University of the Western Cape
The politics of aesthetics and performance: Visuality and the remaking of culture in the Calabar Festival and Carnival, 2004 -2019
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThe Calabar Festival and Carnival was inaugurated in 2004. Aspects of Calabar cultural festivals had been appropriated into Caribbean carnivals and were performed from around the second half of the 18th century, particularly in the Trinidadian carnival. In 2004, it returned to Africa and was remade at a time of political-economic change that demanded diversification and the creation of a tourist economy. The Calabar Festival and Carnival has become an arena for sociocultural and political discourse, as well as an object of multifocal photographic practice. Since 2004 when it was first re-introduced, Calabar Festival has been generally hyped by both the media and scholarship as Africa’s leading street party framed in carnival form, but also eulogized as a cultural and tourism fiscal project that has contributed tremendously to the economic and political development of Calabar, Cross River specifically, and Nigeria in general. This study takes a leap away from these romanticized eulogies to critically evaluate some socio-political, visual and affective elements that make up the operationality and performativity of the festival. I draw from the concept of dilapidation and dissonance to assert that the festival started in 2004 with some elements of promising economic, tourism and cultural objectives. But the state government and its political and economic agencies who instituted and oversee the carnival festival have progressively pushed the event into the realm of a dilapidated cultural project, with reverberating resonances of gloom that have affected both residents and participants, as well as other elements of the society.
Degree
thesis:*- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of the Western Cape
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2024
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Udo, Nsima Stanislaus
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Witz, Leslie