Globalization and Trinidad Carnival
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Transcript of Globalization and Trinidad Carnival
Kei th Nurse
of the dialectical and the dialogical. Articulating
the poetics of meaning construction and the politics
of consent formation, such a perspective looks at
hybridity as an assertion of differences coupled with
an enactment of identity, as a process which is simul
taneously assimilationist and subversive, restrictive
and liberating. In this endeavor, it may be helpful to
remember Trinh Minh Ha's remark that "no matter
how desperate our attempts to mend, categories will
always leak."
Globalization and Trinidad Carnival: Diaspora, Hybridity and Identity in Global Culture Keith Nurse
In the current debate about globalization and
the growth of a global culture the main tendency is
to focus on the recent acceleration in the flow of
technology, people and resources in a North to South
or centre to periphery direction. In this sense much of
the literature on globalization is really a depoliticized
interpretation of the long-standing process of Western
ization and imperialism, terms that have become very
unfashionable in these so-called postmodern times.
Alternatively, the article is premised on the view that
'culturally, the periphery is greatly influenced by the
society of the center, but the reverse is also the case'.
Therefore, the aim of the study is to examine the
counter-flow, the periphery-to-centre cultural flows,
or what Patterson calls the 'extraordinary process
of periphery-induced creolization in the cosmopolis'.
In this respect it is a case study of 'globalization in
reverse', a take on what Jamaican poet Louise Bennett
calls 'colonization in reverse'.
The argument here is that the Trinidad carnival and
its overseas or diasporic offspring are both products
of and responses to the processes of globalization as
well as 'intercultural and transnational formations'
that relate to the concept of a Black Atlantic. Carnival
is theorized as a hybrid site for the ritual negotiation
of cultural identity and practice between and among
various social groups. Carnival employs an 'esthetic
of resistance' that confronts and subverts hegemonic
modes of representation and thus acts as a counter-
hegemonic tradition for the contestations and conflicts
embodied in constructions of class, nation, 'race',
gender, sexuality and ethnicity.
The Overseas Caribbean Carnivals
It is estimated that there are over sixty overseas
Caribbean carnivals in North America and Europe.
No other carnival can claim to have spawned so many
offspring. These are festivals that are patterned on the
Trinidad carnival or borrow heavily from it in that they
incorporate the artistic forms (pan, mas and calypso)
and the Afro-creole celebratory traditions (street
parade/theatre) of the Trinidad carnival. Organized
by the diasporic Caribbean communities, the overseas
carnivals have come to symbolize the quest for 'psychic,
if not physical return' to an imagined ancestral past
and the search for a 'pan-Caribbean unity, a demon
stration of the fragile but persistent belief that "All o'
we is one"'. In the UK alone, there are as many as thirty
carnivals that fall into this category. They are held
during the summer months rather than in the pre-
Lenten or Shrovetide period associated with the
Christian calendar. The main parade routes are gener
ally through the city centre or within the confines of
the immigrant community - the former is predominant,
especially with the larger carnivals.
Like its parent, the overseas carnival is hybrid in
form and influence. The Jonkonnu masks of Jamaica
and the Bahamas, not reflected in the Trinidad carnival,
Global izat ion and Tr in idad Carnival
are clearly evident in many of these carnivals, thereby
making them pan-Caribbean in scope. The carnivals
have over time incorporated carnivalesque traditions
from other immigrant communities: South Americans
(e.g. Brazilians), Africans and Asians. For instance, it is
not uncharacteristic to see Brazilian samba drummers
and dancers parading through the streets of London,
Toronto or New York during Notting Hill, Caribana
or Labour Day. The white population in the respective
locations have also become participants, largely as
spectators, but increasingly as festival managers,
masqueraders and pan players. Another development
is that the art-forms and the celebratory traditions of
the overseas Caribbean carnivals have been borrowed,
appropriated or integrated into European carnivals to
enhance them. Indeed, in some instances, the European
carnivals have been totally transformed. Examples of
this are the Barrow-in-Furness and Luton carnivals
where there is a long tradition of British carnival. One
also finds a similar trend taking place in carnivals in
France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and
Sweden, as they draw inspiration from the success of
the Notting Hill carnival.
