Bahian carnival and social carnivalesque in trans-Atlantic context

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2968073
AutoresP Armstrong (0000-0003-3042-3074, California State University Los Angeles, autor de correspondencia)
Año2010
Volumen16
Número4
Páginas447-469
Fecha de publicación2010-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial Identities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1350-4630 • E-ISSN: 1363-0296
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13504630.2010.497722
OpenAlexW1973275822
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas15

This article outlines strands of carnival theory from Bakhtin to Black Atlantic and East African post-colonial scholarship, then describes the carnival of Bahia, Brazil. In New World carnivals, race is a critical rhetorical category in the exchange between everyday authority and the subaltern cultures whose energies manifest in the event. The most racially self-conscious of such carnivals, the Bahian carnival is generally considered a beacon of Afro-centricity and constant aesthetic evolution, and associated with resistance to patriarchal order. Here, as elsewhere, however, carnival praxes can be read as a reflection of social conflicts and collusions, but not as a transparent translation of material relations. As well as individual affirmation and traditional group identities, carnival now fosters consumer cultures. As to its symbolic logic, progressive rhetoric is contradicted by the surprising viability of a conservative agenda in which 'dissidents' often collude. Bahian carnival is less an inversion of order than an intensification of an everyday culture which has already assimilated carnival motifs and values. The temporal and spatial boundaries between these zones are unusually open. The composite middle-ground is here termed the 'Bahian carnivalesque'; though less conspicuous, this social sensibility of tolerance, with all its ambiguities, is more extraordinary than the carnival itself and may better survive commodification

Carnivalesque · Subaltern · Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies · Literature, Culture, and Criticism · Urban and sociocultural dynamics