SALCC and The OAS Celebrate The Inter-American Week for People of African Descent

Almost every country in the Americas has a carnival festival in their ritual calendar. Throughout the Americas - from Rio's and Bahia’s carnivals in Brazil to the Trinidad and Tobago carnival and the New Orleans’ Mardi Gras - carnivals reflect the social order and the attendant social conflict as well as the submerged aspirations and tensions of the respective societies.

Throughout the greater Caribbean and in the Caribbean diaspora, the spread of carnivals have become expressions of national and Pan-Caribbean identities much in line with the transnational and transcultural notion of a “Black Atlantic”.

These carnivals have grown in socio-cultural and political stature and economic importance as generators of festival tourism and new cultural art forms and creative industries exports. In this presentation I will elaborate on how the carnivals allow for the unmasking and re-imagination of social constructions embodied in notions of empire, nation, class, ‘race’, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and even development.

As such, carnivals are not just a ritual, aesthetic and commercial space where psychic and bodily pleasures are enacted, represented and marketed. It is an arena where social values and meaning are put on public display, negotiated and contested.