The first overseas Caribbean carnival began in the
1920s in Harlem, New York. This festival was later to
become the Labour Day celebrations in 1947, the name
that it goes by today. The major overseas Caribbean
carnivals, for example, Notting Hill and Caribana,
became institutionalized during the mid- to late 1960s
at the peak in Caribbean migration. Nunley and
Bettleheim relate the timing to the rise in nationalism
in the Caribbean with the independence movement of
the 1950s and 1960s. The emergence of the carnivals
can also be related to the rise of black power conscious
ness. The growth in the number and size of the
overseas Caribbean carnivals came in two waves. The
first involved the consolidation of the early carnivals
during the 1960s until the mid 1970s. From the mid
1970s, two parallel developments took place: the early
carnivals expanded in size by broadening the appeal of
the festival, for example, playing reggae music; and,
through demonstration effect, a number of smaller
carnivals emerged as satellites to the larger, older ones.
The carnivals have developed to be a means to pro
mote cultural identity and sociopolitical integration
within the Caribbean diasporic community as well as
with the host society. The diversity in participation
suggests that the overseas Caribbean carnivals have
become multicultural or poly-ethnic festivals. For
instance, Manning argues that the overseas Caribbean
carnivals provide:
a kind of social therapy that overcomes the separation
and isolation imposed by the diaspora and restores to
West Indian immigrants both a sense of community
with each other and sense of connection to the culture
that they claim as a birthright. Politically, however,
there is more to these carnivals than cultural nostalgia.
They are also a means through which West Indians
seek and symbolize integration into the metropolitan
society, by coming to terms with the opportunities, as
well as the constraints, that surround them.
Manning's explanation of the significance of carni
vals to the Caribbean diaspora is supported by the
observations of Dabydeen:
For those of us resident in Britain, the Notting Hill
carnival is our living link with this ancestral history,
our chief means of keeping in touch with the ghosts of
'back home'. In a society which constantly threatens or
diminishes black efforts, carnival has become an occa
sion for self-assertion, for striking back - not with bricks
and bottles but by beating pan, by conjuring music
from steel, itself a symbol of the way we can convert steely
oppression into celebration. We take over the drab
streets and infuse them with our colours. The memory
of the hardship of the cold winter gone, and that to
come, is eclipsed in the heat of music. We regroup our
scattered black communities from Birmingham,
Manchester, Glasgow and all over the kingdom to one
spot in London: a coming together of proud celebration.
Dabydeen goes on to illustrate that the carnivals are
an integrative force in an otherwise segregated social
milieu:
We also pull in crowds of native whites, Europeans,
Japanese, Arabs, to witness and participate in our
entertainment, bringing alien peoples together in a
swamp or community of festivity. Carnival breaks
down barriers of colour, race, nationality, age, gender.
And the police who would normally arrest us for
doing those things (making noise, exhibitionism,
drinking, or simply being black) are made to smile and
Kei th Nurse
be ever so courteous, giving direction, telling you the
time, crossing old people over to the other side, under
taking all manner of unusual tasks. They fear that
bricks and bottles would fly if they behaved as normal.
Thus the sight of smiling policemen is absorbed into
the general masquerade.
From another perspective it is argued that the over
seas carnivals reflect rather than contest institution
alized social hierarchies. In each of the major overseas
carnivals the festival has been represented in ways
which fit into the colonialist discourse of race, gender,
nation and empire. The festival has suffered from racial
and sexual stigmas and stereotypes in the media which
are based on constructions of'otherness' and 'blackness'.
This situation became heightened as the carnivals
became larger and therefore more threatening to the
prevailing order. In the early phase, from the mid-1960s
to the mid-1970s, the carnivals were viewed as exotic,
received little if any press and were essentially tolerated
by the state authorities. From the mid-1970s, as attend
ance at the festivals enlarged, the carnivals became
more menacing and policing escalated, resulting in a
backlash from the immigrant Caribbean community.
Violent clashes between the British police and the
Notting Hill carnival came to the fore in the mid- to
late 1970s. Similar confrontations occurred at the other
major overseas carnivals in New York and Toronto.
Through a gendered lens 'black' male participants in
the festivals have been portrayed as 'dangerous' and
'criminal'. Female participants, on the other hand, are
viewed as 'erotic' and 'promiscuous'.
These modes of representation have come in tandem
with heightened surveillance mechanisms from the state
and the police. In the case of London, the expenditure
by the state on the policing of the festival is several
times larger than its contribution to the staging of
the festival. The politics of cultural representation
has negatively affected the viability of the overseas
carnivals. The adverse publicity and racialized stigmas
of violence, crime and disorder has allowed for the
blockage of investments from the public and private
sectors in spite of the fact that the carnivals have
proved to be violence-free relative to other large public
events or festivals. In the case of the UK, for instance,
official figures show that Notting Hill, which attracts
two million people, has fewer reported incidents of
crime than the Glastonbury rock festival which attracts
60,000 people. Yet the general perception is that Notting
Hill is more violence-prone.
