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This chapter assesses the relationship between Carnival and the annual Corpus Christi celebrations in late medieval and early modern Spain. Carnival has always been associated with revelry, subversive inversions of the social order, and transgressive behavior. Meanwhile, Corpus Christi is the high point of the Catholic devotional cycle in early modern Spain. Although it seems odd to juxtapose a feast such as Carnival with that of the Corpus Christi, there was a progression—uneven but perceptible—from the carnivalesque to the elaborate appropriation of some of these allegedly subversive themes of Carnival by the carefully programmed procession of the living body of Christ through the streets of Iberian cities.

Kristin M.S. Bezio asks us to enter Arkham Asylum, more or less literally, as players of the eponymous 2009 video game produced by Rocksteady. In her analysis, Bezio carefully outlines how the Joker acts not only as a villain but also as a guide, a situation that puts the player in the awkward position of following him through the Arkham maze. Engaging Derridean notions of the “nonspecies” and Bakhtin’s analysis of the “carnival,” Bezio argues that Batman: Arkham Asylum opens up in the process a more stimulating – because far less stable – ludic environment, one which ultimately is contained by the Joker’s game-ending decision to meet Batman in combat: “By agreeing to meet Batman on his own terms, the Joker has forsaken the only thing that gave him any power – after all, the Joker’s goal in manipulating Batman is not to destroy Batman, but to force him ‘to see the world as I see it.’”

Megan Holt interviews Merline Kimble, founder of the current incarnation of the Gold Digger Baby Dolls. The name of the group pays homage to the original Gold Digger group, founded by Kimble’s grandparents and disbanded during World War II. Kimble discusses her family’s place within the Baby Doll tradition and the resurgence of interest in that tradition in recent years. Kimble acknowledges the link between masking and freedom, stressing that a sense of freedom is particularly important for the women who participate in Baby Doll culture. She notes that baby dolls are not defined by age or gender--men and women, children and elders, all have a place in the masking tradition, a tradition she hopes will live on through the next generation.

This chapter looks at the cost of Carnival celebrations in an era of economic austerity due to drought and economic crisis. In 2014, ’15, and ’16, an ongoing drought of historic magnitude led the Ceará governor to redirect state monies intended for Carnival and other music-related celebrations to more urgent drought-relief efforts. Is music as vital as water? In the context of national economic crisis and massive drought, this chapter suggests that electronic forró’s continued dominance points to the increasing neoliberalization of culture in Brazil in the wake of social successes for the Workers’ Party and a period of optimistic and ambitious cultural policy.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on axé music and the African origins of Brazilian popular music. It explains that axé music and the African roots of Brazilian popular music are embedded in a sacred/secular connection of religion, individual artists, Carnival organizations, music, musical instruments, drumming, dance, imagery, symbols, festive celebrations, and the richness of Afro-Brazilian culture. The chapter also highlights the role of West African àsé in Afro-Brazilians’ struggle for racial equality and economic opportunity.

This chapter examines Dunham’s interventions in World War II-era U.S. cinema. Focusing on three of Dunham’s Hollywood films, Carnival of Rhythm (1941), Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), and Stormy Weather (1943), the chapter recovers Dunham’s groundbreaking contribution as a Black woman choreographer to midcentury U.S. cinema. Establishing that Dunham was the first Black choreographer to gain onscreen credit for her work in Hollywood, it shows how her performances represented a negotiation of studio-era racial codes but also how she mediated such codes and was able to assert her authorship by presenting a vision of Black dancing womanhood in Hollywood that was pioneering its open engagement with sensuality, cultural diversity, and choreographic allusions to ballet and modern dance.

This chapter examines the agency of women in soca and related genres, including various controversies they confront in this performance context. As women have created a space for themselves in Carnival mas and at the Carnival fetes, a number of “soca divas” have emerged to give voice to female revelers. This and other historical trends in soca underscore the rapidly changing nature of the popular music scene in Trinidad. The chapter considers the shifting attitudes and norms regarding gender roles, giving rise to gender diversity in various performance contexts, how these changes have played out in soca music, and how musical change and innovation continue to expand the possibilities within expressive culture in Trinidad and Tobago. It discusses the ways in which soca and its offshoots have created platforms for expression by women performers, including the two top female soca artists in Trinidad: Destra Garcia and Fay-Ann Lyons.

This chapter is devoted to Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue and carnival and their use in political theory. The notion of language as developed by Bakhtin is analyzed in detail, whereby special attention is given to his idea of language as a system of utterances. These explorations serve to advance the idea of non-consensual dialogue. In this perspective, dialogue is a vehicle of reflexive understanding that is an assimilation of someone else’s ideas into one’s own conceptual system. This concept of dialogue is presented as an alternative to the Habermasian notion of dialogue and to the concept of hegemony as developed by Ernesto Lacalu and Chantal Mouffe. In the second part of the chapter, the concept of carnival is discussed. In Bakhtin, carnival is not just a particular festivity, but an existential feature of human nature which enables people to form intimate bonds outside any institutional circumstances. On this model, carnival can be treated as a liminal example of democracy insofar as democracy needs constant change and re-construction of its institutions and habits.

Tania Isaac suggests, in her writing here as in her choreography and performance pieces, an intense, complex experience of knowing her native island, St. Lucia, through its dance and its ways of looking at the body. To do this she finds four names for St. Lucia which suggest metaphoric characterizations of the multiple selves of her island. She uses these selves to explore the movement of St. Lucian kwadril (quadrille), masquerade, calypso, and soca, of Carnival of the bands playing mas and the more individualistic Carnival of Ol' Mas. Isaac uses description and metaphor to suggest a density and variety of cultural information, a layering that can contain all contradictions.

