ABSTRACT
This essay looks at an international performance phenomenon, which I refer to as tactical carnival, that has developed as a tactic in the toolbox of the burgeoning global justice movement. This movement has been more accurately described as a ‘movement of movements’ due to its great diversity in geography, identity, and ideology (‘One no, many yeses’ is one of its main slogans). As connections and coalitions are forged between Bolivian miners, American anti-corporate activists, Polish organic farmers, etc., organizers have begun to coordinate a celebratory form of protest that involves unpermitted street parties/processions that occupy public space, both to assert movement identity and importance and often to disrupt state or corporate events/daily business. Movement organizers and writers use the term ‘carnival’ to label these explicitly oppositional events, at which flamboyant costumes, dance, puppets, tricksterism, samba bands and other musical groupings can all be seen. They also seem to refer to ideas about ‘carnival’ that may, to some scholars, seem romantic or overly idealist: nevertheless, these activists are attempting to deploy the ideal of carnival in a practical, experimental way on the street, to create a new, twenty-first century kind of ‘carnival’ that is not calendrically nor spatially circumscribed or permitted by the state but declared and embodied by a movement that identifies itself as global, anti-corporate and anti-authoritarian.
