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179
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
THE POLITICS OF CARNIVAL
Carnival as Contentious
Performance: A Comparison
between Contemporary Fort-
de-France, Pointe-à-Pitre,
and London Carnivals
Lionel Arnaud
Institut d’Études politiques de Toulouse/Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, in a context of increased racial tensions and growing nationalist claims, the use
of rhythms, instruments, and clothing associated with Africa among the black populations of
England, Guadeloupe, and Martinique became part of a cultural and political repertoire aimed
at resurrecting and denouncing a long history of subordination. Similarly, the mobilization of
carnival by Afro-Caribbean activists today can be considered as a tactical choice—that is to say,
carnival has become part of the standardized, limited, context-dependent repertoires from which
claim-making performances are drawn.
Based on ethnographic eldwork conducted in Fort-de-France, London, and Pointe-à-Pitre
between 2000 and 2018, this article analyzes how cultural movements have drawn on
carnivalesque aesthetics to both memorialize and display the complex history of black Caribbean
populations. I argue that Caribbean carnival has been subject to constant reinterpretations
since the eighteenth century and that, as such, this repertoire is not only a model or a set of
limited means of action, but also a convention through which carnival groups constantly reinvent
their skills and resources. Furthermore, this article shows that the repertoires mobilized by the
carnival bands I study in Europe and in the Caribbean cannot be reduced to an aesthetic gesture
that serves political claims, and that they are part of a historical genealogy that testies to the
irreducible character of a way of life.
KEYWORDS
Caribbean
cultural movements
carnival performances
mobilization
politicization
repertoire
resistance
180
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
Carnival as Contentious Performance: A Comparison between Contemporary
Fort-de-France, Pointe-à-Pitre, and London Carnivals
Lionel Arnaud
Introduction
Following nineteenth-century emancipations, black populations remained marginalized
across the American continent. Kept away from participation in the national economic and
political systems, they often used carnival as a vehicle to assert their presence and to position
themselves against the hegemonic projects of European societies.1 While the legacy of slavery
fueled a desire to emancipate from the norms and codes of white “civilization,” carnival artists
and participants rarely explicitly memorialized their past oppression. Across the continent,
carnival was primarily perceived as a time and space for celebration and for individual or
collective creation.2 In the Caribbean, even though it provided a stage for free expression that
sometimes bordered on the political—the burning of Vaval, the traditional cardboard and papier-
mâché gure that reigns over the Guadeloupe and Martinique carnivals, may thus be interpreted
as a way to wipe the slate clean and erase present inequalities—it was not a site for vocal claim-
making.
In the 1970s, however, a variety of cultural movements challenged the “bourgeois” character of
carnival and injected it with more militant undertones in a context of increased racial tensions
and growing nationalist claims. Carnival thus left the “infrapolitical” sphere—where actions,
gestures, and signs that criticized the dominant went mostly unnoticed—and grew into a “public
transcript” of power relations that was more rebellious and subversive.3 The use of rhythms,
instruments, and clothing associated with Africa, especially, became part of a cultural and
political repertoire aimed at resurrecting and denouncing a long history of subordination.
Deemed more “authentic,” African performance styles epitomized a desire to resist the
neocolonial order, racism, assimilation, or, more largely,
pwotasyon
.4
Charles Tilly’s notion of “repertoires of contention,” dened as “prevailing forms of [collective]
action” that “characterize the interaction among a specied set of collective actors” seems
particularly fruitful when analyzing the reasons why social movements put certain artistic
traditions, including carnival, at the service of political battles.5 The mobilization of the carnival
performance repertoire can indeed be considered a “strategic choice” if we consider “the
range of actions theoretically available” to Afro-Caribbean activists.6 In the Caribbean context,
however, the use of particular drums or costumes cannot be analyzed solely as a “tactic,” insofar
as slavery was not just a form of economic oppression: it also entailed a process of cultural
dispossession (deculturation) and the imposition of an exogenous culture (enculturation).
Consequently, carnival participation by Afro-Caribbean activists in Fort-de-France, Pointe-à-Pitre,
and London is inseparable from a desire to expose the cultural dimension of neocolonialism, with
a view to individual and collective empowerment.
To test this hypothesis, I will rst review the history of carnival in Guadeloupe and Martinique—
two former colonies that became overseas
départements
of France in 19467—and in London,
where Trinidadian migrants established and developed one of the largest carnivals in the world in
1. Roger Bastide,
Les Amériques
noires
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996
[1967] ).
2. Denis-Constant Martin, “Je
est un autre, nous est un même.
Culture populaire, identités et
politique à propos du carnaval
de Trinidad.”
Revue française de
science politique
42, no. 5 (1992):
183.
3. James C. Scott,
Domination
and the Arts of Resistance: Hid-
den Transcripts
(New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1990).
4. In Guadeloupe and Martinique,
the Creole expression
pwota-
syon
refers to the abuse of power
by a powerful person over some-
one he already knows is weaker
than he is, to make him even more
subordinate.
5. Charles Tilly,
Trajectories of
Change
(Chicago: Chicago Univer-
sity Press, 2006), 50, 39.
6. Charles Tilly, “Repertoires of
Contention in America and Britain,
1750-1830,” in
The Dynamics of
Social Movements: Resource
Mobilization, Social Control, and
Tactics
, ed. Mayer N. Zald and
John David McCarthy (Cam-
bridge: Winthrop, 1979), 131.
7. While these “sister islands”
display a high degree of com-
monality, starting of course with
their simultaneous integration
into the French Republic after
World War II, their histories are
different. Occupied by the English
from 1794 to 1802, Martinique in
particular was exempted from the
rst abolition of slavery (1794),
which in Guadeloupe resulted
in a considerable weakening of
planter hegemony. This histori-
cal divergence may explain why
181
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
large-scale social, political, and
cultural mobilizations such as the
2009 general strike have often
started in Guadeloupe before
spreading to Martinique. See
Jean-Luc Bonniol, “Janvier-mars
2009, trois mois de lutte en Gua-
deloupe,”
Les Temps Modernes
1, nos. 662–63 (2011): 82–113.
For further discussion, see Lionel
Arnaud,
Les tambours de Bô Kan-
nal. Mobilisations et résistances
culturelles en Martinique
(Paris:
Karthala, forthcoming).
8. Tilly,
Trajectories of Change
.
9. Howard S. Becker and Robert
R. Faulkner,
“Do You Know...?”
The Jazz Repertoire in Action
(Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009).
10. Charles Tilly, “Nineteenth-Cen-
tury Origins of Our Twentieth-Cen-
tury Collective-Action Repertoire,”
CRSO Working Paper No. 244
(University of Michigan, Septem-
ber 1981), 9–10.
11. Lilian Mathieu,
L’espace des
mouvements sociaux
(Belle-
combes-en-Bauges: Le Croquant,
2012).
12. On the general history of
Afro-Caribbean carnivals, see
Richard D. Burton,
Afro-Creole:
Power, Opposition, and Play in
the Caribbean
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2018); Paul
Rosele Chim and Joël Rabo-
teur, eds.,
Le Carnaval et la folie
imaginaire des peuples
(Paris:
Édition Publibook, 2012); Thierry
L’Etang et André Lucrèce, eds.,
Le Carnaval. Sources, traditions,
modernité
(Fort-de-France: Les
Cahiers du Patrimoine, 2007);
Hollis Liverpool,
Rituals of Power
and Rebellion: The Carnival
the post–World War II period. I will then analyze how groups organized in these three locations in
the 1970s have drawn on carnivalesque aesthetics to both memorialize and display the complex
history of black Caribbean populations. The third part of my essay will focus on the participatory
nature of carnival and how it has fostered forms of resistance that are not only aesthetic but also
social—that is, embedded in values of solidarity and community. Ultimately, I will highlight the
“trajectories of change”8 that have affected Afro-Caribbean carnival performances so as to refute
the idea of xed Afro-Caribbean cultural and political repertoire that can be learned and then
known once and for all, and to present carnival as a
convention
through which carnival groups
constantly reinvent their skills and resources.9
1. The Origins of the Carnival Action Repertoire in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and London
In its most interactionist sense, the word “repertoire” refers to a model “in which the accumulated
experience … of contenders interact with the strategies of authorities to make a limited number of
forms of action more feasible, attractive, and frequent than many others which could, in principle,
serve the same interests.”10 The choice of means of action is thus restricted by situational
constraints, including cultural familiarity, the availability of certain resources to the group at a
specic time, and the existence of “competing” claims by other groups.11 Carnival provides an
interesting vantage point from which to investigate the dynamics of the reconstruction and
reappropriation of meaning, especially in contexts of cultural pluralism where various social
groups are involved in uneven numerical, political, economic, or racial relationships. In order to
better understand this process of constant reinterpretation, I will begin by briey distinguishing
three stages—from the arrival of carnival in the Caribbean to the development of street bands in
the aftermath of abolition to its reinvention in the immediate postwar period.12 I will then analyze
how cultural movements have tried to reinvent carnival by subverting the hierarchy of values
between European and African cultures.
