo-carnival-2018-still-up-in-the-air/">controversies around carnival funding</a> have exposed racial, social and economic divisions in the Bahamas and <a href="http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/entertainment/20180311/back-di-road-lack-support-grounds-ja-carnival">Jamaica</a>. </p>
<h2>The Toronto Carnival nexus</h2>
<p>At <a href="https://www.macleans.ca/society/why-torontos-caribbean-carnival-is-still-important-50-years-later/">Toronto’s Carnival, we can see some of this rich social, political and cultural past.</a> Costumed performers and revellers represent a continuum of Caribbean traditions that originated during colonial times. Yet, Toronto’s Carnival projects them towards the future. </p>
<p>Amalgamating Pan-Caribbean traditions in a cosmopolitan metropolis, Carnival is a public cultural space for Toronto’s racialized residents. There, participation and creation continues to function as community building. </p>
<p>Santiago’s Carnival allowed my teenage self to tune into my Afro-Caribbean heritage. Toronto’s Carnival legitimizes the city’s embrace of its own mix of cultural identities.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98890/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry Navarro Delgado does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The Toronto Caribbean Carnival reclaims alternative ideals of beauty while building community in Toronto.
Henry Navarro Delgado, Associate Professor of Fashion, Toronto Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/82123
2017-08-09T00:07:57Z
2017-08-09T00:07:57Z
Fifty years of celebrating island culture at Toronto’s Caribbean Carnival
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181461/original/file-20170808-16053-jetbc3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A reveller performs in the Grand Parade at the Caribbean Carnival in Toronto on Aug. 5, 2017. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.cpimages.com/fotoweb/cpimages_details.pop.fwx?position=1&archiveType=ImageFolder&sorting=ModifiedTimeAsc&search=caribana&fileId=7ED4E565C8CEED275AEAE4A023E6F0DBFE75CC55B6586039E8D351704E8E44E5D64DFDF4CDC77E89E0AC1315BE069FBC130C21E9668006FCB910651727E2C0824659CEF5EB788C83B851E7E4EF17334D47FD83097F6AA0513129BBCACEB13D1C46CC3C9460A14C917B21C799164B6B5D">(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov)</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the aftermath of Toronto’s lively Caribbean Carnival last weekend — the 50th “jump up” since 1967 — it might seem naive or even rude to ask: Why have a Caribbean Carnival in Canada? </p>
<p>The festival celebrates Caribbean culture in Canada. It also reminds us of the history of creative resistance in which dehumanized, enslaved Africans celebrated life. An added benefit of Toronto’s annual Caribbean Carnival — formerly known as Caribana — is that it has served to educate Canadians.</p>
<p>But while it’s important to reflect on the significance of the Caribbean Carnival at its half-century mark, we must also look at the festival without any of the reductionist and neoliberal tendencies of “evaluators” so often seen in mainstream accounts of Black art and culture. </p>
<p>Rather, this moment is ripe for an introspective view that encompasses the many layers of this festival’s <a href="https://noisey.vice.com/en_ca/article/r7p87b/an-oral-history-of-caribana-1966-2015">long and hotly debated history.</a> By looking closely at the ways in which some of our cultural institutions have partnered with the festival over the years, one can grasp wider narratives about Caribbean Canadian life beyond the stale questions of government funding and economic stimuli. </p>
<p>The festival, like most, is powered by massive amounts of volunteer labour to successfully operate. But unlike other festivals, ornate masquerade costumes and floats are conceived and created for up to 12 months in advance. These major pillars of Caribana — volunteerism, costume design as well as the engineering of elaborate floats — are ideal areas upon which to reflect on the festival’s first 50 years. </p>
<h2>Deep historical roots & feats of engineering</h2>
<p>Most music festivals in Toronto are often viewed as economic stimulants or as youth-filled parties built on thin rationales, like a long weekend. </p>
<p>But the Carnival has always had deep and significant historical roots. The Carnival was, and continues to be, the place to celebrate life in spite of the dehumanization of colonialism and post-colonialism. </p>
<p>Its inception can be traced back to the <a href="http://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=exposition">1881 Canboulay riots</a> — the burning of Trinidadian sugarcane fields that sparked the earliest renditions of Carnival by enslaved Africans.</p>
<p>To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Canada, a version of Trinidad and Tobago’s world-renowned carnival was reborn in Toronto in 1967 as Caribana. This diasporic, Creolized version was decidedly a Canadian phenomenon, designed to celebrate the Caribbean presence in Canada. </p>
<p>Over the years, Caribana personified the ways in which Afro-Caribbean populations have experienced Canada. Scholars like <a href="http://www.nourbese.com/about/">m. nourBese philip</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820500224392">David Trotman</a> and <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/people-contacts/faculty/burman">Jenny Burman</a> have written about the ways in which Caribana experiences disproportionate scrutiny, consistently garners negative media attention and battles for funding despite generating hundreds of millions of dollars for the city of Toronto each year.</p>
<p>Since 2010, the Ontario Science Centre has sponsored the <a href="http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/journey-to-valhalla-flies-away-with-the-eighth-annual-ontario-science-centre-innovation-in-mas-award-at-the-2017-peeks-toronto-caribbean-carnival-638609483.html">Innovation in Mas award</a> that celebrates Carnival designers “whose creation best exemplifies the application of principles and practices of innovation that include risk-taking, problem-solving, daring perspectives in material use, mechanics and engineering.” Mas is short for “masquerade.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181418/original/file-20170808-22982-16593fw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181418/original/file-20170808-22982-16593fw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181418/original/file-20170808-22982-16593fw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181418/original/file-20170808-22982-16593fw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181418/original/file-20170808-22982-16593fw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181418/original/file-20170808-22982-16593fw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181418/original/file-20170808-22982-16593fw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A float called Journey to Valhalla, the winner of the 2017 Ontario Science Centre’s Caribbean Carnival contest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Ontario Science Centre</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The award is a welcome addition to the festival because few media outlets cover or explore the scientific feats that allow gigantic floats and costumes to maintain their structure and buoyancy after eight to 10 hours of <em>chipping</em> — or dancing — as they make their way along the parade route. Vivid short video clips from news segments hardly do justice to the complex ways in which Mas camps — places where costumes and floats are designed and constructed — enliven the festival and carry on tradition. </p>
<p>Countering and supplementing many of the colourful images of revellers, the science centre’s award presents the public with another narrative about the Caribbean Carnival, focusing our attention on what <a href="https://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/Media-Expert-Stoddard/">scientist Walter Stoddard</a> calls the “skills, attitudes and practices of innovation — creativity, risk-taking and collaboration.” </p>
