ON ROUTE 2003
ACADEMIC SESSIONS: 16 AND 17 JUNE

'On Route 2003' is a three day conference exploring the diversity of carnival arts today and celebrating the achievements of carnival artists worldwide.

Two academic sessions are included in the programme. These take place on 16 and 17 June from 14.00 to 16.00 in the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre. For more details, please see programme below.

Admission to these sessions is free to anyone whether or not they are taking part in the rest of the conference.

Please pass this information on to anyone who may be interested.

ABSTRACTS

Panel 1 – Identifying the Form and Aesthetics
16 June 2003 2-4pm Abstract

Carnival in Context: English Festive Misrule

Chris Humphrey
Research Associate
University of York

This paper considers how insights gained from a study of medieval English festivals can be applied to carnival-style events in the post-medieval period. By stimulating a discussion of approaches that can reach beyond theories of carnival culture as either subversive or a safety-valve, the aim is to open up an appreciation of the real diversity of its social meanings and political possibilities.

Panel 1 – Identifying the Form and Aesthetics
16 June 2003 2-4pm

Abstract

Theatricalizing Everyday Space (1): The Yorùbá Experience

Akin Oyètádé
Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

Abstract

This paper examines the use of everyday space during the egúngún annual festival in Yorùbá land. The egúngún "masquerade", symbolises the spirits of departed ancestors in Yorùbá belief. There is a very fine line between the world of the living and of the dead among the Yorùbá. Hence, elderly members of a family do not disappear permanently at death. Rather, they are believed to become more potent and closer to their families and watch over them, even though they are not always visible to the naked eyes. They can see the mortal person and protect them from dangers, but the living members of their families may not be able to see them, except after some rituals. In times of trouble, people are encouraged to call upon their dead parents for help, and it is believed that they will appear in vision, trance or dream to offer solution. In order to commemorate this belief, the ancestors are remembered and venerated yearly by the spectacle of the egúngún festival, which turns whole streets, squares, market grounds, etc., into theatrical spaces for performances and entertainment.

The paper will examine what goes on behind the scenes in the sacred grove known as Igbó ìgbàl¬. The rank of officials allowed into the sacred grounds where the egúngún is dressed before he is allowed to come to the open, everyday space will be analysed and the role of the Ölºkø "the guide" of the egúngún will be examined. It is a well known that only men carry/wear or are dressed up in the ¬kú or agø, "the costume" of the egúngún. This gender-specific role will be examined against the popular saying: awo egúngún lobìnrín lè ße, awo g¬l¬dd… lobìnrín lè mø, bóbìnrín fojú borò, orò á gbé e "the cult/esoteric group of the egúngún is open for women to participate in, the cult/esoteric group of the g¬l¬d… is what women are allowed to have a knowledge of, if a woman dares to set her eyes on the orò "the bull roarer", orò will 'carry her' - make her disappear." Finally, we will examine the cultural significance of suffering and affliction through whipping with àtòrì during the egúngún festival.

Panel 1 – Identifying the Form and Aesthetics
16 June 2003 2-4pm

Abstract

Carnival in Context: a South Italian Ritual Cycle

Herman Tak

University of Utrecht

A major mistake many historians and (historical) anthropologists make - as the Russian philologist Vladimir Propp has already pointed out - is that they study festivals / rituals including carnival in isolation that is ignoring their mutual relations. Instead we should see carnival as related to a ritual year cycle, or more precisely, view the great variety of festivals and rituals displaying carnival characteristics the agrarian Europe knew in their relation to the multitude of agrarian cycles. The agrarian cycle depended closely on the seasons and ways fields were cultivated, cattle and sheep were pastured, hundreds of years of local and regional events and histories, and followed the course of the sun or the moon. Yet time was not cyclic (a geometric metaphor) but polar: ‘a repetition of repeated reversal, a sequence of oscillations between polar opposites: night and day, winter and summer, drought and flood, age and youth, life and death’ (Leach 1961). From the perspective of ritual alternation, Bakhtin’s ‘popular religion’ did not have just one face. It was a Janus face with a devout (summer) side and a carnival (winter) side, a period characterized by a relative economic standstill and possible food shortages. In these circumstances reversal was, among other things, a way to resolve such experienced plights. Besides, inversion meant also derision of religion and the established order whose failure became clear in the winter season.

Panel 1 – Identifying the Form and Aesthetics
16 June 2003 2-4pm

Abstract

Theatricalising Everyday Space (2):

a post-ramaddan processional festival in northern Nigeria

Frances Harding and Malami Buba
Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

In this paper, we look at the post-ramadan celebrations (called in Hausa language 'bukin sallah') and note its carnivalesque characteristics.

The ancient city of Katsina, Northern Nigeria is well-known for its spectacular post-ramadan processional performance. Situated on the Sahel, the southern fringe of the Sahara desert, the people of the area are predominantly Hausa with significant Fulani and Tuareg populations as well. There is a long history of both resistance to, and absorption of, various elements of the languages and cultures of the non-Hausa people, although Hausa is the main language spoken.

In the paper, we draw attention to the ways in which, along with modernity, many historic features, held in tension in the society, are uniquely evidenced in the visual and performative display during the processional performance.

