ABSTRACT
This article outlines strands of carnival theory from Bakhtin to Black Atlantic and East African post-colonial scholarship, then describes the carnival of Bahia, Brazil. In New World carnivals, race is a critical rhetorical category in the exchange between everyday authority and the subaltern cultures whose energies manifest in the event. The most racially self-conscious of such carnivals, the Bahian carnival is generally considered a beacon of Afro-centricity and constant aesthetic evolution, and associated with resistance to patriarchal order. Here, as elsewhere, however, carnival praxes can be read as a reflection of social conflicts and collusions, but not as a transparent translation of material relations. As well as individual affirmation and traditional group identities, carnival now fosters consumer cultures. As to its symbolic logic, progressive rhetoric is contradicted by the surprising viability of a conservative agenda in which ‘dissidents’ often collude. Bahian carnival is less an inversion of order than an intensification of an everyday culture which has already assimilated carnival motifs and values. The temporal and spatial boundaries between these zones are unusually open. The composite middle-ground is here termed the ‘Bahian carnivalesque’; though less conspicuous, this social sensibility of tolerance, with all its ambiguities, is more extraordinary than the carnival itself and may better survive commodification.