Hazel Franco braids the many strands of the two islands' (Trinidad and Tobago) folk dance cultures with their histories. She focuses on Afro-Trinidadian dances and their underlying African heritages and various infusions, on Carnival traditions from the balls of French plantation owners to the development of traditional Carnival characters to the mid-20^th century bands of sailors and ship's firemen following steel bands. She notes the different history and dances of Tobago, government innovations like the Best Village competitions, and the black power movement of the 1970s. She charts an arc of choreographers adopting folklore for the stage, with new theatrical fusions from pioneer Beryl McBurnie to Cyril St. Lewis to Astor Johnson.

This chapter details the genesis of the US Navy Steel Band, an act born of Admiral Daniel Gallery's ambition. The admiral attended the Trinidadian Carnival in both 1955 and 1957, and was spellbound by the spirit, music, and sound of Trinidadian steelbands. So profound was the Carnival experience that it served as the driving force for Admiral Gallery's steelband obsession. The chapter examines the transition of the US Navy Steel Band from traditional military wind band to an untraditional military steelband from the perspective of Admiral Gallery, several former US Navy Steel Band members, and Trinidadian steelpan legend Ellie Mannette. US Navy Steel Band members had many advantages unknown to their Trinidadian counterparts, such as formal musical training and literacy, yet they were at a loss in terms of learning the art of steelband in a visceral sense.

This chapter illustrates the US Navy Steel Band's musical and cultural influence throughout New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. By the late 1960s, the US Navy Steel Band moved past its high-profile early years of chasing stardom and settled into a new phase that saw the band become a fixture of the US Navy's recruitment and goodwill outreach program on a national level. Examining the US Navy Steel Band's transition from San Juan to New Orleans is essential for understanding the band's musical and cultural influence throughout New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region during the 1970s. This is particularly the case when exploring the band's seamless integration into the New Orleans Mardi Gras tradition as well as ways in which the US Navy Steel Band infused elements of the Caribbean Carnival into their adopted cultural home.

This chapter discusses the history of Carnival Memphis, which celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in June 2006. Members of the original Carnival association organized in 1931 during the throes of the Great Depression. They intended to showcase Memphis to the region and the world as a modern, progressive city capable of hosting a festival promoting commerce, community, and celebration. Carnival founders included the presidents of the Retail Clothiers Association, the Cotton Exchange, and the Junior League. Supported by the directors of the Cotton Exchange, they tapped into the city's nineteenth-century commercial and social roots to find business sponsors and festival themes. Cotton Carnival founders succeeded in fostering civic participation, boosting community identity, attracting spectators and media attention, and promoting the region's most vital economic product at the time—cotton.

The first chapter offers a brief history of Carnival music in Trinidad and the emergence of diasporic Carnival celebrations in New York, London, and Toronto. The tangled transnational origins of calypso, steelband, and soca along with their development as expressions of cultural identity and resistance for Afro-Trinidadians together set the stage for the music’s migration to North America and Europe. Calypso and steelband are recognized today as Trinidad’s most distinctive contributions to the world’s musics. The traditions associated with the twentieth-century Carnival are best understood as products of musical hybridity. That is, both calypso and steelband evolved through a similar process of hybridization. This chapter provides the necessary background for understanding this music’s migration and life outside the Caribbean in Harlem and Brooklyn.

Chapter 3 turns to the establishment of Harlem’s Dame Lorraine Carnival dances in the mid-1930s and the founding of an outdoor Carnival parade on Seventh Avenue in 1947. The importance of calypso music and the early steelbands in the parade is examined, and the music’s role in maintaining connections to Trinidad and uniting Harlem’s Caribbean migrants is considered. The first large-scale Carnival dances were those produced by the bandleader Gerald Clark, who called his events “Gala Dame Lorraine,” a reference to an early nineteenth-century female Carnival character who was always elegantly dressed. At these dances, bands came clad in themed costumes to compete for prize money. These events showed that New York’s Caribbean migrant communities were eager to support annual Carnival celebrations that combined three essential components of Trinidadian Carnival: dance orchestras, calypso song battles, and masquerade contests. Their success led to an outdoor Carnival parade up Harlem’s Seventh Avenue.

Chapter 4 recounts the mass in-migration of English-speaking Caribbean people to Brooklyn in the wake of the new 1965 immigration laws. The closing down of Harlem Carnival in 1961 did not lead to the cessation of Carnival activity in New York. In 1971 the West Indian American Day Carnival Association (WIADCA) launched a Labor Day Carnival parade down Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, establishing Brooklyn as the new center of New York’s Carnival. There would also be stage shows at the Brooklyn Museum and other nearby venues, as well as an annual Panorama contest and Dimanche Gras dance and stage show as part of the Labor Day festivities. Brooklyn’s Labor Day Carnival would eventually expand into the borough’s premiere cultural event, attracting millions of viewers and providing a nurturing environment for the growth of steelband and calypso, as well as the emerging soca style. Carnival music lay at the heart of the celebration.

For centuries, Venice has been called the most beautiful city in the world, a title that can make one forget that not all the attractions it offers are strictly physical. After the fall of the Serenissima, visitors may have come primarily to admire the paintings and architecture, or to visit the Lido baths in the summer, but they also continued to have a look at the festivals and were spectators at the various regattas. With the thinning and aging of the local population, Venetian culture has become like Venetian space, available for appropriation by tourists. This chapter explores three recent examples of this process: the Vogalonga (initiated in 1975 by local aficionados of Venetian rowing), the Festa del Redentore, and the Carnival of Venice. All three celebrations represent concrete realizations of a spirit of idealistic communitarianism that was especially diffuse in Italy in those years. Of the six bridge festivals celebrated under the Serenissima, the Redentore was probably the most important; it is also one of the two that has survived.