Encountering Difference by Robin Cohen & Olivia Sheringham

Author:Robin Cohen & Olivia Sheringham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509508839
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Carnival in London

Let us now turn our attention to a rather different creolizing space, to the carnival that takes place every year in the ‘global city’ of London, a city we refer to as a contemporary contact zone (see chapter 3). Many of the tensions outlined above – between commercialization and authenticity, co-optation and resistance, or past and present – are evident in London’s Notting Hill Carnival. Although there were historical precedents to carnival in the Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs of the eighteenth century, the modern British revival dated from 30 January 1959 when Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian writer and activist, staged an indoor event as a deliberate protest against the Notting Hill race riots directed against Caribbean immigrants in August 1958. These colonial migrants, invited to help rebuild post-war Britain, had begun to arrive in the 1950s and their migration continued into the 1960s. Yet, despite expectations of a better life in the motherland – ‘they take you here and they take you there, and they make you feel like a millionaire. So London, that’s the place for me’22 – the reality was far from welcoming and these migrants faced widespread discrimination. In the face of such hostility, cultural forms such as carnival emerged among Caribbean people in Britain, not just ‘for recreation’, but, importantly, ‘for self-expression and self-affirmation and as a statement of identity’.23 Not only has today’s carnival in London dramatically grown, attracting more than a million revellers, but also its form and content have evolved to reflect London’s ever more diverse population.

The early trajectory of the Notting Hill Carnival in many ways parallels that of its precursor in Trinidad (and other parts of the Caribbean) and, as Jackson argues, in both cases the political context is of key significance.24 Prior to the abolition of slavery in 1834, the Trinidadian carnival was the realm of the white – predominantly French-speaking Catholic – elite. Yet, following emancipation, black slaves, who had formerly been prohibited from congregating in public, took to the streets and gradually took over the event as a way of celebrating their freedom and, through creative disguise and mimicry, criticizing and caricaturing their former masters. Through bringing together groups whose everyday lives are normally separate, both physically and socially, carnival came to represent a space where ‘all the social, political and “racial” tensions of Trinidadian society’ are made manifest.25 On the other hand, governments and cultural elites have frequently used carnival as a form of nation-building, an ‘integrative institution’ that celebrates unity in diversity.26

In London, following several years of being celebrated in large halls, in 1966 carnival took to the streets of Notting Hill when a small street festival held for local children became an extensive street party as residents were drawn to the sounds of Russell Henderson’s steel band.27 At the time, Notting Hill was an area where many Caribbean migrants lived, predominantly due to low rental prices. In its early years, carnival represented a means for the celebration of shared Caribbean cultural identity in urban areas of settlement, and incorporated traditional masquerades, music and costumes.

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