Street Life: The Politics of Carnival

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Abstract
The notion is developed of Carnival as a contested social event whose political significance is inscribed in the landscape. Some themes from Caribbean history and social anthropology are brought together with some recent ideas from social geography concerning the territorial basis of British racism. The focus is on London's Notting Hill Carnival but it is argued that the significance of this contemporary British event can only be understood against the background of Britain's colonial interests in the Caribbean. In the empirical part of the paper an analysis of media representations of the Notting Hill Carnival is developed, concentrating on the disturbances associated with Carnival in 1976. Press reports of the Carnival riots signalled a significant shift in British ‘racial’ discourse and a marked deterioration in relations between black people and the police, involving a ‘criminalization’ of black people in general. The spatial constitution of symbolic resistance is described and the paper concludes with a discussion of the ‘carnivalization’ of society, challenging the conventional distinction between culture and politics.

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