<p>Stoddard found all those qualities present at all the Mas camps he and the jury visited in the course of adjudicating the award, countering the mainstream media’s focus on the festival’s financial impact and shallow coverage of the public parade. </p>
<h2>ROM also celebrates Carnival</h2>
<p>Like the Ontario Science Centre, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has had several exhibitions over the last decade to celebrate Caribbean culture. From 2008-2011, there was Roots to Rhythm, From the Soul: Caribana Art Exhibit and Beyond the Rhythm Caribana Art Exhibit.</p>
<p>The ROM, until its recent <a href="https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visualarts/2014/10/23/of_africa_at_the_rom_aims_to_repair_old_wounds.html">2016 public apology</a>, also held the dubious distinction of being the host of the deeply racist and problematic Into the Heart of Africa exhibition which celebrated colonial theft and perpetuated anti-Black racial stereotypes in the early 1990s. </p>
<p>Working closely within Caribbean arts communities, the ROM has managed to regain the trust of Toronto’s Black communities over the last 25 years. A case in point is its 2012-2013 exhibition of world renowned Mas costume designer Brian MacFarlane. <em>Carnival: From Emancipation to Celebration</em> provided the general public with an opportunity to learn the history of Carnival and better understand Caribana’s historical importance from the 2013 Carnival Symposium.</p>
<p>By focusing on emancipation and the roots of Carnival and bringing scholars, Mas camps and artists together, the ROM provided ample opportunity for Canadians of all backgrounds to learn the history of a festival that attracts more than a million revellers each year.</p>
<p>The involvement of both the ROM and the Ontario Science Centre have helped to educate the general public on Caribbean culture that goes beyond a fixation on luxurious vacation destinations and reggae music.</p>
<p>These cultural institutions have provided nuanced and informative counternarratives to the overly simplistic, economic reductionist depictions of Caribana by mainstream media outlets. The story of Caribana is an epic, multi-layered and deeply historical one rooted in the innovative engineering of Mas design, droves of devoted volunteers, the spirit of social critique and the cultivation of community. </p>
<p>Thankfully, 50 years later, a richer story of Caribbean Carnival in Toronto is unfolding, allowing the festival to continually grow and enhance the Canadian social fabric.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82123/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark V. Campbell receives funding from Canada Council For the Arts and SSHRC
Mark is the director at FCAD Forum for Cultural Strategies a cultural industries think tank and a member of the Board of Directors at the Ontario Arts Council
</span></em></p>
Fifty years of the Caribbean Carnival in Toronto has had a significant impact on Canada’s cultural institutions. It’s also helped educate Canadians about Black history.
Mark V. Campbell, Adjunct Professor, Radio and Television Arts School of Media + Director for Cultural Strategies, Faculty of Communication and Design Forum, Toronto Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/73897
2017-03-16T07:32:32Z
2017-03-16T07:32:32Z
In Trinidad and Tobago, Carnival goes feminist (bikinis and feathers included)
<p>Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival, which recently ended its 2017 rendition, is an event as contradictory as it is extraordinary. </p>
<p>No mere mimicry of other such celebrations in Rio de Janeiro or New Orleans, Carnival on this Caribbean island of 1.4 million people – primarily descended from <a href="http://www.trinicenter.com/kwame/2002/Nov/252002.htm">enslaved Africans and Indian indentured labourers</a> – combines African traditions with European pre-Lent festivities and Indian musical rhythms. </p>
<p>Given this <a href="https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-6086-2_679">syncretism</a>, it’s perhaps unsurprising that, over the past 200 years, Carnival has been not just two days of normal order turned upside down but also an annual expression of female political resistance. </p>
<h2>Beads and glitter and ‘bikini mas’</h2>
<p>Caribbean women’s takeover of Carnival is most evident during “bikini mas”. Each year, tens of thousands of women participate in this Carnival mas(querade), “playing mas” in Rio-style sequined bikinis, feathered headpieces and beads. </p>
<p>Because playing bikini mas has come to replace traditional costumes portraying other periods, places and cultures (as well as some fantastical imagined characters), <a href="http://2017.blisscarnival.com/ny-times-carnivals-louder-commercial-beat-adds-dissonance/">some fear</a> that Trinidad and Tobago’s historic tradition is dying. New, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.tt/carnival/2012-02-13/changing-face-carnival">imported masquerade styles</a>, say traditional mas makers, do not make political statements or show off local artistry.</p>
<p>But bikini mas is a complex phenomenon. Its <a href="http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/S1529-212620160000021011">rise is directly linked</a> to women’s increasing earnings and economic independence; disposable income and the desire for well-earned fun support the demand for such costumes. It also reflects black and brown women’s wish to be affirmed as <a href="https://books.google.tt/books?hl=en&lr=&id=dGSnsW6rA6EC&oi=fnd&pg=PA25&dq=pamela+franco+carnival&ots=cHwBWyEnyg&sig=juWro71HAdrjOaCGSRgZGZaQw_M&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=pamela%20franco%20carnival&f=false">beautiful and sexy</a>, not only seen as successful and serious students and workers. </p>
<p>As feminist scholar and mas player Dr Sue Ann Barratt told me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A big part of it for some women is … to show they have been working out and qualify as gorgeous, for affirmation as a woman and to send a message that you can be watched, but not touched.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In short, bikini mas authorises women to push back against the strict moral controls that religion and society place on them (while allowing men more sexual freedom). </p>
<p>Take, for example, these lyrics from Soca music star Destra Garcia’s 2016 hit, Lucy: “I grew up as ah real good girl, always home, don’t go nowhere. As soon as I was introduced to Carnival, they say I loose”. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, singer Orlando Octave observed in one 2017 tune, “Plenty girl have [a] man and [yet] acting like they single, wining like she single, feting like she single”. </p>
<p>This contradiction – which Trinidadian women live every day – has helped spur bikini mas to become a ritual for an entire <a href="http://wlrn.org/post/carnival-made-china-trinidads-annual-festival-faces-generational-divide">generation of young women</a>: a women’s movement given cultural expression. </p>
<h2>The original anti-slut shaming</h2>
<p>These revellers are continuing the nation’s long-standing tradition of female self-affirmation, resistance to subordination, and renegotiation of the rules governing public space. </p>
<p>Caribbean women have always been at the forefront of rebellions, from rising up against slavery in the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01440398408574875?journalCode=fsla20">1500s</a> to leading the <a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/36917286/Water__Women_and_Community.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1489587018&Signature=KqDI69VPeYcUbYpPjHYByTy%2FSVw%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DWater_women_and_community_in_Trinidad_We.pdf">1903 riots</a> over access to water. </p>