Carnival: Between Freedom and Prohibition
The rst period started when European Christian settlers imported their carnivalesque traditions,
including charivaris, cavalcades, balls, and masked receptions. Soon, carnival became a “Creole”
celebration, organized by and for the exclusive enjoyment of European settlers: it consisted
mainly of indoor parties, balls, and house-to-house visits, in which high-society men and women
were costumed either as
neg’ jardin
(black eld workers) or
mulâtresses
(mulatto women), who
embodied seduction and temptation in the white imagination.13 In Trinidad and Tobago, where
carnival arrived in the luggage of French colonists worried about the instability of the islands they
had settled in, men went out at night with torches and drums to form
canboulay
(from
cannes
brûlées
, burnt cane) processions in which they mimicked black activity when a cane re broke
out.14 Meanwhile, free people of color were not allowed to mingle with whites, and therefore
celebrated carnival more discreetly, away from the
habitations
. However, under mounting
pressure from the black population in the early nineteenth century, whites let the
mûlatres
organize private dances, which they were forbidden to attend. As for slaves, they were banned
from participating in the masquerade carnival events of the colonial elite, except to serve their
masters.
After the abolition of slavery in 1838 (Trinidad and Tobago) and in 1848 (Martinique and
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Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
Guadeloupe), a new period began. While the black bourgeoisie tried to imitate the white
bourgeoisie by launching its own balls, where satin and velvet reigned supreme, former
slaves left the houses to “occupy” the streets, a space where people with few resources could
nevertheless celebrate.15 Because colonial ocials considered street carnival to be a threat
to law and order, morality, and private property, masks and disguises were often prohibited,
under penalty of imprisonment. In Trinidad, attempts were made as early as 1858 to prevent
the canboulay processions, which since 1838 had become a symbolic celebration of black
emancipation—even though they never took place on August 1, that is, the ocial day of the
abolition of slavery. Canboulay was no longer allowed after 1881, while a ship from the British
royal eet would remain anchored off Port-of-Spain during the carnival period until the 1950s.
After the Second World War, carnival changed again. In 1946 the former French colonies of
Martinique and Guadeloupe became French overseas
départements
, which meant that the
residents of both islands now beneted from the same social and political rights as the rest
of French citizens. From a simple popular celebration, carnival became a public affair. The
city of Fort-de-France gradually got involved in its organization and consistently supported its
development. Competitions were organized that allowed local artists and musicians to display
their mastery of beguine,16 mazurka,17 and
valse creole
(Creole waltz), while in the countryside
and in working-class neighborhoods people continued to organize satirical parades that mocked
political gures and social actors who had “erred” (whether by committing adultery or engaging
in so-called disreputable behavior) by burning them in egy. But the emergence of organizing
committees and carnival federations, along with the development of a Caribbean consumer
society, partly converted carnival into a sedate, westernized celebration. In 1950s Fort-de-France
and Pointe-à-Pitre, beautiful young women dressed in either traditional clothing or modern
outts now competed for the title of Queen of Carnival in the presence of the prefect and military
authorities.18 In Trinidad and Tobago, the independence gained from the United Kingdom in
1962 resulted in the recognition and institutionalization of carnival. Steel band19 and calypso20
competitions lost some of their critical edge to become instruments of nationalism.
The Two Faces of Carnival: “Pretty Mas” vs. “Traditional Mas”
In Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Trinidad and Tobago today, carnival is a divided event: on the
one hand, there is “Pretty Mas” (also called “Fancy Mas” or “bourgeois carnival”), the colorful and
joyful festival during which well-organized walking bands dance one after another, displaying
shimmering, richly decorated costumes; on the other hand, there is “Traditional Mas” (or
“Ole Mas”), the carnival of the “dirty,” the celebration which showcases menacing, disruptive
costumed gures (the Midnight Robber, Pierrot Grenade, etc.) and during which single maskers
and small groups of men and women parade in cheap costumes that they have made with the
means at their disposal. This duality of carnival, separating two audiences and two carnival
repertoires—one static, aesthetically pleasing, and European in inspiration; the other ambulatory,
vaguely threatening, and rooted in Afro-Creole culture—particularly manifested itself in the 1970s,
with groups that sought to challenge the cultural hegemony of the bourgeois elites by occupying
public space.
In the French West Indies some carnival groups indeed freed themselves from the rules set
by the carnival federations. Emancipated from bourgeois conventions, much like their fugitive-
Tradition in Trinidad and Tobago
1763-1962
(Chicago: Research
Associates School Times, 2001);
Biringanine Ndagano,
Penser le
carnaval. Variations, discours et
représentations
(Paris: Karthala,
2010); John W. Nunley and Judith
Bettelheim, eds.
Caribbean Fes-
tival Arts: Each and Every Bit of
Difference
(Seattle: St. Louis Art
Museum/University of Washing-
ton Press, 1988); and Véronique
Rochais and Patrick Bruneteaux,
Le Carnaval des travestis. Les
travestis makoumè
(Case-Pilote:
Lafontaine, 2006).
13. The word
mûlatres
comes
from the late sixteenth-century
Spanish word
mulato
, which
meant “young mule.” It was the
term enslavers used to refer
to children born out of (mostly
forced) intercourse with African
slaves. In their minds, any union
between whites and blacks
was unnatural and could thus
be compared to the progeny of
two equine species. Owing to
their European ancestry and to
a generally lighter skin, however,
mulatto children were often freed,
educated, and could inherit their
father’s estate. They thus became
part of a small but relatively priv-
ileged socioeconomic class. On
the specic gure of the
mulatta
in the Atlantic world, see Joseph
Roach,
Cities of the Dead: Cir-
cum-Atlantic Performance
(New
York: Columbia University Press,
1996); Teresa C. Zackodnik,
The
Mulatta and the Politics of Race
(Jackson: University Press of Mis-
sissippi, 2010); and Emily Clark,
The Strange History of the Amer-
ican Quadroon: Free Women of
Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic
World
(Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2013).
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Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
14. Trinidad was a Spanish colony
from 1498 to 1797. During the lat-
ter part of the eighteenth century,
an inux of white and “colored”
French planters and their black
slaves transformed Trinidad into a
Spanish colony run by Frenchmen
and worked by African slaves. In
1797, when the island came under
British control, it hosted 250 white
French planters, 150 Spanish
residents, 4,700 mulattoes, and
nearly 100,000 slaves. For about
a century, from the end of the
eighteenth century to the end of
the nineteenth century, the French
plantocracy dominated Trinidad
and Tobago. Planters spoke
French or a Creolized French, and
they mainly attended Catholic
churches.
15. On postemancipation carnival
in Trinidad, see especially Ana
Maria Alonso, “Men in ‘Rags’ and
the Devil on the Throne: A Study
of Protest and Inversion in the
Carnival of Post-Emancipation
Trinidad,” in “Carnival in Perspec-
tive,” special issue,
Plantation
Society in the Americas: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Trop-
ical and Subtropical History and
Culture
3, no. 1: 73–120.
16. Beguine (or biguine) is a
Caribbean musical and choreo-
graphic genre that developed in
Martinique after 1848. With the
creation of musical societies and
the organization of concerts, the
cities of Martinique and Gua-
deloupe saw the emergence of
ball orchestras identical to the
jazz orchestras of New Orleans.