Under increased surveillance the carnivals became
more contained and controlled during the 1980s. The
perspective of governments, business leaders and the
media began changing when it was recognized that
the carnivals were major tourist attractions and
generated significant sums in visitor expenditures.
For example, the publication of a 1990 visitor survey of
Caribana, which showed that the festival generated
Cnd$96 million from 500,000 attendees, resulted in
the Provincial Minister of Tourism and Recreation
visiting Trinidad in 1995 to see how the parent festival
operated. Provincial funding for the festival increased
accordingly. In 1995, for the first time, London's
Notting Hill carnival was sponsored by a large multi
national corporation. The Coca-Cola company, under its
product Lilt, a 'tropical' beverage, paid the organizers
£150,000 for the festival to be called the 'Lilt Notting
Hill Carnival' and for exclusive rights to advertise
along the masquerade route and to sell its soft drinks.
That same year the BBC produced and televised a
programme on the thirty-year history of the Notting
Hill carnival. By the mid 1990s, as one Canadian analyst
puts it, the carnivals were reduced to a few journalistic
essentials: 'the policing and control of the crowd, the
potential for violence, the weather, island images, the
size of the crowd, the city economy and, most recently,
the great potential benefit for the provincial tourist
industry'. These developments created concern among
some analysts. For example, Amkpa argues that:
strategies for incorporating and neutralizing the
political efficacies of carnivals by black communities
are already at work. Transnational corporations are
beginning to sponsor some of the festivals and are
contributing to creating a mass commercialized audi
ence under the guise of bogus multiculturalisms.
Another analyst saw the increasing role of the state in
these terms:
The funding bodies appear to treat it as a social policy
as part of the race relations syndrome: a neutralised
form of exotica to entertain the tourists, providing
images of Black women dancing with policemen,
or failing this, footage for the media to construct
distortions and mis(sed)representations. Moreover,
Global izat ion and Tr in idad Carnival
this view also sees that, if not for the problems it causes the police, courts, local authorities, and auditors, Carnival could be another enterprising venture.
In this respect one can argue that the sociopolitical and
cultural conflicts, based on race, class, gender, ethnicity,
nation and empire that are embedded in the Trinidad
carnival were transplanted to the metropolitan context.
In many ways the overseas carnivals, like the Trinidad
parent, have become trapped between the negative
imagery of stigmas and stereotypes, the co-optive
strategies of capitalist and state organizations and the
desires of the carnivalists for official funding and
validation.
[.. .]
Trinidad Carnival and Globalization Theory
The foregoing analysis of the historical and global
significance of Trinidad carnival presents some chal
lenges to globalization theory. It suggests that the
globalization of Trinidad carnival needs to be viewed
as a dual process: the first relates to the localization of
global influences and the second involves the globalization
of local impulses. Drawing from the case of Trinidad
carnival one can therefore argue that the formation of
carnival in Trinidad is based upon the localization of
global influences. The Trinidad carnival is the historical
outcome of the hybridization of multiple ethnicities
and cultures brought together under the rubric of
colonial and capitalist expansion. New identities are
forged and negotiated in the process. On the other
hand, the exportation of carnival to overseas diasporic
communities refers to the globalization of the local.
The overseas Caribbean carnivals have grown in scale
and scope beyond the confines of the immigrant
population to embrace, if not 'colonize', the wider
community in the respective host societies. This is
what is referred to as 'globalization in reverse'. In sum,
the overseas carnivals have become a basis for pan-
Caribbean identity, a mechanism for social integration
into metropolitan society and a ritual act of trans
national, transcultural, transgressive politics.
Another observation is that historically, core societies
are the ones most involved in the globalization of their
local culture. For example, in most developed economies
cultural industry exports are seen as part of foreign
economic policy. They recognize that perpetuating
or transplanting one's culture is a critical factor in
influencing international public opinion, attitude and
value judgement. Peripheral societies are those that are
more subject to importing cultural influences as opposed
to exporting them. It is also the case that when peri
pheral societies export their culture they often lack the
organizational capability and the political and economic
leverage to control or maximize the commercial returns.
This is in marked contrast to the capabilities of core
societies where there is not only an ability to maximize
on exports but also to co-opt imported cultures. What
it comes down to is who is globalizing whom. In this
business there are 'globalizers' and 'globalizees', those
who are the producers and those who are just consumers
of global culture. In this regard, it is far too premature
to argue, as Appadurai has suggested, that centre
periphery theories lack explanatory capability when it
comes to transformations in the global cultural economy.
