Social Identities Carnival Praxis, Carnivalesque Strategies And

This article was downloaded by: [Crichlow, Michaeline A.] On: 23 July 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 924743564] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Social Identities Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713445719 Carnival praxis, carnivalesque strategies and Atlantic interstices Michaeline A. Crichlowa; Piers Armstrongbc a Departments of African and African American Studies & Sociology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina b Latin American Institute, University of California, Los Angeles c Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles Online publication date: 23 July 2010 To cite this Article Crichlow, Michaeline A. and Armstrong, Piers(2010) 'Carnival praxis, carnivalesque strategies and Atlantic interstices', Social Identities, 16: 4, 399 — 414 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2010.497693 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2010.497693 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Social Identities Vol. 16, No. 4, July 2010, 399Á414 INTRODUCTION Carnival praxis, carnivalesque strategies and Atlantic interstices Michaeline A. Crichlowa* and Piers Armstrongb** aDepartments of African and African American Studies & Sociology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; bLatin American Institute, University of California, Los Angeles; Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles (Received 11 October 2008; final version received 1 October 2009) Somo crioulo doido e somo bem legal Temos cabelo duro e´so´ no black pau Que bloco e´ esse? Eu quero saber. E´ o mundo negro que viemos mostrar pra voceˆ. Branco, se voceˆ soubesse o valor que o preto tem, Tu tomavas banho de piche, branco e, ficava negraõ tambe´m. Enaõ te ensino a minha malandragem Nem taõ pouco minha filosofia, naõ We be crazy Creole and we be very cool We have kinky hair and we just go in ‘Black Pow’ What carnival club is this? I want to know. It’s the black world that we came to show you Whitey, if you knew the value of the Black man, You’d bathe yourself in tar and become a Black man too And I’m not gonna teach you my artful dodging or my philosophy either, no. (Que Bloco E´ Esse, Paulinho Camafeu) A multidisciplinary symposium on carnivals and the carnivalesque Downloaded By: [Crichlow, Michaeline A.] At: 16:54 23 July 2010 In the summer of 2005, 11 scholars who had studied and participated in carnival and carnivalesque moments, gathered at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City for a colloquium on carnival. Their respective core disciplines included sociology, anthropology, history, folklore, visual arts, theatre, performance, and foreign languages and literatures. The carnivals they studied were predominantly of the Americas (with a Caribbean cluster of Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba and New Orleans, and an Eastern South American cluster of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) but also included France, the Trinidadian-derived Notting Hill carnival in London, a carnival-like Catholic festivity in the Philippines, and on the carnivalesque front a G-8 protest in Scotland and well-humoured coal industry protests in West Virginia. All used interdisciplinary perspectives and methods in their work, and the colloquium fostered exchanges of a comparative *Email: [email protected]; **Email: [email protected] ISSN 1350-4630 print/ISSN 1363-0296 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2010.497693 http://www.informaworld.com 400 M.A. Crichlow & P. Armstrong nature regarding both instances of carnival and its disciplinary frames. The conceptual orientation deriving from the profile of case studies examined, meant combining a focus on post-colonial issues of emancipation with aesthetic performa- tives and the expression of personal fantasies. We sought to explore carnival beyond its traditional festive sites, and to rethink it, less through overarching binaries such as Western/non-Western or domination/subordination, and more in terms of its cultural flows, hybridities, negotiation, dialogics, and unintended consequences. An inclination to rely on binaristic notions in earlier carnival literature, particularly within Marxist and certain ethnographic studies, tended to underscore the ‘grotesque’ anomalies in a visual politics of presence or place. But the cultural turn in social studies, with its emphasis on translation, negotiation, constructions of subjectivities, and on liminality, allows more for a perspective of open-ended transformations and relational histories, and hence a stress upon the contingent, provisional formation of social spaces, subjectivities and temporalities. This view’s value has been enhanced with the recent overflow of certain carnivals beyond their historical sites and temporal constraints. The essays in this volume offer then to rethink carnivals and the carnivalesque principally in terms of its movements, boundary crossings, convivialities, creative bricolage and fantasies, which are maneuvers open to anyone Á state elites, ‘folk’ and visitors, players and observers. Carnival per se Carnival was originally a Catholic festival, lasting for threeÁfive days, just prior to the 40 days of Lent which precede Easter and are marked by a penitential restraint which is empathic to Christ’s impending agony. The etymology of the word is contested, but apparently derives from the Italian, carne levare (the removal of meat). Since it has not traditionally existed in Anglophone societies, there is some awkwardness in English usage of the term. ‘Carnival’ usually refers to a temporary amusement park, and Americans use a French term in New Orleans, mardi gras (Fat Tuesday), when people would eat up all the meat and fat proscribed in Lent, which starts the following day, Ash Wednesday, the day of ritual mourning that follows carnival. Since Lent was a time of penance and discipline, the preceding days became, in contrast, a time of liberation from the usual social and moral constraints, a public Downloaded By: [Crichlow, Michaeline A.] At: 16:54 23 July 2010 party. In medieval times, carnival was part of an organic cycle of discipline and liberation. For a day the fool or the fattest glutton in the town became ‘king’, and, to a lesser extent, or at least by implication, the ‘king’ (i.e., the local baron or the mayor or other leading burgher) became a ‘fool’. Usually, instead of leading to actual liberation, carnival was politically useful to the powerful as a harmless escape valve for oppressed people. It was, nevertheless, predicated psycho-socially on a symbolic inversion of status which is highly ambiguous: if carnival helped to maintain the status quo, it uniquely allowed for bold expressions of dissidence and thus pointed to a ‘revolution in the mind’ in the form of a kind of alternative reality. Carnival was also singular in precipitating a gregarious, compacted assemblage of townsfolk of different stations in a general clime which embraced both meddling with order and individual eccentricity. Finally, at a deeper spiritual level, carnival was profoundly enigmatic in that it preserved links with pagan practices and sensibilities, and presumably initially emerged as a political accommodation, by the Church, of enduring pre-Christian values. From this point of view, carnival is simply a mask for Social Identities 401 the continuity of Bacchic rites which are traced back to Roman festivities and, beyond that, to pagan principles of the earlier ancient world. In the early modern historical period (after the Middle Ages and before the Industrial and French revolutions), the enigmatic ritual aspects of carnival receded with economic development. Given the political volatility of this period of national consolidation, carnival became an arena for expressions of changing patronal power (for example, when a powerful burgher sought to mark his ascension in a town). The line that carnival constantly sketches between the potential and the real was sometimes broken, and the margin of unruliness tolerated in carnival occasionally broke into purposeful violence because of the links to extraneous political agendas. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s rigorous study (1979) demonstrates how carnival was used as a venue to channel hostility deriving from anger over taxation and corruption in the linguistically divided southern French town of Romans, culminat- ing in widespread violence in 1580 and the massacre of two dozen artisans. In a different vein, Teo´filo Ruiz (2001) documents the consistency

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