Composed of clarinets, drums,
and banjos, later associated
with drums, these orchestras
popularized biguine in Parisian
clubs of the 1920s. For a study
of twentieth-century biguine, see
slave ancestors (
maroons
) had freed themselves from slavery, they went off the beaten track,
both in the literal and gurative sense, since they did not allow themselves to be constricted
by any itinerary or any way of experiencing carnival. “A form of physical and symbolic violence
exuded from the[ir] bodies through the virulent determination to speak out against, mock, and
stigmatize power-brokers of any kind. This was their opportunity to give corporeal expression to
their dissatisfaction.”21 If maskers often came off as “
méchant
,” (nasty) in their politicized use of
carnival, they nevertheless submitted to the rules of conduct set by the groups they joined. They
also conformed to carefully dened musical identities and ritualized outts whose primary goal
was to showcase their attachment to African roots. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, the
mas a
Kongo
(Congo masking) and the “Neg Gwo Siwo” (from
nègres gros-sirop
) thus involved coating
their bodies and faces with a mixture of
sirop de batterie
(sugarcane syrup) and soot or coal,
giving their skins a darker, shiny aspect (g. 1). The body thus disguised, sometimes dressed in
a short loincloth made with banana leaves, was supposed to enhance the memory of Africa in
a context where it was often denied, or simply despised. The deprecated link to Africa was thus
transformed into the armation of a glorious identity, in an interesting reversal of the ordinary
hierarchy of values between European and African performance cultures.
Figure 1. The “Neg Gwo Siwo”
tradition revisited by a group of
young activists in the colors of
the Martinique ag during Fort-
de-France Carnival, 2020.
Credit: Benny Photo.
184
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
Édouard Benoît, “Biguine: Popular
Music of Guadeloupe, 1940-1960,”
in
Zouk: World Music in the West
Indies
, ed. Jocelyne Guilbaud
(Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993).
17. Mazurka is a style of music
and dance that originated from
Poland. It arrived in Martinique
at the very beginning of the
twentieth century. It was the
favorite dance of the French army
ocers, who were soon imitated
by the residents of the city of
Saint-Pierre, the former capital of
Martinique.
18. In this new conguration
resulting from
départementalisa-
tion
, that is, the 1946 incorpora-
tion of the “old colonies” (Guade-
loupe, Martinique, Reunion Island,
and French Guiana) into France
as
départements
, the prefect
became the main representative
of the French state, as he already
was in other French departments.
His authority gradually replaced
that of the all-powerful governor,
who symbolized the colonial
administration. Martinicans
overwhelmingly voted for this
change, expecting this supposed
administrative standardization to
break with the colonial tradition
of using the “peculiar” nature of
overseas countries as an excuse
for setting specic legal rules.
19. A steel band is an orchestra
made up of percussion instru-
ments such as drums and metal
containers. Steel bands often play
calypso melodies, but calypso
singers tend to be also accom-
panied by instruments such as
the guitar, the trumpet, and the
saxophone.
20. The word “calypso” sup-
posedly derives from the West
However, it should be noted that, before the 1960s and 1970s, the use of the
masque à goudron
(tar mask) in Guadeloupe and Martinique carnivals was not necessarily related to African
ancestry but was rather meant to frighten children and bystanders—especially those wearing
elegant carnival outts—who feared being soiled by the
siwo batri
. In other words, even though
the color black was activated as a symbolic marker,
mas a Kongo
did not necessarily constitute
a political claim or an act of “resistance” as conceptualized by James Scott.22 The practice of
black body make-up, as well as the use of foliage, was actually a crucial aspect of Indo-European
carnival, with its attendant cult of the bear and the wild man.23 Similarly, the
djab wouj
(red devil)
and
ti djab
(little devil) gures which, today, are said to refer to positive African gods (similar to
the masks of the Casamance harvest in Senegal), could also found in many European carnivals
(g. 2).24 Even the use of the whip in contemporary Guadeloupe Carnival, said to be a reminder of
slavery and subjugation, is nevertheless present in Indo-European carnival as a way to improve
soil (and female) fertility and ward off evil spirits.25
The same type of tradition also existed in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, especially during Jouvay
(or J’Ouvert), when gangs of young people imitated devils, demons, monsters, and goblins by
soiling themselves with chocolate, fat, oil and paint, tar, and molasses to symbolize the shedding
of all inhibitions and exorcize their fear of death. But these traditions echoed not only the happy
and festive celebrations of slaves after they gained their freedom in 1838, but also the spirit of
civil unrest in Port-of-Spain, when people covered themselves in oil or paint or tar to avoid being
recognized, without any reference to an African past.
The desire to promote Afro-Caribbean culture and traditions in Trinidad only became explicit in
the 1950s, with the making of increasingly spectacular costumes that would later become tourist
Figure 2. The Red Devils of the Tanbo Bô Kannal walking group in Fort-de-France Carnival, 2013.
Author’s photograph.
185
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
African term
kaiso
, used as
an expression of admiration
similar to “Bravo!” In West Africa
(present-day Nigeria), people
would gather in
kaiso
tents where
a griot would lead them in song.
In pre-emancipation Trinidad
captive Africans brought to work
on sugar plantations would gather
during carnival and mix African
singing, dancing, and drumming
with “patois” (Trinidadian French
Creole) to mock their masters
and to communicate with each
other. To stand out, each singer
adopted a stage name and a
recognizable style. Today, the
word “calypso” refers to any song
that is performed in the streets
by carnival-goers, or on stage by
professional or semi-professional
singers. For further detail, see
John Cowley,
Carnival, Canboulay
and Calypso: Traditions in the
Making
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998); and Joce-
lyne Guilbaud,
Governing Sound:
The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s
Carnival Musics
(Chicago: Chi-
cago University Press, 2007).
21. Jérôme Pruneau, Mely-
on-Reinette Stéphanie, and Agnès
Danielle, “‘
Maché an Mas-la !
’ Eth-
nographie de l’usage symbolique
du corps ‘charnel’ dans le car-
naval guadeloupéen,”
Caribbean
Studies
37, no. 1 (2009): 53. My
translation.
22. When analyzing the notion
of resistance, James Scott
distinguishes between “
real
resist-
ance,” which “embodies ideas or
intentions that negate the basis
of domination itself” and has rev-
olutionary potential, and “token,
incidental, or epiphenomenal
activities,” which lack the organ-
ized, systematic, and cooperative
character of true resistance and
attractions. In 1957, a nineteen-year-old bandleader named George Bailey revolutionized carnival
with his “Back to Africa” organization, which presented a “Pretty” version of the African roots of
Trinidadians, hitherto perceived through the prism of the Western or even Hollywood imagination,
in a sumptuous show inspired by the traditions of West Africa.26
Intended to offset the pejorative image of Africa conveyed by the colonial imagination, this
performance repertoire was imported to London in 1959 by Trinidadian activist Claudia Jones
(1915–64). The founding editor of the
West Indian Gazette
, a monthly newspaper with a
circulation of fteen thousand established in London in March 1958, she led the rst West Indian
delegation to the Home Oce to deal with the racist violence that had then been shaking the
Notting Hill district.27 Four months later, on January 30, 1959, in order to bring the Caribbean
community together and encourage friendship based on equality and human dignity with the
English, she took the initiative in organizing London’s rst Afro-Caribbean carnival in the St.
Pancras festival hall, north of the British capital city.28 A thousand people attended the event,
which featured steel bands, calypso singers, and a lavish costume competition. The celebration
soon spilled over when steel band players decided to organize an impromptu parade during
the event, creating tensions with some residents. In 1964, Rhaunee Laslett, a social worker and
community activist who had been born in London to an American Indian mother and a Russian
father, reshaped the event around the prevention of racial tensions and the rapprochement of a
divided community. With the help of a social work organization, the North Kensington Amenity
Trust, she transformed Notting Hill Carnival from a simple competition of calypso masks and
singers into a vast public event. In the early 1970s, the advent of sound systems, but also of
Rastafarian culture from Jamaica, boosted the event but also its communal dimension by
attracting many participants, particularly young blacks from the various segregated districts of
London.
2. From the Promotion of Caribbean Culture to Political Mobilization
In London, Fort-de-France, and Pointe-à-Pitre, the 1970s were a time when the carnival repertoire
was recongured. In a context of growing “identity” claims and political radicalization, attested
by the diffusion and success of Black Power ideas among Afro-descendants around the world,
the opposition between Pretty Mas and Traditional Mas was replayed to serve more openly
militant agendas.29 A “third way” of sorts between the self-regulated, “civilized” celebration of the
“bourgeois” (whites) and the unruly charivari of the (black) masses was devised. It combined a
supposed African and popular “authenticity” with careful, even spectacular staging.
