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.