Washington DC's Caribbean Carnival, which is in its 11th year, takes more than 500,000 Caribbean people "back home" with its parade of life, color and unity. To the dismay of many attendees, the parade moved from its original home on Georgia Avenue to the downtown area, where the white, business-class atmosphere with its federal buildings made some feel as though their culture was an exhibit in an art museum.
Addresses the place of Carnival in the creation of a national cultural narrative in Trinidad and Tobago and examines the role that such a narrative plays in the formation of a coherent national cultural identity
This article compares the transformation of carnival celebrations in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay at the beginning of the 20th century. It argues that changes in carnival practices in the River Plate region was linked to the rise of a vacation culture in Montevideo. The article also assesses the historiography on Montevideo's carnival which has cast a negative light on the impact of modernization and the festival. In comparison to Buenos Aires', carnival in Montevideo was fomented by governmental regulation. Finally, the article examines the relationship between carnival and each of the city's African-descent populations.
Argues that the Trinidad carnival and the overseas Caribbean carnivals (e.g. Notting Hill, London; Caribana, Toronto; Labour Day, New York) are products of and responses to the processes of globalization as well as transcultural and transnational formations. Carnival is theorized as a hybrid site for the ritual negotiation of cultural identity and practice by the Caribbean diaspora.
On Saturday, July 3, certain sections of downtown Montreal should have been teeming with the music and vibrations of the Caribbean on what was supposed to be the 35th or 36th staging (depending on who is counting) of the annual Carifiesta parade. Instead, not a drum will be heard and the soca, calypso, reggae and zouk rythmns that should have been fueling the fire in the tens of thousands of participants and spectators along Rene Levesques Blv'd. will be replaced by the usual humdrum of Saturday commerce on the thoroughfare. So when it's all said and done as the cliché goes... it's our fault that we'll not be palancing in downtown Montreal.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
240 p, Contents: Im/migration, Race, and Popular Memory in Caribbean Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945-1992 --; Im/Migration History --; Playing for Keeps: A Brief Colonial History of Carnival and Powwow --; Im/migration Policy, the National Romance, and the Poetics of World Domination, 1945-1965 --; Performing Memory, Inventing Tradition: Colonial Optics and Im/migrant Locations --; Performative Spaces, Urban Politics, and the Changing Meanings of Home in Brooklyn and Minneapolis --; Sounds of Brooklyn: Pan Yards as Im/migrant Social Spaces --; Gender and Generation Down the Red Road --; Afterword. Political Economies of Home: Citizenship and Denizenship