Among the “new” carnival bands that emerged at the time, carnival was seen as a way not only
to reclaim and celebrate black culture but also to psychologically and somatically awaken Afro-
Caribbean people to the need for political or, more specically, identity-based claims. As such,
the repertoire was not solely meant to mobilize: it was rooted in action-based pedagogy, meaning
in a willingness, endogenous to the collective, to deepen its understanding of itself, of others, and
of their political, social, and cultural environment.
Skin Drums and Colonial Helmets as Vehicles of Cultural Revival
In Fort-de-France, the Tanbo Bô Kannal walking band (TBK) has strived for more than forty years
to promote not just Martinican carnival, but also, and above all, black Martinican music and
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dances such as
bèlè
and
kalenda
, inherited from the former plantation complex and whose
main characteristic is that they involve skin drums (
tambours a po
in Martinican Creole).30
TBK was born in one of the most disadvantaged districts of Martinican capital, the Rive
Droite-Levassor district, also known as “Bô Kannal”: members wanted to improve the image
of this area of ill repute while claiming their nonconformity, in a sort of reversal of the stigma.31
Concerned with the gradual disappearance in his neighborhood of a number of cultural
traditions such as the Papa Djab gure (an emblematic red devil that used to be an essential
gure in Martinique Carnival) and of
danmyé
(a martial art and dance form similar to Brazilian
capoeira
, in which two men clash to the rhythm of the drum), a young slaughterhouse worker
named Victor Treffre (born in 1941) started to publicize the work of various informal artistic
collectives in the early 1960s. He later strove to collect traditional musical and choreographic
know-how in order to transmit and disseminate them among the younger generations.
In February 1973, these initiatives acquired a spectacular dimension as youths from Rive
Droite decided to display their singing and drumming skills in the streets of Fort-de-France.
Denigrated by the mulatto class, pushed off the podium by the organizers of carnival, they
improvised a vindictive chorus (
Comité bourgeois, carnaval bidon!
[Bourgeois committee, fake
carnival!]) and vowed to restore carnival to its former “authenticity,” which, according to them,
was threatened by the “owery oats” of the assimilated elites.
Hooked on the idea, they started rehearsing with new instruments adapted to street-walking,
created by recycling old plastic cans on which they xed the skins of young goats recovered
from the slaughterhouse in Fort-de-France where some of them worked. Rather than just
imitate the scorned music of the “old negroes” (
bagay vié neg
), they created a new type of
performance, the
kalenbwa
, inspired by kalenda dancing32 and by the music of the
chwal
bwa
(wooden horse).33 The overall atmosphere was one of celebration and mockery, with the
participants being mainly there to “let off steam” and to make their “sound” heard. However,
a series of tragic events—including the police murder of a young student at Schœlcher High
School in 197134 and the bloody repression of the February 1974 strike in Chalvet35—led to
a reorientation of the practice. Cultural and political activists started to envision the cultural
initiatives of Bô Kannal youths as a potential mechanism for popular political mobilization.
Today, TBK is present at most events that commemorate slavery, be it the “Convoy for
Reparation” (initiated in 2000 by Garcin Malsa, founder of the Movement for the Independence
of Martinique), the events organized for the ftieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death in
2011, or the commemorations of the popular revolt of December 1959 when three young
demonstrators were killed by the police (g. 3).36 In 2015, TBK was particularly active in the
May 22 celebrations that, in Martinique, commemorate the abolition of slavery by the French
Republic.37 So was Voukoum, a guest Guadeloupean organization created in 1988 with which
it maintains close relations. Originally from Basse-Terre (the main island of Guadeloupe),
Voukoum is in many respects comparable to TBK, due to its popular origins and its use of so-
called
a po
(skin) drums. What is original about this walking group’s carnival work is their desire
to honor Guadeloupean culture heritage through masks and traditional costumes (such as
mas
a Kongo
). To them, these are emblems of a Guadeloupean identity and, more broadly, of its
African roots, which the group considers to be in jeopardy and would like to see acknowledged,
supported, and strengthened.
therefore cannot effect signicant
change. See James C. Scott,
Weapons of the Weak. Everyday
Forms of Peasant Resistance
(New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1985), 292.
23. See Samuel Kinser’s essay
in this issue and Marie-Pascale
Mallé, ed.,
Le Monde à l’envers
(Paris: Mucem/Flammarion,
2014).
24. Aimé Césaire, the poet who
was elected mayor of Fort-de-
France in 1945 and remained
deputy to the French National
Assembly for Martinique from
1945 to 1993, is often presented
as the rst, if not the rst, to have
highlighted the African ancestry of
the Martinican red devil: “One day,
I had a shock, I was in Senegal, in
Casamance, during a great village
festival. Suddenly, I saw the Mar-
tinican Mardi-Gras fat ox coming
in with its red suit studded with
mirrors, its tail and its bovine
horns. I ran up to a villager, asked
him what it was, what this mask
was, and what it meant to him.
He told me that it was the mask
of those who have undergone the
initiation. He explained to me that
the bovine horns were the symbol
of temporal wealth, and that the
mirrors placed side by side were
the symbol of knowledge, in other
words the symbol of spiritual
wealth.” Cited in Thierry L’Étang et
André Lucrèce, eds.,
Le Carnaval.
Sources, traditions, modernité
(Fort-de-France: Les Cahiers
du Patrimoine, 2007), 106. My
translation.
25. Stéphanie Mulot, “La trace
des Masques. Identité guade-
loupéenne entre pratiques et
discours.”
Ethnologie française
33, no. 1 (2003): 111–22.
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As emblematic of the Antillean cultural revival is Akiyo (Creole for “Who are they?”), a carnival
group initiated in 1979 by anticolonial activists concerned with promoting Guadeloupean
culture for a Guadeloupean audience. Taking up the formula initiated by TBK in the early 1970s,
this self-identied
Mouvman kiltirél
(cultural movement) reclaims the streets with skin drums
and rhythms from the
gwo ka
(literally, big drum) repertoire, a musical genre inherited from
the plantation complex and similar to
bèlè
, but specic to Guadeloupe. Akiyo differs from
TBK, however, in its organization and its openly political commitment to wrest Guadeloupean
culture from local and national public authorities. Some of its founding members were actually
activists associated with the Mouvement populaire pour une Guadeloupe indépendante (MPGI),
while others belonged to clandestine political groups.38 While TBK members have become
more or less politicized over time, trading their red
kaban
costumes (old nightgowns or sheets
traditionally stored under the bed as a draw sheet) for African outts and later costumes bearing
the colors of the Martinican ag (black, red, and green), Akiyo members immediately considered
the mobilization of previously banned music and instruments as anticolonial action. In the early
1980s, its participants went so far as to mock the French state by wearing military fatigues and
colonial helmets. Believing that the group was damaging the reputation of the French army, the
subprefect issued an order in 1985 prohibiting the band from performing in public. In reaction,
more than eight thousand people demonstrated in the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre along with Akiyo.
Since then, colonial outts have become a trademark of the band. Combined with the beat of
dozens of skin drums, played in unison while performing a fast-paced march (the
déboulé
), they
reinforce the group’s warlike character and never fail to impress audiences. Today, Akiyo’s stated
objective is to turn carnival into a place of expression, derision, an outlet for youth, where it is
possible to denounce colonization, slavery, and the excess of assimilation without replacing the
politics of protest (g. 4).
26. Garth L. Green and Philip W.
Scher, eds.,
Trinidad Carnival: The
Cultural Politics of a Transnational
Festival
(Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2007), 35.
27. On August 17, 1958, a hateful
crowd broke the windows of a
black-occupied house on Stowe
Road in the Shepherd’s Bush
neighborhood. A few days later, a
black man was savagely attacked
in a North Kensington pub. From
August to September 1958, these
racist attacks occurred daily,
day and night, causing dozens
of injuries. Eight months later, a
young Caribbean carpenter was
beaten to death. These riots,
known as the “Notting Hill white
riots,” galvanized the black com-
munity and strongly contributed
to its mobilization throughout the
1960s. See Edward Pilkington,
Beyond the Mother Country. West
Indians and the Notting Hill White
Riots
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1988).
28. Bill Schwarz, “‘Claudia Jones
and the
West Indian Gazette
’:
Reections on the Emergence of
Post‐colonial Britain,”
Twentieth
Century British History
14, no. 3
(2003): 264–85.