<p>Well before slavery was abolished in 1838, Trinidadian women played in Carnival bands. Sometimes they covered themselves in mud, expressing a sexuality even then decried as indecent. Alongside them would march women who fought in stickfights (public duelling competitions), a stereotypically “masculine” activity. </p>
<p>By the 1800s, such women had come to be known as “<a href="http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-77/wining-words#axzz4awn4APtH">Jamettes</a>”, from the French <em>diametre</em>, which referred to those considered to exist below the line of respectability. </p>
<p>After abolition these working-class, African-descended women continued the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7p0fRafo0Q">Jamette</a> tradition. They often cooked, washed clothes and socialised in shared urban backyards, and worked in a wide range of trades, from washerwomen or market vendors to sex workers.</p>
<p>With its fearless and unapologetic combination of sexual, reproductive and economic issues with insistence on justice, equality and freedom from violence, Jamette politics has come to influence Trinidad and Tobago’s modern Carnival – and Caribbean feminism – in ways that <a href="https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/december2012/journals/Editorial.pdf">cross class, colour, religion and race</a>. </p>
<p>Predating by decades the “<a href="http://amberroseslutwalk.com/">slut walks</a>” of Canada and the United States, bikini mas has helped cultivate contemporary women’s opposition to rape culture in Trinidad and Tobago, where male domination and sexual harassment of women is seen as natural and normal. Indeed, the <a href="https://redforgender.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/lifeinleggings-call-for-feminist-solidarity/">Caribbean region</a> has <a href="http://www.stabroeknews.com/2012/news/stories/02/28/sexual-violence-rates-in-the-caribbean-highest-in-the-world-report/">disproportionately high rates of sexual violence</a>. </p>
<p>Last year, a Japanese steelpan player, Asami Nagakiya, was murdered during Carnival in Port of Spain. After the city’s mayor suggested that that women’s dress and behaviour at this annual event invited abuse, <a href="https://globalvoices.org/2016/02/15/citizens-protest-against-trinidad-mayors-vulgar-victim-blaming-statements/">feminist groups</a> called for his <a href="https://grrlscene.wordpress.com/?s=carnival&submit=Search">resignation</a> and young women came out in their bikini mas costumes to protest the victim-blaming. </p>
<p>Over the next months, <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/notaskingforit?lang=en">#NotAskingForIt</a> campaign, featuring female students, workers, family members and bikini mas players, circulated social media across the entire Caribbean region. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rKXE6GfvrIo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Just because I look glamorous in a tight dress’ doesn’t mean I’m ‘asking for it’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Classist and sexist or empowering?</h2>
<p>Bikini mas is not without its contradictions. The cost of participation in a “band” of mas costume players can be up to US$1,000 per person. Though all classes of women find the money to pay for an outfit, economics shapes access to these moments of female freedom. </p>
<p><a href="http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4955&context=etd">Classism features</a>, too, in the way that many women who play in bikini mas bands are contained on either side by ropes and security personnel. This reproduces historical ways that white upper classes used to cut themselves off from others while taking over the streets. </p>
<p>But such cordoning also signals a harsh modern reality of violence against women: the ropes are meant to protect women of all classes and races from sexual harassment. Still, this policing of women’s bodies complicates the radical potential of bikini mas. </p>
<p>Young feminist are finding ways to connect Trinidad’s centuries-old Carnival to a new generation of political resistance. This year, the prominent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/leave-me-alone-trinidads-women-find-a-rallying-cry-for-this-years-carnival/2017/02/26/3888f116-f9e6-11e6-aa1e-5f735ee31334_story.html?utm_term=.c14d73564033">“Leave me alone, Leave she alone” campaign</a> teamed up with singer Calypso Rose to embolden women against sexual violence and encourage men to help create a Carnival – and by extension society – in which women are safe and free. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"839799446170927104"}"></div></p>
<p>In Trinidad and Tobago, Carnival is where thousands of women express their aspirations for freedom and equality. Look beneath stock images of pretty glitter and beads, and you’ll find just such feminist ideals.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73897/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gabrielle Hosein receives funding from the International Development Research Council (2010-2014) and the European Union (present).</span></em></p>
Some deride a Carnival trend in which women revel in the streets wearing swimsuits and feather boas. But to feminists, ‘bikini mas’ is a highly political act.
Gabrielle Hosein, Lecturer and Head of Gender Studies Department, The University of the West Indies: St. Augustine Campus
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71657
2017-02-24T16:37:31Z
2017-02-24T16:37:31Z
The destructive life of a Mardi Gras bead
<p>Shiny, colorful bead necklaces, also known as “throws,” are now synonymous with Mardi Gras. </p>
<p>Even if you’ve never been to the Carnival celebrations, you probably know the typical scene that plays out on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street every year: Revelers line up along the parade route to collect beads tossed from floats. Many try to collect as many as possible, and some drunken revelers will even expose themselves in exchange for the plastic trinkets. </p>
<p>But the celebratory atmosphere couldn’t be more different from the grim factories in the Fujian province of China, where teenage girls work around the clock making and stringing together the green, purple and gold beads. </p>
<p>I’ve spent several years researching the circulation of these plastic beads, and their life doesn’t begin and end that one week in New Orleans. Beneath the sheen of the beads <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Beads-Bodies-and-Trash-Public-Sex-Global-Labor-and-the-Disposability/Redmon/p/book/9780415525404">is a story that’s far more complex</a> – one that takes place in the Middle East, China and the United States, and is symptomatic of a consumer culture built on waste, exploitation and toxic chemicals.</p>
<h2>‘The same thing over and over’</h2>
<p>The Mardi Gras bead originates in Middle Eastern oil fields. There, under the protection of military forces, companies mine the oil and petroleum, before transforming them into polystyrene and polyethelene – the main ingredients in all plastics. </p>
<p>The plastic is then shipped to China to be fashioned into necklaces – to factories where American companies are able to take advantage of inexpensive labor, lax workplace regulations and a lack of environmental oversight.</p>
<p>I traveled to several Mardi Gras bead factories in China to witness the working conditions firsthand. There, I met numerous teenagers, many of whom agreed to participate in the making of my documentary, “<a href="http://beadsbodiesandtrash.com/">Mardi Gras: Made in China</a>.”</p>
<p>Among them was 15-year-old Qui Bia. When I interviewed her, she sat next to a three-foot-high pile of beads, staring at a coworker who sat across from her.</p>
<p>I asked her what she was thinking about.</p>
