Search Results

The focus of this chapter is the carnivalesque character of Wittenberg’s Luther festivals, especially Luther’s Wedding. The historical suppression of carnival and popular culture in the centuries following the Reformation is presented. The chapter argues that Wittenberg’s festivals represent the reemergence of a festive popular culture. Wittenberg’s festivals are interpreted as a form of a mimesis and sympathetic magic, as individuals attempt to actualize, through performance and reenactment, a remembered convivial culture of the past associated with medieval carnival.

This chapter draws together glossaries dealing with the slang of various branches of the entertainment industry: the circus, carnival, and stage. Later glossaries deal with the slang of swing, which introduces the relationship between popular music and slang and particularly the influence of African-Americans on slang that is to be so evident in the next volume.

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.

This essay explores the contemporary legacies of colonial religious discourses, by examining how participants in Haiti’s annual Rara festival—a Lenten carnival and public performance of Haitian Vodou—at once inherit and transform the anti-Jewish sentiments of the clergy in colonial Saint Domingue. Through an active identification with the Jews who “killed Jesus,” disenfranchised Haitians reinvent the European demonization of Jews and Africans, deconstructing colonial religious categories from within, in order to craft rituals of resistance to their country’s predominantly Catholic and mulatto elites.

In this chapter, Clark Terry describes his second encounter with Turk and his gang, following their dissociation after their commitment to the show. It was at this time that he was offered a second chance to be associated with Turk and his gang, as part of a small carnival that traveled in several trucks but was at that time stationary in Hattiesburg for a few months. This meant that he would have a place to stay, wash and eat. The money was tight and the carnival was to come to an end soon. All that Clark was left with was the option to travel back to St. Louis in Mr. Suggs' truck. Finally he made it back to St. Louis and was surrounded by businesses, a movie theater, and a church.

Cross-dressing in women’s travel writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be seen as a carnivalesque affair, featuring bearded ladies and flamboyant Queens. Using the performative gender theories of Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber, this chapter questions the extent to which such theatrical cross-dressing allows European women travel writers to transgress social boundaries in their home and host countries. The first section of this chapter considers Jane Dieulafoy’s painstaking construction of textual legitimacy for her cross-dressing, which both invokes and abjures the legacy of bearded Queens by displacing it along Oriental cultural fault lines. It then examines the tensions that emerge in Isabella Bird’s travelogues as a result of the author’s determination to convincingly perform femininity in the Orient for her British audience. The final section explores Isabelle Eberhardt’s more radical constructions of linguistic and physical gender vagabondage in Algeria and Tunisia, and the restrictive social mechanisms they provoke.

This book explores some of the processes and the playing companies which helped to produce William Shakespeare. The groupings that made the playing companies into teams usually worked individualistically, in competition with one another. Their individualism, like their professionalism, was driven by the common need for money. They were a peculiar, unique, new phenomenon in London and in the country at large. Even their place in society was anomalous, since they functioned as workers in time of carnival. We already have histories of the theatres that the different companies used, studies of the staging practices, biographies of individual players, and even histories of some individual companies. This book is an attempt at the largest context, a comprehensive history of the companies which generated the London plays and first put them on stage. As in any study of historical process, the principal concern in this book is change and the processes that determined change. It follows the London companies through all the more general transformations and looks at the history of the individual companies.

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.’”

This chapter discusses carnivalesque and carnival tales. For many theorists and writers, the Venetian carnival represented many seasons in Venice society. For the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnival was a glimpse of authentic human freedom, a utopia still recoverable whenever carnival laughter united the powerful in mockery and defiance. Others such as Frazer saw the carnival as a monument of fruitless ingenuity, of waster labor, and of blighted hopes. Carnivalesque denoted humor that deflated pretense, embraced community, and celebrated life in its highest and lowest impulses. For Bakhtin laughter gave power to the powerless and challenged impregnable institutions. Masks served to convey that ranks were arbitrary and status was only skin deep. Masks also deviated the wearers from conformity and blurred the line between reality and make-believe. To consider the moments of the Venetian carnival is to be reminded of the sheer variety of the seasons. The carnival may be spontaneous or scripted, harmless or explosive, disruptively seditious or decorously ferocious. The carnival may stay within the limits or violate them, and its transgressions may be authorized or not. It may be used by the powerless to challenge the authority or by authorities to divide the populace. And it may offer an occasion to deny roots or to affirm one’s roots.

Throughout his eleven seasons at Luna Park, the image of Fred Thompson as the fun-loving boy-capitalist on a spree was as much a feature of the park as its exaggerated “Oriental” architecture or the Shoot-the-Chutes. Thompson staged his performances to show that Luna Park was built by and for a new kind of man, one who would accept no less than all the fun to which he was entitled. Thompson, then, was largely indistinguishable from the Coney Island resort that he named for the continuously mutating moon: a radiant reflection of energy, never the same or in the same place from one moment to the next, the very representation of capricious and insatiable desire. Above all, he said, his park meant unceasing variety and change, “movement, movement, movement everywhere.” What was true of Luna Park would be true of Thompson; he was what he sold.

This chapter addresses Latin American contexts for reading and teaching Welty's fiction. Beginning with traces of Spanish Natchez and territories of New Spain in Welty, this chapter moves to engage aspects of magical realism, carnival ethos, and consciousness ofla frontera (the border) in Welty's early work. Readers may come to see that Welty can be read well in alignment with several different Latina or Chicana writers.

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.

The carnival season in Venice began unofficially on December 26, when the theaters reopened after a ten-day break for Christmas. This day signaled an influx of tourists, whose numbers grew during the following two months. The government decreed the official beginning of each carnival season, which varied from year to year. During this period, carnival turned Venice into a stage and turned everyone into a performer. This chapter narrates the story of the Venice carnival. It particularly focused on the violence, the high hilarity, and the solemn ceremony that characterized the Venice carnival. The Venetian carnival was a time outside of time. It was a time when common mores and morals were suspended and identities put in flux. For connoisseurs, the Venetian carnival was a time when the society’s artificial rules gave way to the truths of nature. For the disapproving, it furnished a ready narrative for the Republic’s decline and fall: moral decay weakened foundations and the state would eventually collapse. And for those seeking political meaning in acts of transgression, the carnival granted ample evidence for equality in the moment of disguise.

This chapter discusses prevailing sentiments and ideas about the Venetian carnival and the masks. For some, the Venetian carnival was“the other side of life, the counterpart of social segregation and political repression”. This interpretation of the carnival was widespread. The mask’s anonymity was a ticket to liberation. It conferred on its wearers a power to be anyone they wished, a cover to speak the truth, flaunt the convention, and throw off hierarchy. In a society where social structure was immutable, freedoms were limited, and punishment was harsh for anyone who questioned the system, the masks acted as salutary unsettler, equalizing, challenging, and permitting the forbidden. The carnival was a joyous celebration which erased differences, exposed ideologies, and cleared the way for human connections stripped of hierarchy. Masks revealed a universal impulse for equality. However, the carnival was a willed distraction from dire economic and political crises. The carnival provided a glimpse to the serious issues on social structure and selfhood; on politics and dissent; on destruction and renewal; on hierarchy, democracy, and equality; and on the collapse of the thousand-year Republic.