29. As Stuart Hall has argued,
“Black is not a question of
pigmentation ... [It] is a historical
category, a political category, a
cultural category.” Stuart Hall, “Old
and New Identities, Old and New
Ethnicities,” in
Theories of Race
and Racism
, ed. John Solomos
and Les Back (London: Routledge,
2000), 149. According to Claire
Alexander, British “blackness”
has its own specic history that
can be broadly divided into two
phases: one that ran from the
1960s to the mid-1980s and
which should be understood as a
political commitment to bringing
Figure 3. Tanbo Bô Kannal’s 2011 parade through the streets of Fort-de-France
to commemorate the December 1959 popular uprising. Author’s photograph.
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Journal of Festive Studies
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Figure 4. Akyio’s
déboulé
on January 7, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi3wWBBSOKo
Sound Systems and the Celebration of Black Community
In the French overseas departments, the 1970s were characterized by the growth of a pro-
independence, even nationalist, rhetoric that fostered a rediscovery of African music and dance
as well as renewed interest in carnival, particularly among students. In contrast, young Afro-
Caribbean people based in Paris or in the rest of France had little interest in festive traditions, and
the same was true with English youths, especially those born in Jamaica.39 Since most of them
had been born and educated in London’s inner city neighborhoods, their cultural self-expression
tended to favor the lyrics and rhythms of reggae as well as the concepts, beliefs, symbols, and
practices of Rastafarianism, two forms popularized and conated by Bob Marley and his band,
the Wailers, who quickly became icons comparable to Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X. Marley’s
songs spoke of violence, blood, re, police, oppression, and revolt; but also of love and Jah
Rastafari, the black God who would come to save black people and take them to the promised
land, Africa. Indeed, reggae and Rastafarianism developed particularly in the 1960s in the poor
districts of Kingston, the Jamaican capital, before spreading throughout the black diaspora, and
young West Indians born in Britain, facing racism and segregation, soon identied with these
movements. Gradually, reggae based in Great Britain began to emerge in the music and songs
of Caribbean bands such as Aswad, Cimarons, Misty in Roots, and Steel Pulse, which tried to
reect in part the personal experience of black people in England. In this sense, reggae and
Rastafarianism provided London’s Caribbean youth with a worldview, a political philosophy, and
an exclusive language, as well as a set of rituals rooted in music, dance, and marijuana use.40
More signicantly, both participated in the formation of neighborhood groups that would gather
around sound systems, allowing them to recreate forms of sociability away from the London’s
nightclubs, from which they were generally excluded (although the 1968 and 1976 Race Relations
Act had theoretically banned such discriminatory practices). Introduced in the 1974 Notting
Hill Carnival, sound systems symbolically “took possession” of the city’s space-time, while the
exhilaration triggered by the gathering, exacerbated by the massive consumption of alcohol and
“God’s herb,” broke with contemporary norms of behavior. Made up of one or more turntables,
together all the “nonwhite”
populations of England; and a
second, from the mid-1980s to
the very early 2000s, which saw
“the fracturing of this coalition”
over the identity claims of various
ethnic (and later, religious) groups.
Claire Alexander, “Breaking Black:
The Death of Ethnic and Racial
Studies in Britain,”
Ethnic and
Racial Studies
41, no. 6 (2018):
1038. A comparable analysis and
chronology could be applied to
the French West Indies.
30. Philip Curtin,
The Rise and Fall
of the Plantation Complex: Essays
in Atlantic History
, 2nd ed. (New
York: Cambridge University Press,
199 0).
31. While the name “Bô kannal”
sounds like an abbreviated form
of
Bord de canal
(canal’s edge),
that is, the name given to the
initially illegal neighborhood
located along the Levassor canal,
“bo” more commonly refers to a
kiss, which gives the term a very
affectionate dimension.
32. Kalenda is said to be the
oldest of the African dances in
Martinique. It is more improvisa-
tional than
bèlè
, as the dancer is
alone in front of the drum. On the
complexities of contemporary
kalenda in the French Antilles,
see Julian Gerstin, “The Allure
of Origins. Neo-African Dances
in the French Caribbean and the
Southern United States,” in
Just
Below South: Intercultural Perfor-
mance in the Caribbean and the
U.S. South
, ed. Jessica Adams,
Michael P. Bibler, and Cécile Accil-
ien (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2007): 123–45.
33.
Chwal bwa
music owes its
name to the eponymous merry-
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Figure 5. Glady Wax sound system, Notting Hill Carnival, August 2000. Author’s photograph.
an amplier, numerous speakers, and an extensive collection of vinyl records, the sound system
allowed the disc jockey to adjust the sounds to the tastes and moods of his audience, which
made it an extremely powerful medium within the Afro-Caribbean community (g. 5). In their
presence, the streets were charged with unusual, frenetic energy.
However, the multiplication of sound systems in carnival parades, the volume of the music they
played, and the crowds they generated made them an increasingly problematic aspect of the
festivities to residents and participants alike. The 1975 carnival was thus marked by an upsurge
in pickpocketing, snatching, illegal alcohol sales, and damage to the gardens of residential areas,
while only about sixty police ocers were in attendance to ensure the safety of a demonstration
previously perceived as anecdotal to London life. To meet these new challenges, various artists
who participated in the Notting Hill Carnival came together in 1975 as an organization, the
Carnival Development Committee (CDC), which encouraged the creation of new steel bands and
masking groups and eventually redirected the carnival towards the Trinidad and Tobago tradition.
In April 1976, the CDC met with the Council of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
as well as with the Metropolitan Police to discuss how to make the festivities safer. Its leaders
then decided to increase the number of police ocers to twelve hundred during the two days of
carnival, a deployment of force that was quickly considered a provocation by many young West
Indians, who already considered the police to be fundamentally racist. Some of them, loosely
organized into gangs, started to harass police ocers with stones and bottles before dispersing
into the crowd. Hundreds of police ocers and a few civilians were wounded and taken to the
go-round that turns only with the
strength of the men who push it
to give it the necessary impetus.
In the center, musicians play
traditional instruments such as
the
chacha
,
ti-bwa
, the accordion,
the Martinican ute, or the drum.
Until the 1970s, this small wooden
carousel was a feature of all local
festivals in Martinique.
34. On May 14, 1971, during a
demonstration by students of the
Schœlcher High School against
the visit of the minister of the
interior, Pierre Messmer, a clash
with the police led to the death
of a high school student named
Gérard Nouvet. The outcry that
followed forced the minister to
shorten part of his stay.
35. In early 1974, agricultural
workers went on strike to obtain
a ve-franc wage increase. On
February 14, 1974, a group of
demonstrators headed north of
the island. On the Chalvet plateau,
they fell into an ambush set
up by the French police, which
surrounded the strikers with a
helicopter and more than two
hundred gendarmes. Stones were
thrown against police ocers,
who responded with bullets. The
confrontation left one worker
dead and several injured. On
February 16, the tortured body of
a young man from Marigot was
found abandoned on a beach.
36. On these events, see Lou-
is-Georges Placide,
Les émeutes
de décembre 1959 en Martinique.
Un repère historique
(Paris: L’Har-
mattan, 2009).
37. On May 22, 1848, some sixty
thousand slaves from Martinique
rebelled to enforce the abolition
decree signed a month earlier by
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Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
members of the French govern-
ment. In memory of this uprising,
May 22 has become the day Mar-
tinicans commemorate abolition.
The date of May 10 was chosen
for metropolitan France.
38. A founding member of the
Akiyo collective, Joël Nankin, was
convicted in 1983 for having com-
mitted attacks and violating the
integrity of French territory, and
was imprisoned until 1989.
39. There is a festival in Paris that
owes a lot to the mobilization of
the Caribbean people who live in
metropolitan France. However,
besides the fact that the Parisian
city council of Paris largely initi-
ated its creation in 2001, it should
be noted that the “Carnaval
Tropical de Paris” welcomes an
ever-increasing variety of other
countries and cultures and that
the history of the Caribbean pop-
ulations living in mainland France
is, from this point of view, very dif-
ferent from that of black Britons.
Broadly speaking, each group has
much more in common with the
population of the country in which
it lives than with the Caribbean
populations of other European
countries. See Stéphanie Condon
and Margaret Byron,
Migration
in Comparative Perspective:
Caribbean Communities in Britain
and France
(New York: Routledge,
2008).