From this perspective one can argue that Trinidad,
like other peripheral countries, has been on the receiving
end of globalization except in the case of its carnival.
This is to say that in an evaluation of globalization an
appreciation for the resultant political hierarchies
and asymmetries must be evident and caution should
be employed so as not to construct new mythologies of
change that depoliticize the systemic properties of the
capitalist world system. In this regard, it is critical that
the relevant historical period is conceptualized. The
case of the Trinidad carnival suggests that the growth
of historical capitalism in the past five hundred years
is pivotal to understanding the causal relations and
social forces that shaped and have evolved from the
festival, both locally and globally, both in the recent
past and the longue durée.
Another critical methodological issue is the con
ceptualization of space. Because of the heavy reliance
on statecentric and nationalist analyses in the social
sciences a wide array of activities and structures have
escaped mainstream thought. The argument here is
that the world has not changed as much as some make
out, rather, it is that our awareness of change has been
sharpened by the inadequacy of conventional thought.
For example, one of the major contributions of post-
colonial theory has been to introduce diaspora as a unit
of analysis. This approach is particularly applicable to
the case of Trinidad carnival, given the dual processes
W i l l i a m H. Thorn ton
of globalization identified. The Trinidad carnival and
its overseas offspring fits into Gilroy's concept of a
Black Atlantic where 'double consciousness' and trans-
nationalism are focal processes in the Caribbean's
experience with globalization.
The study of the Trinidad carnival and its overseas
offspring illustrates that globalization presents oppor
tunities for some reversal in hegemonic trends. However,
the case study shows that globalization is not a benign
process and that there are limited possibilities for trans
formation, given the strictures and rigidities in the
global political economy. The limitations are systemic
in nature in that they relate to large-scale, long-term
processes such as colonialist discourse and imperialism.
In peripheral societies the political and economic elite
are generally insecure and view the social protest in
popular culture with much trepidation. They are there
fore loath to acknowledge, far more invest in, the glo
balizing potential of the local popular culture. They are
more likely to denigrate and marginalize it, and failing
that, to co-opt it. Consequently, the tendency is for
local capabilities not to be fully maximized at home.
This suggests that the future contribution of Trinidad
carnival to global culture may begin to move outside
the control of the parent carnival and the home terri
tory if a localized global strategy is not developed.
Historically, the carnivalesque spirit of festivity,
laughter and irreverence feeds off the enduring
celebration of birth, death and renewal and the eternal
search for freedom from the strictures of official
culture. From this perspective the Trinidad carnival
confronts and unmasks sociohierarchical inequalities
and hegemonic discourses at home and in the diaspora.
Aesthetic and symbolic rituals operate as the basis for
critiquing the unequal distribution of power and
resources and a mode of resistance to colonialist and
neocolonialist cultural representations and signifying
practices. The Trinidad carnival and its overseas off
spring is a popular globalized celebration of hybridity
and cultural identity, a contested space and practice,
a ritual of resistance which facilitates the centring of
the periphery.
Mapping the "Glocal" Village: The Political Limits of "Glocalization"
William H. Thornton
[•••]
'Glocalization' - a word that tellingly has its roots in
Japanese commercial strategy - erases the dividing line
between universalism and particularism, modernity and
tradition. The resulting hybrid demythologizes locality
as an independent sphere of values and undermines the
classic Tonniesian antithesis of benign culture versus
malign civilization. It operates, for example, in micro-
marketing strategies that 'invent' (g)local traditions as
needed - needed for the simple reason that diversity sells
[. . .] In the case of Massey's 'global sense of place', this
predilection for locational invention is flowing over into
academic discourse, and particularly into cultural studies.
The danger is that this 'glocal' invention of difference
may operate at the expense of more 'revolting' but
ultimately more resistant strains of difference. Glocal
theory, that is, may too easily resolve the critical tension
between global and local values, thus abetting global
commercial interests. For many on the Left, most
notably David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, postmod
ernism is quite simply a solvent for global capitalism.
From this perspective modernism arose out of an
incomplete modernization and remained at least par
tially at odds with capitalistic 'logic'. Postmodernism,
by contrast, issues from the triumphant completion of
modernization and has no use for 'Pazian' resistance.
This study shares the wariness of Harvey and Jameson
toward International Postmodernism, yet is equally
wary of any Marxist solution to the problem. So too it
is wary of some geocultural correctives, which replace
the global anti-globalism of the Left with a hybrid
(g)Iocalism that, on closer examination, has no teeth.