<p>“Nothing – just how I can work faster than her to make more money,” she replied, pointing to the young woman across from her. “What is there to think about? I just do the same thing over and over again.”</p>
<p>I then asked her how many necklaces she was expected to make each day.</p>
<p>“The quota is 200, but I can only make close to 100. If I make a mistake, then the boss will fine me. It’s important to concentrate because I don’t want to get fined.”</p>
<p>At that point the manager assured me, “They work hard. Our rules are in place so they can make more money. Otherwise, they won’t work as fast.”</p>
<p>It seemed as if the bead workers were treated as mules, with the forces of the market their masters.</p>
<h2>Hidden dangers</h2>
<p>In America, the necklaces appear innocent enough, and Mardi Gras revelers seem to love them; in fact, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/15/nation/la-na-mardi-gras-beads-20120216">25 million pounds</a> get distributed each year. Yet they pose a danger to people and the environment.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, an environmental scientist named Dr. Howard Mielke was directly involved in the legal efforts to phase out lead in gasoline. Today, at Tulane University’s Department of Pharmacology, he researches the links between lead, the environment and skin absorption in New Orleans.</p>
<p>Howard mapped the levels of lead in various parts of the city, and discovered that the majority of lead in the soil <a href="http://dhh.louisiana.gov/assets/oph/Center-PHCH/Center-PH/genetic/LEAD/NewsandUpdates/MardigrassBookmarkLeadPoisoning.pdf">is located directly alongside the Mardi Gras parade routes</a>, where krewes (the revelers who ride on the floats) toss plastic beads into the crowds. </p>
<p>Howard’s concern is the collective impact of the beads thrown each carnival season, which translates to almost 4,000 pounds of lead hitting the streets.</p>
<p>“If children pick up the beads, they will become exposed to a fine dusting of lead,” Howard told me. “Beads obviously attract people, and they’re designed to be touched, coveted.” </p>
<p>And then there are the beads that don’t get taken home. By the time Mardi Gras is over, thousands of shiny necklaces litter the streets, and partiers <a href="http://nola.curbed.com/2017/1/19/14325568/nola-seeks-temporary-workers-mardi-gras-sanitation-trash-clean-up-2017">have collectively produced roughly 150 tons of waste</a> – a concoction of puke, toxins and trash.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ecocenter.org/healthy-stuff/article/news-ecolink-press-releases/holiday-and-mardi-gras-beads-found-contain-lead-and-hazardous">Independent research</a> on beads collected from New Orleans parades has found toxic levels of lead, bromine, arsenic, phthalate plasticizers, halogens, cadmium, chromium, mercury and chlorine on and inside the beads. It’s estimated that up to 920,000 pounds of mixed chlorinated and brominated flame retardants were in the beads.</p>
<h2>A thriving waste culture</h2>
<p>How did we get to the point where 25 million pounds of toxic beads get dumped on a city’s streets every year? Sure, Mardi Gras is a celebration ingrained in New Orleans’ culture. But plastic beads weren’t always a part of Mardi Gras; they were introduced only in the late 1970s. </p>
<p>From a sociological perspective, leisure, consumption and desire all interact to create a complex ecology of social behavior. During the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, self-expression <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Beads-Bodies-and-Trash-Public-Sex-Global-Labor-and-the-Disposability/Redmon/p/book/9780415525404">became the rage</a>, with more and more people using their bodies to experience or communicate pleasure. Revelers in New Orleans started flashing each other in return for Mardi Gras beads at the same time the free love movement became popular in the U.S.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157749/original/image-20170221-18627-1otnhq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157749/original/image-20170221-18627-1otnhq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/157749/original/image-20170221-18627-1otnhq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157749/original/image-20170221-18627-1otnhq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157749/original/image-20170221-18627-1otnhq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157749/original/image-20170221-18627-1otnhq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157749/original/image-20170221-18627-1otnhq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/157749/original/image-20170221-18627-1otnhq7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The aftermath.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/neaththetwilightsky/234952280/">Jaime/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The culture of consumption and ethos of self-expression <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Beads-Bodies-and-Trash-Public-Sex-Global-Labor-and-the-Disposability/Redmon/p/book/9780415525404">merged perfectly with the production of cheap plastic in China</a>, which was used to manufacture disposable commodities. Americans could now instantly (and cheaply) express themselves, discard the objects and later replace them with new ones. </p>
<p>When looking at the entire story – from the Middle East, to China, to New Orleans – a new picture comes into focus: a cycle of environmental degradation, worker exploitation and irreparable health consequences. No one is spared; the child on the streets of New Orleans innocently sucking on his new necklace and young factory workers like Qui Bia are both exposed to the same neurotoxic chemicals.</p>
<p>How can this cycle be broken? Is there any way out? </p>
<p>In recent years, a company called <a href="http://www.zombeads.biz/">Zombeads</a> have created throws with organic, biodegradable ingredients – some of which are designed and manufactured locally in Louisiana. That’s one step in the right direction. </p>
<p>What about going a step further and rewarding the factories that make these beads with tax breaks and federal and state subsidies, which would give them incentives to sustain operations, hire more people, pay them fair living wages, all while limiting environmental degradation? A scenario like this could reduce the rates of cancers caused by styrene, significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and help create local manufacturing jobs in Louisiana.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, as Dr. Mielke explained to me, many either are unaware or refuse to admit that there’s a problem that needs to be dealt with.</p>
<p>“It’s part of the waste culture we have where materials pass briefly through our lives and then are dumped some place,” he said. In other words: out of sight, out of mind.</p>
<p>So why do so many of us eagerly participate in waste culture without care or concern? Dr. Mielke sees a parallel in the fantasy told to the Chinese factory worker and the fantasy of the American consumer.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The people in China are told these beads are valuable and given to important Americans, that beads are given to royalty. And of course [this narrative] all evaporates when you realize, ‘Oh yes, there’s royalty in Mardi Gras parades, there’s kings and queens, but it’s made up and it’s fictitious.’ Yet we carry on with these crazy events that we know are harmful.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, most people, it seems, would rather retreat into the power of myth and fantasy than confront the consequences of hard truth.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71657/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Redmon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Each Mardi Gras, 25 million pounds of beads hit the streets of New Orleans. One researcher went to the Chinese factories that make them – and spoke to the workers who believe the beads will be given to royalty.