In addressing the aesthetics and form of the processional performance, we consider in particular four related aspects: costume design and colour, acts of performing and display, the use of space, and gendered & cross-gender participation. We illustrate this with video footage from the 1997 event.

Panel 2 – Reading Carnival and its Meanings
17 June 2003 2-4pm

Abstract

Performing Carnival, Making Meaning, Playing Mas

Adela Ruth Tompsett
University of Middlesex

Examination of carnival's post-emancipation development in the Caribbean is essential to an understanding of meaning in contemporary mas, whether in the Caribbean or in the Caribbean-derived carnivals of the diaspora. History continues to inform the masquerade, while at the same time, cultural mixing in Brooklyn and Toronto, Notting Hill and Leeds, has introduced other ways of being and seeing.

This paper will focus on Notting Hill Carnival and examine how its Trinidadian origin continues to be significant and how its development in London's urban, culturally diverse and globally interactive location has variously shaped and influenced the mas. It will address how meaning is layered in mas, and, along with notions of public and personal significances in a masquerade, show that how the mas is played, influences how it is read.

Reference will be made to key figures including Errol Hill, Daniel Crowley and Peter Minshall,, to personal documenting and observation of mas on the road, and to interviews with contemporary designers and players.

In conclusion, the paper articulates ways in which mas makes meaning, explores ideas and actualities and demonstrates how mas is a medium of communication as well as functioning aesthetically.

Panel 2 – Reading Carnival and its Meanings
17 June 2003 2-4pm

Abstract

Theorizing Carnival: Bakhtin and the Literature of Carnival in the Caribbean

Nana Wilson-Tagoe
Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

This paper explores multiple meanings in transpositions of carnival in literary texts. Its particular focus on the Caribbean creates space for re-visiting aspects of Bakhtin’s theorisation of carnival. As a living tradition in Caribbean societies carnival operates both as spectacle, ritual and metaphor in Caribbean texts. Its capacity to appropriate and mobilise space, and its tendency to unleash energies that can be at once creative, subversive and destructive make it a convenient trope for exploring both aspiration and contradiction in postcolonial Caribbean texts. Bakhtin’s notion of carnival on the other hand centres on the historical carnivals of the Middle Ages, which as he argues, survive in certain kinds of writing. His view of carnival as the popular humorous and disruptive ‘other’ of fixed medieval hierarchies is central to his theorisation of doubleness as resistance and his formulation of what he has called, ‘grotesque realism.’ But is his generally liberatory view of carnival echoed in the trope of carnival in Caribbean texts? How does the deployment of the trope in the Caribbean illuminate, complicate or extend Bakhtin’s theorisations? To what extent do the two contexts throw up similar and contrasting perspectives on carnival? The paper explores these questions by examining three Caribbean texts in relations to Bakhtin’s theorisation. Its special focus on Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance and Salt will be illuminated and enlarged with references to the work of Walcott, Brathwaite and Harris.

Panel 2 – Reading Carnival and its Meanings
17 June 2003 2-4pm

Abstract

The Spectacle of the Carnival in African Literature

Kwadwo Osei-Nyame, Jnr
Department of the Languages and Cultures of Africa
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

As performance and as cultural expression, carnival may be deployed as the ritual re-enactment of the vicissitudes of a community and as a discourse that is simultaneously reflective of a mode of self-affirmation and self-interrogation. I shall demonstrate the extent to which literature has engaged with carnival as the “symbolic exchange of language, “ which is “circumscribed and permeated by a specific historical environment.” I shall conclude with the argument that the use of carnival as ritual in African societies is often a mode of dramatic expression that simultaneously reflects in its performance the solidification and problematization of individual and communal bonds.

Panel 2 – Reading Carnival and its Meanings
17 June 2003 2-4pm

abstract not currently available

Trinidad Carnival and its Multiple Meanings

Dr Hollis Urban Liverpool

'Chalkdust'

Director of Culture for the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago

Academic Sessions - Admission to these two sessions is free to everyone.

Monday June 16 2pm – 4pm

Panel 1 - Identifying the Form and Aesthetics

Chris Humphrey – Carnival in Context: English Festive Misrule

Akin Oyetade – Theatricalising Everyday Space(1): the Yoruba experience in SW Nigeria

Herman Tak - Carnival in Context: a South Italian Ritual Cycle

Malami Buba and Frances Harding – Theatricalising Everyday Space (2): a post-ramaddan processional festival in northern Nigeria

Tuesday 17 June 2pm – 4pm

Panel 2 - Reading Carnival and its Meanings

Ruth Tompsett – Performing Carnival, Making Meaning, Playing Mas

Nana Wilson-Tagoe – Theorising Carnival – Bakhtin and the Literature of Carnival in the Caribbean

Kwadwo Osei-Nyame – The Spectacle of Carnival in African Literature

Hollis Urban Liverpool — Trinidad Carnival and its Multiple Meanings

On each of the first two days of the Conference, from 2- 4pm, an academic panel will address issues of Carnival in performance and in literature.

The first panel is on 'Form and Aesthetics' and draws examples from Africa, southern Italy and medieval England.

The second panel is 'Reading Carnival and its Meanings' and considers contemporary Trinidad and English Carnival both in performance and in the writings of Bakhtin and others.

Admission to these two sessions is free to everyone whether or not you are taking part in the rest of the conference