Carnival in the Classroom
By Shalini Puri
After teaching several courses at Pitt in which I taught cultural theory in conjunction with literary representations of Carnival, I decided I wanted to try something different: I wanted to teach not literary representations of Carnival, but Carnival itself as an aesthetic performance. So when I had the opportunity to teach an intensive course on Carnival at the Honors College at Oregon State, where I was on a post-doc in 1997, I was delighted. I have since been modifying and developing that course to teach at Pitt. The course became an experiment in developing an appropriate methodology. How does one teach a performance which has no clearly demarcated text, a city as its stage, and up to a million people as its actors? What resources could I draw on to give students, most of whom had never had any direct experience of Carnival, access to specific performance of Carnival? What kinds of explanatory models could we use to understand the relationships amongst the innumerable specific, local, transient, and improvisational performances? And, finally, how could I used the course to push both the students' and my own thinking about Carnival out of the "radical or conservative?", "safety-valve or dress rehearsal for rebellion?" debate that has so dominated cultural theory about carnival?
I settled on a few strategies. First I wanted to find a way for the students to experience the energy and cultural significance of Carnival: taught in January and February, the course was designed to keep pace with Carnival season. Students followed raging debates that were building to a timely crescendo in online newspapers on Internet news sites about Carnival in Trinidad and Brazil. These debates - about freedom of expression, censorship, government funding, tourism, morality, a political satire in carnival - had echoes in the U.S. context that students were able to amplify to their advantage.
Second, I decided that the best way to let students experience the astonishing variety of carnivalesque performances and aesthetics was to take a multi-media approach to the course. We viewed slides, videos, film; we listened to carnival music; we read historical and anthropological accounts of carnival's successive transformations from Emancipation on; we read novelistic explorations of carnivalesque agency. The students did library and Internet research to bring in images we could discuss, images that seemed to them to embody or explode particular controversies about Carnival. I encouraged student papers that were comparably diverse in their range of media and approach. For instance, one student downloaded the national budget of Trinidad, and studied the budgetary allocations for steel band and carnival development in order to address the ambivalent impact of state-sponsorship on Carnival. And student's close reading of a moving image of a barely-clothed woman masquerader enabled her to debate questions of feminism, objectification, commodification, and transgression. A third student did a close reading of a carnival music-video's race and gender politics, using it to question some theories of Carnival.
Finally, we compared Internet images and slides I had taken at various carnivals to examine the range of agendas and aesthetics at play. How differently, for example, Che Guevara is made to speak - and yet how strange the overlaps - in the sternly purposeful Che of official state iconography and the tourist-targeted decorative mask's neo-revolutionary carnivalesque. Carnival in Cuba, only recently reinvented as a tourist attraction, offered me a useful occasion for examining the impact of tourism on carnival and comparing the trajectories of carnival in dependent capitalist and socialist states. (In future adaptations of the course, I hope we can give some attention to workers in the tourism sector, for their experience of carnival must surely include not simply unambiguous liberation from the work-cycle, but peak exploitative labor.)
Our comparative analyses of visual and textual images focused on distinguishing amongst - or demonstrating the entanglement of - the different registers of freedom to which Carnival aspires: freedom as pleasure, beauty or sexual transgression; freedom as the affirmation of community or the assertion of the individual self over community; freedom as confrontation or as release from confrontation. I hoped that these close readings of visual and textual images could offer us a route out of the "radical or conservative?" debate, by enabling us to deepen our sense of the distinctions amongst resistance, transgression and opposition. My goal was for students to leave the course with an awareness that questions of Carnival's politics could not be answered in the abstract, once and for all. Rather, they could only be answered in the often tense interplay of the aesthetic structure, content, and conjuncture of carnivalesque performance.