David Redmon, Lecturer in Criminology, University of Kent
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/70150
2016-12-12T14:06:20Z
2016-12-12T14:06:20Z
Office Christmas Party: a glimpse into the joylessness of contemporary American life
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149652/original/image-20161212-26060-1lrl2o2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">E One</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Tis the season to be jolly. Few institutions insist upon this more than Hollywood, which traditionally includes among its December releases a number of films designed to induce seasonal merriment. Yet viewers of a new comedy, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1711525/">Office Christmas Party</a>, may find themselves in a mood more sombre than cheery. Not so much because of the film’s manifest flaws (including jokes that are only sporadically funny, with some resembling bad crackers in their failure to detonate), but because of what, beneath its tinselly visuals and raucous soundtrack, the film tells us about the condition of the United States this Christmas.</p>
<p>Many reviewers of Office Christmas Party have already pointed out the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0854n9z/film-2016-13-snowden-the-birth-of-a-nation-office-christmas-party">excesses of its plotting</a>. What could have been a modest vehicle streamlined for the season is bedecked with multiple, clashing genre accessories: at times we’re watching Bill Murray’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096061/">Scrooged</a> (1988), in other moments an episode of the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0232500/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Fast and Furious</a> franchise. </p>
<p>But essentially, the film’s premise comes down to this: the Chicago branch of internet company Zenotek is failing, and Carol (Jennifer Aniston), corporate CEO and Scrooge-like sister of local manager Clay (TJ Miller), arrives in the snowy city to downsize or even close it. In desperation, the hippy-ish Clay decides to throw an office Christmas party of sufficient lavishness to win over a wealthy client (Courtney B Vance). Most of the film’s running time is taken up by the riotous party itself. But as the guests descend into intoxication, the corporate carnival that ensues is likely to sober the attentive viewer by revealing glimpses of a badly damaged America.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149654/original/image-20161212-26063-1l2rl1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149654/original/image-20161212-26063-1l2rl1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149654/original/image-20161212-26063-1l2rl1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149654/original/image-20161212-26063-1l2rl1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149654/original/image-20161212-26063-1l2rl1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149654/original/image-20161212-26063-1l2rl1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149654/original/image-20161212-26063-1l2rl1e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christmas cheer at full throttle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">E One</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Work and play</h2>
<p>You would not assume that a silly festive comedy such as Office Christmas Party and a Russian scholar of Dostoevsky and Rabelais would have much in common. But Mikael Bakhkin’s research on the theory of carnival, especially as elaborated in the monumental <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SkswFyhqRIMC&redir_esc=y">Rabelais and His World</a> (1965), offers a fruitful resource by which to assess the politics of fun in Office Christmas Party. </p>
<p>Carnival, at its epitome in the medieval <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Fools">Feast of Fools</a> celebration, holds out the prospect of a “utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance”, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SkswFyhqRIMC&redir_esc=y">according to Bakhtin</a>. Hierarchy is inverted, with the high made low; stuffy decorums are violated by irreverent laughter. What Bakhtin calls “the lower-bodily stratum” liberates the participant in carnival from rigid mental disciplines and initiates a radical reimagining of the world. And, certainly, the lower-bodily stratum is on abundant display in Office Christmas Party: pelvises gyrate in frequent dance sequences, while, more daringly, penises appear and naked buttocks wait their turn to be lowered onto the photocopier.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149651/original/image-20161212-26048-9g5m7d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/149651/original/image-20161212-26048-9g5m7d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149651/original/image-20161212-26048-9g5m7d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149651/original/image-20161212-26048-9g5m7d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149651/original/image-20161212-26048-9g5m7d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149651/original/image-20161212-26048-9g5m7d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/149651/original/image-20161212-26048-9g5m7d.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The aftermath.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">E One</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet we should be cautious about endowing these particular bodily excesses with carnival’s most subversive potential. Instead we find on display throughout the film the limited form of liberation that Bakhtin <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SkswFyhqRIMC&redir_esc=y">criticises</a> as “a mere holiday mood”. Under Clay’s management style, in fact, every day at Chicago’s Zenotek office resembles a holiday. The film aims to convince us that, unlike in Carol’s austere corporate fiefdom, daily work here has the character of play (with evidence extending from a relaxed dress code through to a regular delivery of doughnuts). </p>
<p>Yet the grim corollary of this is that play is always work. Ultimately, the film cannot imagine an alternative to the rule of hard-lined, business-driven corporate mentality (however disguised that regime might be by executives wearing Christmas jumpers or fellating a novelty eggnog dispenser).</p>
<h2>Family Christmas</h2>
<p>The assembled family is crucial to the iconography of the American Christmas. Think, for example, of James Stewart’s tearful reunion with his wife and children at the end of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038650/">It’s a Wonderful Life</a> (1946), or of benevolent generations gathered together in <a href="http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/12/24/art-entertainment/the-homecoming.html">illustrations painted by Norman Rockwell</a> for the Saturday Evening Post. Or even recall the ending of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104940/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Muppet Christmas Carol</a> (1992), in which Kermit and Miss Piggy as the Cratchits preside over a table groaning with both food and children.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/36sySXiY6SU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>But in Office Christmas Party, families are largely absent (a deficit not satisfyingly redressed by Clay’s attempts to build a sense of “family” into life working for his company). The film begins, unseasonably, with one character’s divorce. The few children present are peripheral but in disadvantaged situations: a baby rented for the party’s Bethlehem manger, for example, or a child who suffers Carol’s wrath for stealing her cinnabon. Where a child’s discourse with its mother is heard, it proves disturbingly to be a lovelorn worker’s expression of a “mommy fetish”. The prevailing sense is more of atomisation than Christmassy connection.</p>
<p>In letting slip the American experience now of economic and social precariousness, Office Christmas Party is, in the end, surprisingly lacking in festive cheer. And as a final reason not to be jolly, we might reflect that the US Christmas we see here on-screen is the last before the coming of President Trump, a potential Bad Santa if ever there was one.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70150/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Dix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
As the film descends into intoxication, viewers are likely to be sobered by glimpses of a badly damaged America.
Andrew Dix, Lecturer in American Studies, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68281
2016-11-10T11:29:56Z
2016-11-10T11:29:56Z
How the internet turned the US election into a medieval carnival
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145286/original/image-20161109-19078-hvn3ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“In the 1850s, thousands of Americans proudly called themselves ‘the know-nothings’ and formed a movement against migrants for the ‘purification’ of America. They were bragging about their lack of a clue about politics and rational argument,” my academic friend sighed over a coffee in London last week.</p>
<p>Because they were the only Democrats in the neighbourhood, my friend’s family had moved from Alabama back to the Old World. These days, the politics of the United States has turned into a similar whirlpool of awe and ridicule – but now you don’t have to be geographically bound to the country, as the digital realm makes the flows of controversial rhetoric spill over traditional boundaries of time and space.</p>
<p>The campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton featured an unprecedented amount of <a href="http://www.webcitation.org/6HzDGE9Go">memes</a>, viral texts that proliferate on mutation and sharing. <a href="https://camri.ac.uk/staff/anastasia-denisova/">In my research</a>, I look at how memes have become the fast food media of contemporary politics as well as mindbombs of political activism. They are absurd, politically incorrect, incomplete and require the knowledge of context to “get” the joke. But most importantly, they mirror public opinion and popular emotions on the subject.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton’s office tried to appropriate the language of internet cultures and shape their campaign posters like memes. But they failed to detach from the composition and expression style of a traditional poster. Not bold enough for memes, not classy enough for placards, these visuals got stuck somewhere in the grey zone between the online and offline.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"795770626212503552"}"></div></p>
<p>Donald Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, demonstrated conscientious engagement with social media. He made his presidential announcement on innovative live streaming app Periscope. His Twitter accounts gathered millions of followers – indeed, just the comparison of the main Twitter feeds of the candidates, not to mention the satellite accounts, reveals the disposition of forces: 11m followers for <a href="https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton">@HillaryClinton</a> as opposed to 14m for <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump">@realDonaldTrump</a>. It was probably the bold rhetoric of Trump’s statements that made them so shareable.</p>