40. See the famous study by Dick
Hebdige, “Reggae, Rastas and
Rudies,” in
Resistance through
Rituals: Youth Subcultures in
Post-War Britain
, ed. Stuart Hall
and Tony Jefferson (London:
Hutchinson & Co., 1975), 135–55.
41. On the general history of
Notting Hill Carnival, see Abner
Cohen, “Drama and Politics in
hospital. The media and the government quickly escalated this confrontation, and carnival was
from then on systematically associated with disorder and violence, while the general population’s
hostility increased.41
Two approaches to carnival emerged following the 1970s confrontations.42 On the one hand,
the CDC tried to strengthen its artistic dimension by drawing inspiration from the innovations
introduced by Peter Minshall in the 1975 Trinidad Carnival. A former student of the Central
School of Art and Design in London, this spiritual heir of George Bailey surprised by presenting
a revolutionary scenography entitled “Paradise Lost,” in reference to the famous epic poem
by seventeenth-century English poet John Milton, with a group of two hundred carnival artists
who walked around the streets of Port-of-Spain with huge, spectacular costumes. On the other
hand, the Carnival and Arts Committee set out to turn Notting Hill Carnival into “a celebration
of the Black community” that would reect the needs and aspirations of Afro-Caribbean youth
and allow them to express their latent frustrations. The violence of young blacks during the
1976 carnival was interpreted by these cultural activists as a symbolic attack on the British
state. They therefore criticized any artistic approach as a form of depoliticization. In reaction to
their criticisms, the CDC reorganized in 1977 under the authority of Darcus Howe, a Trinidadian
who was also editor-in-chief of a Marxist magazine,
Rac e To d ay
. According to this inuential
advocate from the London West Indian community, the risk was, on the contrary, that the
masses would turn away from anyone who tried to turn carnival into a political demonstration.
This was summarized in 1977 by Linton Kwesi Johnson, a poet, singer, and member of the
Race
Today
collective: “If politics creeps into art unconsciously, without the writer trying anything, it
is often the most powerful political expression; but when artists try to be political in their art, it
generally ends badly, whether in poetry or literature or in other art forms. People don’t like to be
lectured.”43 According to this perspective, any attempt at instrumentalizing carnival might end
up killing it or at least blunting its political edge. Its organizers and participants had to remained
focused on maintaining their autonomy from the authorities. Consequently, CDC ocials in the
1980s condemned both the repeated attacks against Notting Hill Carnival launched by the Tory
government and interference by the Labour Party, which was then ruling the Greater London
Council and whose leader, Ken Livingstone, was working to rebrand the celebration as a symbol
of true multiculturalism and an outpost of resistance to Margaret Thatcher’s politics.44
3. Marronage and Cultural Resistance: The Invention of New Forms of Collective Action
Since the eighteenth century, the carnivalesque repertoire and the meaning of carnival itself
have constantly been reconceptualized and redesigned in the Caribbean to serve the political
needs and goals of various groups and individual actors. Carnival is not merely a spectacle; it is
a celebration in which everyone is called upon to participate and express themselves. Unlike the
ne arts, which foreground the eye as the main channel through which people can experience
beauty and maintain a distance between the viewer and the artist’s work, carnival arts celebrate
interaction and a diversity of viewpoints.45 Like other popular festivals, carnival allows Afro-
Caribbean people to attest to their mutual presence—to see, hear, feel, touch, rub shoulders, and
support each other. In this way, carnival appears as a survival of traditional cultures, which, unlike
modern societies, did not experience such a clear division between the cultural, social, economic,
and political spheres.46
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Journal of Festive Studies
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the Development of a London
Carnival,” in
Custom and Conict
in British Society
, ed. Ronald
Frankenberg (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press,
1982), 313–44; and Lionel Arnaud,
“À qui appartient le carnaval?
Circulations, (ré)appropriations
et résistances à Notting Hill (Lon-
dres, 1958-2008),” in
Les capitales
européennes de la culture depuis
1945: Berlin, Londres, Madrid,
Paris
, ed. Françoise Taliano-Des
Garets (Bordeaux: PUG, 2020,
forthcoming).
42. Everton A. Pryce, “The Notting
Hill Gate Carnival. Black Politics,
Resistance, and Leadership 1976-
1978,”
Caribbean Quarterly
2, no.
31 (1995): 35–52.
43. Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Jamai-
can Rebel Music,”
Race and Class
17, no. 4 (1976): 411.
44. Lionel Arnaud,
Réinventer la
ville. Artistes, minorités ethniques
et militants au service des poli-
tiques de développement urbain.
Une comparaison franco-britan-
nique
(Rennes: Presses universi-
taires de Rennes, 2008).
45. On the inherently dialogic
dimension of carnival, see Mikhail
Bakhtin,
Rabelais and His World
,
trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1984); and Don
Handelman,
Models and Mirrors:
Towards an Anthropology of Pub-
lic Events
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
46. Émile Durkheim,
De la division
du travail social
(Paris: PUF, 2004
[189 3] ).
47. On maroon communities
throughout the Americas, see
Richard Price, ed.,
Maroon Soci-
eties: Rebel Slave Communities
In the Caribbean, the conjunction of social and cultural claims has to do with colonial history and
slavery. Thus, one of the specicities of the Caribbean is undoubtedly that social struggles have
been built in close connection with cultural practices. Much like the use of the Creole language
has been erected as an act of political resistance—especially when it takes written forms that
were unknown until about thirty years ago—carnival bands today use “country” food, certain
forms of social assistance, and traditional music based on skin drums to revive the more or
less mythicized economic, social, and cultural resistance capability of the maroons. Hence the
need to shift our gaze from the mere processes of aesthetic and identity reinterpretation to the
repertoires that are part of their practical organization.
Marronage Practices in Caribbean Cultural Movements
To groups like Akiyo or Tanbo Bô Kannal, the reference to marronage is central. Marronage
refers to the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century phenomenon of slaves running away from the
plantations to join independent communities of fugitive slaves in inaccessible, inhospitable
environments (swamps in the southern United States, canyons in Jamaica, forests in Suriname,
jungles in the Guianas).47 Cultural life in these settlements was often rooted in Africa. Today, the
most militant carnival bands call for a new kind of marronage, “cultural marronage,” equating
gwoka
and
bèlè
with resistance practices.48 Akiyo often retells the history of abolition, declaring
that it was not truly the French abolitionist Victor Schœlcher who freed the slaves, but rather the
maroons who fought for liberty for generations. The question of whether statistically signicant
marronage practices actually existed in Guadeloupe and Martinique is of little relevance here.
As with the African masks used by Voukoum, the reconstruction of history consolidates Afro-
Caribbean identity around the pride of having had enslaved, but rebellious and free-spirited,
ancestors.49
This dynamic was rst inspired by folk musicians such as Vélo in Guadeloupe or Ti Emile
in Martinique, who conceptualized the practice of Afro-Caribbean drumming and dancing
from an “existential” point of view, as a way of “retaining the old world,” more than as a strictly
political positioning. Michel Halley, one of Akiyo’s founders who developed his drumming
skills in contact with Vélo, explains that “for a man like Vélo, independent or non-independent,
colonial or noncolonial, white or nonwhite Guadeloupe ... it was not his concern, it never was
his concern. His concern was to play, to be able to sleep and eat, and to practice freely (as
much as he could) his art of Ka, that’s all.”50 Gradually, however, and in a context of increasing
nationalist and identity-based claims, the approach inherited from these “ordinary” musicians51
was mobilized and transformed into acts of cultural and political resistance toward the French
state by the generations born after the war (g. 6). The slave, the maroon, and the
morne
(small
mountain) farmer were conated in the collective imagination into a single mythical character
whose drumming skills allowed him to free himself spiritually and physically from the plantation
system. In this respect, the practice of
bèlè
and
gwoka
became associated with a call for cultural
independence meant to combat the “Frenchication” of Martinican and Guadeloupean societies
generated by the transformation of the islands into French departments in 1946.
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While a new musical and choreographic repertoire was added to Antillean Carnival, transforming
it into a place of cultural reinvention and political expression, modes of social organization more
or less inherited from the experience of slavery such as the
Koudmen
(helping hand), which
consisted in freely offering one’s services to lighten the burden of someone building their house
or farming a piece of land, were increasingly championed by cultural movements as a way to
counter Antillean societies’ growing individualism and consumerism.52
Today, the workshops organized in preparation for carnival provide an introduction to the
musical style of each band, as well as to the fabrication of musical instruments or costumes.
