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Masquerade Politics: Explorations in the Structure of Urban Cultural Movements

University of California Press

This book explores the drama and politics of some urban cultural movements. It is based on the detailed study of the structure and development of London's Notting Hill Carnival.

Urban society is characterised by population density and the intense struggle for economic and political power between different interest groups. Often a group conducts that struggle in the form of a cultural movement, such as a religious cult or the development of an ethnic identity. In such movements culture and politics are dynamically interconnected and study of them would shed light on both the structure of the cultural form and the political processes involved.

Many studies of urban religious and ethnic movements have been published in recent years, including some of my own. But the structure and significance of seemingly frivolous, playful cultural movements like carnivals, fairs and festivals, have been relatively little explored.1

The London Carnival was first held in 1966 in the form of a revived traditional English fair. It was then local and polyethnic, attended by a few thousand men, women and children, about half whom were West Indians. After a few years it became exclusively West Indian in arts, music and leadership, and national in scale, attended by hundreds of thousands of people. In 1976 it made the headlines when it occasioned a bloody confrontation between West Indian youth of British birth and education and the police, with

For a partial survey of the relevant literature see Manning 1983. For a perceptive discussion of the politics of international fairs see, B. Benedict, The Anthropology of World's Fairs: San Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 , Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1983 and B. Benedict, 'International Exhibitions and National Identity', in Anthropology Today , vol.7, no.3.

hundreds injured. Over the next few years the carnival became a major issue for political manipulation by internal West Indian factions and external interest groups. During most of the 1980s it became relatively more 'peaceful' and publicly institutionalised, with a police band sometimes participating and the Prime Minister sending her blessings and encouragement to everyone concerned on the eve of the celebration. The radical leadership of the late 1970s had been silently marginalised and phased out to be replaced by moderate men and women who emphasised professionalism in the organisation of the event. More white people participated, contributing to a total attendance that sometimes reached the two million mark, throughout the two days of carnival.

The tranquillity was largely only apparent, however, the result in no small measure of intensive policing, of subtle pressure by the authorities and of increasing financial inducements from a variety of public sources. As the 1980s drew to a close, the increasing appeal of the area to young, affluent professionals and semiprofessionals, intensified police campaigns against local drug traffickers and dwindling public financial support led to the containment of the celebration within a strictly defined framework. All the time the carnival itself remained tense and its outcome each year unpredictable.

The carnival site is in Notting Hill, in the heart of the metropolis. When the carnival started it was a slummy area, notorious for drug dealing and mugging, yet adjacent to the wealthy streets of Kensington with their palatial houses, hotels and expensive shops, within a short distance of the City of Westminster, which houses Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament. The local council of Kensington and Chelsea, as well as that of neighbouring Westminster, was dominated by the Conservative Party and so were the parliamentary constituencies overlapping with them. As the years went by the area became strategically even more sensitive as the battle against drug trafficking intensified nationally and internationally, and as developers moved in, buying old dilapidated houses and converting them into modern luxurious flats that were eventually sold to white 'yuppies' who soon joined disgruntled older residents in demanding that the carnival should be banned from the area. However, the police, the local council and the Home Office each in turn protested that they had no authority to introduce the ban, that it was one or the other of these institutions that had the power but not them. Several

times the authorities offered to remove the carnival to a stadium or a park but the carnival leadership vehemently rejected the suggestion. Notting Hill as a place held a special symbolic significance for the West Indians who regarded it as, in the words of one leader, the nearest thing they had to a liberated territory — implicit reference to battles they had fought there against white racists in 1958 and against the police in 1970 and 1976. The carnival continued to exist, its greatest political achievement being that it had survived at all, in the face of formidable opposition and pressures operating to subvert it all the time.

The volatile nature of this celebration is not peculiar to the London Carnival. Generally speaking, every major carnival is precariously poised between the affirmation of the established order and its rejection. It is, in the words of Miliband,2 a contested event. This is borne out by the histories of carnivals in Europe, the West Indies and South America. It is a fact which is hidden by the formal conception of carnival and by popular ideas about it.

As a blueprint, carnival is a season of festive popular events that are characterised by revelry, playfulness and overindulgence in eating, drinking and sex, culminating in two or three days of massive street processions by masqued3 individuals and groups, ecstatically playing loud and cheerful music or as ecstatically dancing to its accompaniment. More specifically, the term refers to the longstanding tradition in many Roman Catholic countries of pre-lenten festivities. People are attracted to it because it occasions release from the constraints and pressures of the social order, generates relationships of amity even among strangers and allows forbidden excesses. Through interaction in primary relationships and change of role in masquerading, individuals recreate their self-identity and so are enabled to resume their demanding social roles in ordinary daily life. Thus carnival connotes sensuousness, freedom, frivolity, expressivity, merrymaking and the development of the amity of what Turner calls 'communitas', as contrasted with 'structure'.

This, though, is only a formal, 'ideal type' of carnival. In concrete historical reality, carnival is always a much more complex

R. Miliband, Marxism and Politics , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977.

The term 'masque' refers to the representation of a theatrical theme by a group of people and is thus different from the term 'mask' which refers to the covering of the face and/or head. In Trinidad and Notting Hill both are 'mas', though are distinguished clearly in the minds of the carnival participants. See D.J. Crowley, 'The Traditional Masques of Carnival', Carib. Q. nos 3 and 4, 1956, pp.194–223.

phenomenon, characterised by...