<h2>Into the twittersphere</h2>
<p>Trump supporters, following their commander, ignored all the rules of political correctness, fair play and sensible campaigning, indulging in meme warfare in the viral meadows of social networks. </p>
<p>Not only did they coin specific memes to attack the democratic candidate for the FBI phone scandal and pro-war sentiments, but even tried to create what I call meme campaigns: chains of similarly styled provocative messages organised by a hashtag that are designed to have a certain effect.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"793272620305088512"}"></div></p>
<p>They don’t always work – but they do reveal the mood of public opinion. Several account holders took time to persistently deploy memes accusing Hillary of a drinking problem on Twitter. But #DrunkHillary failed to engage other users. Meek dozens of “shares” and “likes” revealed that both pro- and anti-Clinton voters doubted the idea that Mrs Clinton was an alcoholic.</p>
<p>Another case, the #DraftOurDaughters campaign, demonstrated how memes can “bomb” unguarded minds and influence the digital crowds. This initiative looked more like professional campaigning. Many voters <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/hillary-is-the-candidate_b_9168938.html">were concerned</a> that Hillary’s support of military interventions abroad would result in sending female soldiers to the battlefield. In order to amplify this concern, pro-Trump users coined a range of smart fake posters that imitated the simple graphic style of authentic Clinton posters. As a result, some social media dwellers <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1185635-draftourdaughters">believed</a> that the meme-looking controversial images were indeed coming from the Democratic candidate.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"795677950209310720"}"></div></p>
<p>Trump himself was by no means safe from the meme battlefield, with social media users creating memes that engaged in a rather lethargic lambasting of the candidate’s groping practices, unorthodox hair style and lack of reason in his assertions. But these memes proliferated in a rather disconnected fashion. Criticisms of Trump were certainly in the air, yet Clinton’s supporters did not create many uniform, clearly-focused campaigns out of them.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"792284418501140481"}"></div></p>
<h2>What does it all meme?</h2>
<p>This meme flood is demonstrative of at least two alarming trends. </p>
<p>First, the growing problem of attention deficit has had a significant impact on the course and outcomes of the election. The phenomenon of “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FuuKd3on9psC&oi=fnd&pg=PR12&dq=attention+economy&ots=RK2QIC4-3y&sig=cP-gxfXcMUxOisarjaCfj9HLJoM#v=onepage&q=attention%20economy&f=false">attention economy</a>” has been studied since early 2000s. In today’s environment of multitasking and media oversaturation, the scarcest resource is not money or talent, but attention. People can only concentrate on a print-size version of the text; as soon as they need to scroll down to read the rest of argument, they are most likely to close the link and move to the next tab.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.mq.edu.au/pubstatic/custom/files/media/garry_linnell_2.mp3">According to Garry Linnell</a>, in 1968, the average politician’s soundbite in the news was 43 seconds, by 1988 it was nine seconds, and in 2016 we barely hear them finishing a sentence. This is the attention deficit environment into which internet memes fit perfectly. Comparable to fast food, they satisfy your information hunger with glitzy, tantalising, succulent bites that have little nutritional value, yet feed you on a very superficial level, right here, right now.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"795930716903272448"}"></div></p>
<p>The second trend that the 2016 US election highlighted is the carnivalisation of public politics. Memes <a href="https://www.academia.edu/9865338/_2014_Online_Memes_as_Means_of_the_Carnivalesque_Resistance_in_Contemporary_Russia">have been scrutinised</a> as instances of medieval-like carnival: it is the logic of upside down, ridicule and mockery, stupidity and opposition to any possible elites. </p>
<p>Originally, of course, the carnival was limited to one week before Lent. People gathered in the central marketplace to unleash their desires and let off steam. The e-carnival is dramatically different: it expands beyond the constraints of time and space. It is ever present, and here to stay. Increasingly, attention-deficit voters draw their news and opinion from the fast food media communication and then return their inputs to the same shallow realm. </p>
<p>The consumption of fast food media advances fast politics, the swift, screaming and scandalous sort of politics that is so tempting to share and receive “likes” for. So the real winner of this election, in fact, is the viral state of mind. This renders the future of politics yet more worrying. </p>
<p>As Trump realised early on, the rule of this emerging memeworld is to share or be square, no matter the content.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68281/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anastasia Denisova does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Hillary Clinton failed to unleash the power of the meme.
Anastasia Denisova, Lecturer in Journalism, University of Westminster
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/54286
2016-02-10T11:37:56Z
2016-02-10T11:37:56Z
The Olympics are coming to town – but Carnival will always come first in Rio
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/110811/original/image-20160209-12571-1myxdcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nateclicks/16024346174/sizes/l">nateClicks/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>After five days of revelry, involving more than <a href="http://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-entertainment/nearly-1-million-tourists-attended-the-2015-rio-carnival/#">a million visitors and participants</a>, Rio’s Carnival has drawn to a close. It is, in some ways, a global phenomenon: Carnival captures a sense of the exotic, creative flair of South American culture, and projects it outward to an enormous audience from around the world. Even the name of the city conjures up images of flamboyant dancers, head dresses and colourful floats. This collection of vibrant and awe-inspiring human art installations seems, at some level, to embody Brazilian culture. </p>
<p>Carnivals take place in many locations throughout the world, and most have their origins in cultural and religious traditions and rituals. Indeed, the word “carnival” comes from the Latin phrase “carne-vale” (flesh farewell) originally marking a period of feasting and revelry before the fasting of Lent. But can carnivals – in particular Rio’s Carnival – really be seen in this light anymore? Or have they been passed over to the forces of globalisation and commodification, and become a mere spectacle staged for the consumption of tourists? </p>
<p>After all, Rio’s Carnival now generates <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rio-carnival-2014-in-numbers-brazil-kicks-off-the-greatest-party-on-earth-tomorrow-but-where-will-9157909.html">in the region of 3.2 billion Brazilian Real</a> (£570m), and three quarters of this comes from tourism alone. The 200 samba schools that take part in the parades <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-02-23/carnival-puts-some-samba-in-brazil-s-economy-the-ticker">spend up to £3m</a> on outfits and preparations, and 250,000 jobs are created each year by the carnival. </p>
<h2>Double the fun?</h2>
<p>Despite <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/brazil-carnival-economic-crisis-recession">the recent downturn</a>, Carnival’s annual economic benefits for the city have been likened to that of an Olympic Games – which might lead one to expect that the city will benefit doubly this year, as it prepares to host the games in August. </p>
<p>Sporting mega events are proven, with effective management, to secure high return on investment; a good example being the <a href="http://olympicstudies.uab.es/pdf/wp084_eng.pdf">1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona</a>. But such returns are never guaranteed. For one thing, public funding is sacrificed to host mega-events; increased taxes and spending cuts to other areas often are not taken into account when calculating the financial benefits. And whereas a vast proportion of money invested comes from the public purse, much of the profit received does not go back to the public, but to shareholders and investors. </p>
<p>Social benefits are also achievable, through sound ethical investments in education, transportation and security, as per <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/78105/201210_Legacy_Publication.pdf">London 2012’s legacy policy</a>. But all too often, these provisions <a href="http://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/05/07/2013/hosting-major-sports-events-hidden-costs-and-policy-dilemmas">are short-term and heavy-handed</a>, with little or no consideration for the needs of communities that live in the city. </p>
<h2>Stark contrast</h2>
<p>One example can be seen in the favelas, which have become a major part of Brazilian culture. Favelas are informal urban settlements, which typically house a city’s poorest residents. And while the favelas are often associated with <a href="http://socrel.oxfordjournals.org/content/72/1/4.full.pdf">social and health issues</a> such as crime, drug use and teenage pregnancy, they are also people’s homes. Many of Rio’s samba schools – which prepare the floats for Carnival’s parades – are based in these areas: the celebrations are woven into their economic and cultural fabric.</p>
<p>Part of the programme to prepare for the Olympics is to “clean up” or “pacify” the favelas, to make the city safe for tourists. With a greater police presence, <a href="https://theconversation.com/vila-autodromo-the-favela-fighting-back-against-rios-olympic-development-52393">forced evictions</a> and questionable pacification tactics, this policy has the potential to stifle creativity and freedom of expression, while quashing the counterculture which gives Rio its unique character.</p>
<p>And so, Carnival offers more to the local people than any mega event ever could through a sense of ownership and shared value. In essence, the playful cultural activities that it involves reflects their culture, provides freedom of expression and bolsters the creative industries. Carnival is Rio: it has been part of the city’s cultural life <a href="http://www.rio.com/rio-carnival/history-carnival">since the 1700s</a>. And while hosting the Olympic Games gives Brazil the opportunity to stage two of the biggest shows on Earth in one year, Carnival is much more important to its cultural and spiritual survival.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/54286/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karen Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
There are benefits to hosting the Olympics - but when it comes to culture, there’s no mega-event like Carnival.
