- Bus Stop
- TikToks
- Carnival in Notting Hill, London
- Philip M NourbeSe, Caribana: African Roots and Communities
“Carnival represents an ancient and recurrent rite of passage [...] You suspend what you are, what you do, who you are, for a space.”
- Philip NourbeSe brilliantly paints a picture of Caribana – Toronto’s annual variation of the Trinidad Carnival – and establishes the players and parties of this event. “During the Carnival season, an entire population is gradually released from moral and civic obligations, and the diverse social, economic, and religious groups become closely united in a single mass activity,” she writes on page 219. People enter the space of Carnival and morph from individuals into merely a small part of a larger collective body. It is a radical, powerful tradition where everyone simply listens and moves – and thus, also creates – sound.
- However, the history of Carnival cannot be accurately represented without discussing those who simply watch this collective body as a means of entertainment. In NourbeSe’s text, readers see this group mostly as “well-dressed” white spectators. In 2024, I see a different picture. With the prevalence of social media and digital cameras, individual acts and actors become scrutinized and the subjects of jokes and laughs across the internet. I, from my dorm room bed in New Haven, CT, find myself watching several highlight reels and unserious thinkpieces on the “nefarious” or “embarassing” acts committed by participants. Whether it is a man failing at his role in a “2-man” or posting a desperate plea to the internet asking us to find the woman he caught a whine with, TikTok is taking the body engaging in a “single mass activity” and shattering it into a bunch of people isolated by the policing of their acts. It transports me onto the streets of London or Toronto, but not as a participant – rather, I become the spectator finding pleasure from critiquing something meant to be unbothered and celebrated.
(I desperately wanted to find the few videos I make brief mention to above but failed to recover them. However, I think the videos I have attached do justice to the idea that phones and an inherent degree of social policing from others at Carnival and online has a tremendous impact on the event and tradition.)
Update on December 31 – I found the two videos! Have dropped them as the last two below. (Fascinating to see the amount of phones taking videos in the first of the two videos.)