Keith 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
embodied in constructions of class, nation, 'race', gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

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 Westernization 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 counterhegemonic tradition for the contestations and conflicts

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 demonstration 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 preLenten or Shrovetide period associated with the Christian calendar. The main parade routes are generally 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,

Globalization a n d Trinidad 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 consciousness. 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 promote 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 carnivals 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 occasion 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

K e i t h Nurse

be ever so courteous, giving direction, telling you the time, crossing old people over to the other side, undertaking 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 overseas carnivals reflect rather than contest institutionalized 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 attendance 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 multinational 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 audience 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,

Globalization and Trinidad 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 challenges 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 panCaribbean identity, a mechanism for social integration into metropolitan society and a ritual act of transnational, 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 peripheral 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 dure. Another critical methodological issue is the conceptualization 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 postcolonial 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

William H. Thornton

of globalization identified. The Trinidad carnival and its overseas offspring fits into Gilroy's concept of a Black Atlantic where 'double consciousness' and transnationalism are focal processes in the Caribbean's experience with globalization. The study of the Trinidad carnival and its overseas offspring illustrates that globalization presents opportunities 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 transformation, 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 therefore loath to acknowledge, far more invest in, the globalizing 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 territory 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 offspring 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 micromarketing 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, postmodernism is quite simply a solvent for global capitalism. From this perspective modernism arose out of an incomplete modernization and remained at least partially 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.