Karen Davies, Senior Lecturer in Events Management, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/43509
2015-08-28T05:37:49Z
2015-08-28T05:37:49Z
Notting Hill Carnival: why partying is the perfect antidote to austerity
<p>About a <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-28917765">million</a> people will be gearing themselves up for the mayhem that is Notting Hill Carnival this bank holiday weekend. For two days there will be crowds, booze and pumping music filling the West London streets. Shops board up in anticipation, and locals make a killing by selling Red Stripe on their doorsteps and renting out their toilet.</p>
<p>Although carnival has been a stalwart of the London summer since 1966, day parties such as this are reportedly increasing in popularity, along with festivals. Recent <a href="http://www.mixmag.net/read/number-of-clubs-in-the-uk-have-almost-halved-since-2005-news">research</a> has shown that the number of clubs in the UK has almost halved in the last ten years and the increase in popularity (and price) of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11794636/Half-of-UK-nightclubs-close-in-ten-years-as-Brits-abandon-rave-culture.html">festivals</a> have been touted as one of the reasons why. Given that Notting Hill Carnival is free, I wouldn’t be surprised if it can expect a particularly high influx of cavorting youngsters this year.</p>
<p>But the real age of the free party was the early 90s, and its echoes can certainly still be felt in the (council supported) street parties of today. </p>
<p>These free parties were inherently political. Travellers and ravers united under the umbrella of DIY culture and created a version of the future that was exciting, daring and flew in the face of authority. Music, drugs, politics and audacious opportunism combined to create a cultural phenomenon that continues to resonate.</p>
<h2>Hedonism in hard times</h2>
<p>Free parties were self-organising, self-sufficient and radical. At the tail end of Thatcher’s hard line government, young and old alike were experimenting with what potential “spaces of resistance” might look like. Eco-activism, road protests, demonstrations, marches, occupations and parties were all part of a time in which opposition, resistance and dissatisfaction were expressed (and contested) spatially. The marginalised joined forces with the chemicalised and history was made.</p>
<p>Described by Steve Redhead in 1993 as “hedonism in hard times”, partying offered a means of escape and a point of liberation for many people. To dance freely, in the open air and without restriction, acted as an antidote to the harsh political climate of the time. People grabbed it with both hands. This new subcultural alliance had the power to rattle the doors of the establishment all the way to Westminster.</p>
<p>Culminating this period of partying, on May Bank Holiday 1992 the biggest free party England has ever seen took place on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7IHkSeKBpM">Castlemorton Common</a>, near Malvern in Worcestershire. In full swing for more than a week, the event marked the peak of rave culture but also signalled its demise. The sight of more than 20,000 party people, pill heads, hippies, crusties, New Age travellers and eco-warriors occupying common land was too much for middle England. The inevitable legislation in the form of <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/contents">The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act</a> followed shortly after.</p>
<p>Castlemorton was not the cause of these measures. It was simply the excuse. </p>
<h2>Not-so-free parties</h2>
<p>With the end of the free parties, another space for all night raving was desperately needed. Glastonbury in particular played a pivotal role in importing all-night raving into the festival context. The traveller/raver alliance found a home within a licensed event and laid the blueprint for the future.</p>
<p>Since then, the “free party experience” has been co-opted by the festival industry and now contributes significantly to the country’s cultural economy. What was once outlawed has found legitimacy through the market. But in return it was forced to give up its autonomy.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91020/original/image-20150806-5266-tgamfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91020/original/image-20150806-5266-tgamfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91020/original/image-20150806-5266-tgamfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91020/original/image-20150806-5266-tgamfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91020/original/image-20150806-5266-tgamfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91020/original/image-20150806-5266-tgamfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91020/original/image-20150806-5266-tgamfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rig Urgitate, July 2014.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many festivals (to an extent) look, sound and feel like the free parties of a bygone era. The DIY, hand made character of the free party aesthetic is instantly recognisable nationwide. Over the course of 25 years, the music has not changed dramatically and even the adage Peace Love Unity Respect (PLUR) endures in certain scenes. Virtually every weekend of the summer season you can dance to non-stop electronic dance music in idyllic rural surroundings without the hassle of evading police and without the fear of arrest.</p>
<p>But these days, to experience freedom, you have to buy a ticket. The original free party values of self-actualisation, freedom and community have been adopted by what French sociologists Boltanski and Chiapello call the “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9QuQihQ_4GsC&redir_esc=y">new spirit of capitalism’</a>” (2007). Capitalism has absorbed the very vehicle that served as its critic – and we’ve learnt to live with it.</p>
<h2>A new generation</h2>
<p>But that’s only part of the story.</p>
<p>The original techno rebels and pioneers of rave may have grown up and moved on – some have moved into the festival business – but the thirst for collective dancing in open, rural, free space has not subsided. Don’t tell anyone, but free parties still happen.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91019/original/image-20150806-5209-159kd99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91019/original/image-20150806-5209-159kd99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91019/original/image-20150806-5209-159kd99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91019/original/image-20150806-5209-159kd99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91019/original/image-20150806-5209-159kd99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91019/original/image-20150806-5209-159kd99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91019/original/image-20150806-5209-159kd99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Free party, August 2012. Photo courtesy of Dylan Bacon.</span>
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<p>The wide media coverage in the early 90s and the moral panic that ensued (fuelled by overblown accounts of out of control youngsters rampaging through the countryside) made for great copy. Now that talk of revolution has died down, press coverage and policing is characteristically low-key. Up and down the country, free parties take place most weekends, particularly when the weather is good. Usually they go unmarked, unnoticed and unreported.</p>