This informal transmission process takes place in two stages: during the period leading to the
fat days, when advice and assistance can be obtained for the preparation of new outts or for
the improvement of instrumental practice; and during the rest of the year, when the groups’
performance calendar clears up, allowing outsiders to take part in the social and leisure activities
offered to members.
Though rooted in the experience of slavery, cultural marronage cannot fail to recall other artistic
practices that have generated new forms of sociability and blurred the lines between the politics
of protest and cultural revival, such as the artistic squats of large contemporary cities and the
rural communities that emerged after May 1968 in France.53 In 1980s London, preparations for
Notting Hill Carnival took place within the framework of community centers that were often run
by activists close to the British New Left, who wanted to ght social and racial segregation while
demystifying the cultural structures that conditioned social relations.54 Gradually, and as the civil
rights movement became more radical in the United States, these community centers became
the nexus of Afro-Caribbean life. Costume workshops, concerts, and plays inspired by the Black
Arts Movement were organized to raise local residents’ social and cultural awareness.55 Some
centers explicitly engaged in memory work aimed at reclaiming a connection to Africa while
promoting a kind of cultural nationalism that came out of the independence movements. For
instance, the Yaa Asantewaa Arts & Community Center located in the Paddington district took
the name of Ghanaian Queen Yaa Asantewaa (1850–1921) in 1985, thus honoring the woman
“who successfully led the heroic and ultimate struggle to maintain the national integrity and
Figure 6. Public performance by Akiyo in the pedestrian streets of Pointe-à-Pitre, where they perform every Saturday
morning. Credit: Otto Von Viani, 2020. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86799984
in the Americas
(Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996); and Alvin O. Thompson,
Flight to Freedom: African
Runaways and Maroons in the
Americas
(Kingston, Jamaica:
University of West Indies Press,
2006). On the Martinican case,
see Gabriel Debien, “Le Maron-
nage aux Antilles françaises au
XVIIIe siècle,”
Caribbean Studies
6, no. 3 (Oct. 1966): 3–43.
48. On cultural marronage from
the West Indies to Madagascar
to Brazil, see Stéphanie Mely-
on-Reinette, ed.,
Maronnage and
Arts: Revolts in Bodies and Voices
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cam-
bridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).
49. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger, eds.,
The Invention of
Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977).
50. Michel Halley interviewed
by Gustav Michaux-Vignes, La
Médiathèque Caraïbe, 2001,
accessed November 16, 2018,
http://www.lameca.org/publica-
tions-numeriques/interviews-au-
dio/michel-halley-2003/ (my
translation). In Antillean Creole
the particle “ka” expresses the
fact than an action is being
performed, but it also refers to the
art of drumming, or to the drum
itself, which is single-headed,
barrel-shaped and stretched with
goat- (or kid-)skin.
51. Marc Perrenoud,
Les Musicos.
Enquête sur des musiciens
ordinaires
(Paris: La Découverte,
2007).
52. Luciani Lanoir L’Etang,
Réseaux de solidarité dans la
Guadeloupe d’hier et d’aujourd’hui
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005).
193
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
ancient cultural heritage of her people.”56 Today, the wall of the vast courtyard where most of the
Notting Hill Carnival parades are prepared remains adorned with portraits of great black leaders—
including Claudia Jones, Amillar Cabral, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Queen Nzinga,
Walter Rodney, and Sojourner Truth—painted in black against a background of green, yellow and
red, that is, the three colors of the Pan-African ag (g. 7).
53. See George Katsiacas,
The
Subversion of Politics: European
Autonomous Movements and the
Decolonization of Everyday Life
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humani-
ties Press, 1997); and Laura Port-
wood-Stacer,
Lifestyle Politics
and Radical Activism
(London:
Bloomsbury, 2013).
54. Dennis Dworkin,
Cultural
Marxism in Postwar Britain: His-
tory, the New Left and the Origins
of Cultural Studies
(Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997).
55. Presented as the artistic
branch of the Black Power Move-
ment, the Black Arts Movement
emerged in the mid-1960s in
New York’s Harlem district. Its
founders insisted on the need to
forge an art that acts, creates,
and ghts (“We want poems that
kill”), making the artist a major
actor of black political resistance.
See Komozi Woodard,
A Nation
within a Nation. Amiri Baraka
and Black Power Politics
(Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999).
56. Yaa Asantewaa Arts & Cultural
Centre website, accessed July 8,
2020, https://yaacentrew9.com/
about-us/.
57. The notion of “conscienti-
zation” is part of the classical
repertoire of popular and political
education activists who, from
Mao-Zedong to Augusto Boal,
have used knowledge and culture
in general as instruments of
militancy and political awakening
of the oppressed masses. In
Martinique, this approach has
been taken up by various cultural
movements such as the Groupe
Culturel 22 Mai 1848 or An Lòt
Chimen Pou la Jénès (ALCPJ,
Figure 7. Fabrication of a costume in the main hall at the Yaa Asantewaa Arts & Community Center,
London, August 2002. Author’s photograph.
Mobilizing Traditions and Popular Culture to Sustain a Protest Agenda
Since the 1970s Antillean political activists have gradually turned away from overt political
action and have immersed themselves in the social reality of the working classes, speaking
Creole and adopting their cultural practices, in order to offer in return a revolutionary struggle
agenda rooted in their daily lives. Together with singers and
bèlè/gwoka
musicians, they have
contributed to reviving clandestine
swaré bèlè
and
léwòz
, night parties that used to punctuate
rural and mountain life and which they now use to raise political consciousness among the
black inhabitants of Guadeloupe and Martinique.57 This way of mobilizing traditions and popular
culture for protest purposes became particularly manifest during the 2009 general strike against
pwotasyon
. Originating in Guadeloupe at the beginning of December 2008 at the initiative of
the LKP (Liyannaj Kont Pwotasyon, or Alliance against Exploitation), a large coalition of trade
unions and associations, this protest movement spread to Martinique on February 5, 2009, and
continued until March 5 as part of an unprecedented social movement against the high cost of
living and, more generally, the economic and cultural dispossession that overseas inhabitants
experience daily.58 Akiyo and Voukoum took part in the negotiations with the French government,
194
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
acting as lead mediators on societal—more precisely, cultural—issues. Among their demands:
that the language and culture of Guadeloupe be taken into account in media programming,
that popular memory sites be rehabilitated, and that a cultural institute be created to celebrate
Guadeloupean popular culture and preserve the memory of slavery.59 During demonstrations, the
two groups initiated and supervised major
déboulés
(
mas a konsyans
or “carnival of conscience,”
and
mas a pwotasyon
or “carnival of proteering,” which to many looked and sounded like
political marches.)
This mobilization of
kiltir
(culture) and of the carnival reference has now clearly become part
of the “repertoire of contention” promoted by trade unions and revolutionary and/or nationalist
parties, both in Martinique and in Guadeloupe. In Fort-de-France, TBK members accompanied
the demonstrations that took place in February 2009 as an extension of the general strike that
had started in Guadeloupe two months earlier. Thirty-seven years after its writing, the carnival
song “Tchè Nou Blindé” (Our heart is armored) became the anthem of the protesters, and is still
played nowadays in the meetings of the pro-independence parties and movements (g. 8).
Another Path for Youth), which in
the 1970s set out to reconquer
the consciences and bodies of the
Martinican “people” by revaloriz-
ing certain artistic practices such
as dance and the
bèlè
drum. See
Lionel Arnaud, “Une conscientisa-
tion ‘pratique.’ Les mobilisations
culturelles des habitants d’un
quartier populaire de Fort-de-
France, entre autonomisation et
politisation,”
Sociétés contempo-
raines
(forthcoming).
58. Yarimar Bonilla,
Non‐sover-
eign Futures: French Caribbean
Politics in the Wake of Disen-
chantment
(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015); Pierre Odin,
Pwotasyon. Luttes syndicales et
anticolonialisme en Guadeloupe
et en Martinique
(Paris: La Décou-
verte, 2019).
59. From slave cemeteries to
habitations
, from Fort Delgrès
to the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre
where the drums of the
gwo-ka
resound, from the Schoelcher
Museum to the ACTe Memorial,
the memory sites scattered
across Guadeloupe are now
part of a “Slave Route” itinerary.
