Re-articulating tradition, translating place : collective memories of Carnival in Leeds and Bristol.

This thesis offers an ethnographic perspective on `African-Caribbean' Carnivals in
Leeds (Chapeltown) and Bristol (St. Paul's), based on an integration of in-depth
interviews, focus groups, archival analysis and participatory research. It
demonstrates how globalized diasporic meanings are localized in and through the
specificities of `place'. Rather than employing an exclusively textual method of
deconstruction, which has dominated much of the academic work on Carnival, this
research draws on participatory experience in social spaces such as mas camps,
Carnival costume-making classes and singing groups to explore the practices
through which Carnival is reconstituted. The thesis shows how these practices
involve performances of different and contested collective memories, where
individual participants react to and recreate these `unified' senses of tradition in
very different ways (ranging from those who insist on a `Carnival tradition' based
on walking mas and soca/calypso music, to those who celebrate a `mas by other
means' through the rhythms of jungle and hip hop and `costumes' of branded
sportswear and puffa jackets). Music and mas provide key examples of the
emergence and re-articulation of complex and contested identities. Though hybrid
in form and apparently `progressive' in sentiment, such forms and their related
`new ethnicities' are shown to involve exclusions as well as inclusions, as they are
patterned by the continued salience of `racialized difference'. The thesis therefore
raises questions about how collective memories are actively reconstructed through
their relations with the multiple spatialities of a `sense of place', and how racisms
persist in influencing the meanings of `multicultural' events such as Carnival.