<p>After prolonged austerity measures and in the wake of the general election, change is in the air. There has been a subtle but distinct change in practice both from party-goers and police that signals a turn towards a more vigorous (and potentially disruptive) occupation of open space. The violence that took place during the dispersal of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n86ldB23TSQ">UK Tek 2015</a> is just one incident that indicates a more hard-line approach from police and local authorities to the recent upsurge in free partying.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91021/original/image-20150806-5253-n2kzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91021/original/image-20150806-5253-n2kzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91021/original/image-20150806-5253-n2kzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91021/original/image-20150806-5253-n2kzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91021/original/image-20150806-5253-n2kzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91021/original/image-20150806-5253-n2kzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91021/original/image-20150806-5253-n2kzx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Stand off at UK Tek 2015, photo courtesy of C J Jackson.</span>
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<p>The festival scene in the UK continues to , develop and create new lines of flight for its participants. It owes much to the rebels and revolutionaries of rave who dared to do things differently. Interest in the free party scene persists because of its profound impact on youth culture, the media, policing, politics, policy and legislation.</p>
<p>Once again we find ourselves in hard times. How the next generation will choose to combat that through party and protest, if they will use it as a challenge to authorities that attempt to rein them in, remains to be seen. The inherently political element of the free parties of old lends itself particularly well to contemporary times.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43509/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alice O'Grady does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The real age of the rave was the early 90s, when politics and partying combined to extraordinary result. And once again we find ourselves in hard times …
Alice O'Grady, Associate Professor in Applied Performance, University of Leeds
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/17452
2013-08-26T05:52:35Z
2013-08-26T05:52:35Z
Notting Hill Carnival is one of Trinidad’s greatest exports
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/29838/original/2wb59wc8-1377276675.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Carnival Circus: hitting your hometown soon</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lewis Whyld PA Wire</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This bank holiday weekend, London celebrates yet another glorious Notting Hill Carnival. Relatively few of the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of revellers enjoying the festivities appreciate the extraordinary process that has led to this festival being dubbed “<a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/notting-hill-carnival-2012-get-ready-1277901">Europe’s biggest street party</a>.”</p>
<p>Some may be familiar with its predecessor, the <a href="http://www.thecarnival.tv/info/history1.htm">Notting Hill Festival</a>. In the 1960s it was waning in popularity, until 1964, when a British social worker, Rhuane Laslett, decided to add a steel band to the festival. Steel bands are formed of players of steel pans – instruments which are indigenous to the Caribbean island of Trinidad and part of its Carnival. Laslett’s intervention caused the Trinidadian immigrants living in Notting Hill to spontaneously form a jumping and dancing procession behind the steel band. Thereafter the Notting Hill Festival became known as the Notting Hill Carnival and the rest, as they say, is history.</p>
<p>Thanks to numerous media reports which tend to highlight the event’s crime statistics, most are familiar with the violent incidents that have occurred at the Notting Hill Carnival. Even though these incidents are a constant source of criticism for festival organisers, they are also in some measure symbolic of the Afro Caribbean community’s struggle for racial equality and recognition in the United Kingdom.</p>
<h2>Roots</h2>
<p>The exact date when carnival celebrations began on the island of Trinidad is not known but we know these practises only began after the arrival of French slave owners around 1783. The early celebrations were upper class affairs for the slave owners and their friends, but slaves attached to plantations were also allowed to hold their own carnival celebrations. These slave celebrations led to the infusion of African traditions into the Trinidad Carnival. </p>
<p>Trinidad-style carnivals possess three distinct cultural forms. Masquerade is the oldest of the traditions, which was imported from Europe and introduced to Trinidad by French plantation owners. Calypso is next oldest art form, developed during slavery by the African slaves. The steel pan was invented fairly recently by comparison, and steel pan music and was only widely played in Trinidad after 1945.</p>
<h2>Carnival as business</h2>
<p>The first Trinidad-style carnival celebrations staged outside of Trinidad occurred in Harlem in the 1920s. These would go on to become the New York Labour Day celebrations in 1947. New York’s Labour Day (now called the West Indian American Parade Day), has spawned dozens of other Trinidad-style carnivals in other American cities. </p>
<p>They tend to feature an American-styled parade and are typically devoted to celebrating a “West Indian American” or “Caribbean American” identity. A similar pattern of adaptation and replication can be seen in Canada, where Toronto’s Caribana (started in 1967 and now called Scotia Caribbean Carnival) went on to inspire Montreal’s Carifiesta, Calgary’s Carifest and Ottawa’s Fete-Caribe. </p>
<p>The Notting Hill Carnival is yet another link in this festival network. It has gone on to inspire dozens of carnivals in a host of UK cities, and has the distinction of introducing static sound systems to the carnival celebrations, a practice started by Jamaican DJs living in the UK in 1975. Additionally, it is the only Trinidad-style carnival outside of the Caribbean that has gone on to inspire the establishment of Trinidad-style carnivals outside of its host country. German festival organisers of the <a href="http://www.berlin.de/en/events/2092491-2842498-carnival-of-cultures.en.html">Carnivals of Cultures</a> cite the Notting Hill Carnival as a key influence.</p>
<p>This spread of carnivals across the world highlights the increasing prevalence of culture as business export. The remarkably close-knit community of Notting Hill Carnivalists (as they are known) participate not only in the Notting Hill Carnival but a host of UK, European and other carnivals. This allows the community, which has a relatively small resource base, greater reach than it would have otherwise. </p>
<p>Many are continually astounded that an event as large as Notting Hill Carnival continues to happen every year largely due to the efforts of a group of enthusiastic volunteers, with limited support from the public and private sector. The fact these volunteers are able to work collaboratively to support, sustain and create a network of dozens of similar festivals is even more amazing.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/17452/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicole Ferdinand receives funding from the King's Cultural Institute's Creative Futures funding programme. She is affiliated with the Carnival Futures: Notting Hill Carnival 2020 project.</span></em></p>
This bank holiday weekend, London celebrates yet another glorious Notting Hill Carnival. Relatively few of the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of revellers enjoying the festivities appreciate the…
Nicole Ferdinand, PhD Student, Department of Culture, Media and the Creative Industries, King's College London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.