Interpreters tell visitors about
slavery and the imprint it has left
everywhere, on the territory and
on people’s minds. This enables
Guadeloupeans to reclaim their
history by searching for their roots
and ancestors. Figure 8. Tanbo Bô Kannal and demonstrators singing “Tchè Nou Blindé” in the streets of Fort-de-France
during the 2009 general strike. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsTzF8N6-E0
On May 9, 2015, on the eve of the inauguration of the ACTe Memorial (a monumental museum
located in Pointe-à-Pitre and dedicated to the memory of the slave trade and slavery) by French
president François Hollande, the LKP organized a ceremony in honor of the “slave ancestors” at
the Palais de la Mutualité (Trade Union House) in Pointe-à-Pitre. In the tradition of mortuary vigils,
activists followed one another to perform texts and poems to the rhythm of drums. Fruits and
owers were placed on a specially arranged altar before being transported by the crowd to the
shing port, where they were thrown into the ocean. Accompanied by the songs and music of
Akiyo, the ritual clearly highlighted the blurring of the commonly accepted boundaries between
195
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
social and cultural mobilizations, political action and cultural action, as well as the extent to which
carnival repertoires are subject to constant attention and mobilization.
Conclusion
Because it is largely based on double entendre, distortion, and inversion, carnival perfectly
illustrates the “infrapolitics of subordinate groups” studied by James Scott, that is, “a wide variety
of low-prole forms of resistance that dare not speak in their own name” and that develop only
because they cannot challenge the existing social and political order.60
Among the descendants of Africans deported to the Americas, carnival was quickly seen as an
equivocal, contentious performance that, though inscribed in dominant forms, could nonetheless
be used to challenge social and racial positions and “reinvent a symbolic activity to perform
group identity.”61 As such, American carnival has always been subject to reinterpretation based on
the actors’ interests and purposes, leading to alliances or confrontations. The constitution of the
carnival action repertoire is a complex phenomenon, which does not always draw on a reservoir
of stable actions but rather proceeds from permanent reinventions and reappropriations. Like the
constitution of the jazz repertoire described by Howard Becker and Robert Faulkner, it requires
the participation of a vast number of people, each bringing their own conceptions of their history
and geographical location, which involves more or less explicit discussions and negotiations
about what participants can and should do, given the pressure exerted by the context and the
other people involved.62
But the repertoires mobilized today by the carnival bands of Fort-de-France, London, and Pointe-
à-Pitre are not only “means” or mere aesthetic forms: they are also their own ends. Or rather, they
are part of an act of identity armation that is supposed to exemplify a society in the making.
In other words, the mobilization of a
tambour a po
or of a sound system is not only an aesthetic
gesture, any more than the valorization of the
Koudmen
can only be explained by economic
contingency: all these cultural practices are part of a historical genealogy and arm a way of
life. “As Martinican activists often explain,
Bèlè
,
Danmyé
,
sé dansé
,
sé mizik
,
sé an manniè viv
[
Bèlè, danmyé
, they’re about dancing, about music, they’re a way of life].” These features are the
hallmark of the specicity of cultural movements; their repertoires of action do not only aim at
mobilizing or supporting the struggle, but also contain a philosophy and a set of principles of
action with the potential to play a catalytic role in the transformation of cultural preferences,
measures, and values.63
The free-oating nature of the carnival repertoire also means that it can be interpreted and
appropriated in ways that sometimes contradict the objectives of cultural movements. Indeed,
while I have highlighted the growing mobilization of carnival in Fort-de-France, London, and
Pointe-à-Pitre for protest purposes, I also want to acknowledge that the repertoires of cultural
movements that seek to revalue the African past, and more properly Caribbean history (and
therefore the ght against the oversight of crimes related to slavery and colonization) can also be
recruited by local governments in order to promote tourism. This is particularly well illustrated by
the London case, where a cultural movement rooted in an experience of racism and segregation
has been converted into a mega-event designed and organized for the benet of the city’s
social and economic development.64 In this case, the objective is less to “raise consciousness,”
60. James C. Scott,
Domination
and the Arts of Resistance
, 19.
61. Erik Neveu,
Sociologie des
mouvements sociaux
, 3rd ed.
(Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 24.
62. Becker and Faulkner,
“D o You
Know...?”
63. Roy Eyerman and Andrew
Jamison,
Music and Social Move-
ments
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
64. Lionel Arnaud, “The Marketing
of Diversity and the Aesthetiza-
tion of Differences. The Cultural
Expressions of Ethnic Minorities
Put to the Test of New Urban
Cultural Policies,”
Nationalism and
Ethnic Politics
22, no. 1 (2016):
9–26.
196
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
and even less to protest, than to assemble, acknowledge, and turn cultural and social identities
into “heritage”—in other words, to reduce them to cultural objects or even to (multicultural)
spectacles.65 Such a transformation is far from benign: it turns Afro-Caribbean populations
into powerless spectators of what is proclaimed to be
their
culture, as if it were no longer a
question of renewing, challenging, or enriching it.66 It reminds us that the mobilization of the
carnival repertoire for political purposes does not necessarily arm an existence that is subject
to any form of interpretation but can also contribute to transforming cultural dynamics into inert
knowledge, ossied traditions, aesthetics detached from a sociohistorical substrate that remains,
at heart, necessarily contentious.
65. Kevin Fox Gotham, “Marketing
Mardi Gras: Commodication,
Spectacle and the Political Econ-
omy of Tourism in New Orleans,”
Urban Studies
39, no. 10 (2002):
1735–5 6
66. Michel Giraud, “La patrimoni-
alisation des cultures antillaises,”
Ethnologie française
29, no. 3
(1999): 375–86.
197
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article is based on eldwork I conducted in London from 2000 to 2007, with funding
from the British Council (see Lionel Arnaud,
Réinventer la ville. Artistes, minorités ethniques
et militants au service des politiques de développement urbain. Une comparaison franco-
britannique
[Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008]), and in Fort-de-France from
2011 to 2018 during a fellowship at the Center for Research into Local Politics in the Caribbean
(CRPLC/CNRS 8053), based at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (Lionel Arnaud,
Les
tambours de Bô Kannal. Mobilisations et résistances culturelles en Martinique
[Paris: Karthala,
2020]). The data concerning Pointe-à-Pitre Carnival stems from exploratory observations and
interviews I conducted in August 2014 and May 2015. For a more detailed presentation of my
ethnographic methodology, see Lionel Arnaud, “Enquêter en pays dominé A l’épreuve de la
résistance culturelle des habitants d’un quartier populaire de Fort-de-France,” in
“En immersion”:
Approches ethnographiques en journalisme, Littérature et Sciences Sociales
, ed. Pierre Leroux
and Erik Neveu (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017), 271–86. I would like to thank
Aurélie Godet, Olivier Tomat, and the journal’s readers for the corrections and improvements they
successively made to the rst versions of this text.
AUTHOR BIO
Lionel Arnaud is Professor of Sociology at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France,
and a member of the Laboratoire des Sciences Sociales du Politique (Sc Po Toulouse/
Université Toulouse 3). He is currently leading an international research team comparing the
implementation of cultural rights in the cities of Cape Town (South Africa), Salvador de Bahia
(Brazil), and Toulouse (France). His research interests focus more broadly on cultural movements
and development policies in Europe and the rest of the world. He is particularly interested in the
ways culture can be politicized or depoliticized and in the cultural practices of racialized and
ethnicized populations. He recently published
Agir par la culture. Acteurs, enjeux et mutations des
mouvements culturels
(Toulouse: L’Attribut, 2018) and
Les Tambours de Bô Kannal. Mobilisations
et résistances culturelles en Martinique
(Paris: Karthala, 2020). More information can be found
on his web page: http://lassp.sciencespo-toulouse.fr/Lionel-ARNAUD-239.
OPEN ACCESS
© 2020 by the author. Licensee H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. This article is
an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/3.0/)
202
Journal of Festive Studies
, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2020, 179—202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
HOW TO CITE
Arnaud, Lionel. “Carnival as Contentious Performance: A Comparison between Contemporary
Fort-de-France, Pointe-à-Pitre, and London Carnivals.”
Journal of Festive Studies
2, no. 1 (Fall
2020): 179–202. https://doi.org/10.33823/jfs.2020.2.1.24
The Journal of Festive Studies
(ISSN 2641–9939) is a peer-reviewed open access journal from
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