Calabar Carnival

| african arts WINTER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 4 What is the place of the street in the production and consumption of contemporary and commodified African festival? How has the street become a curatorial platform and a contested space through which visuality, cultural aesthetic and commodification, play, vulgarity, and the secular coalesce and tangle in an attempt to create a composite festival that produces different layers of historical, cultural, and visual analysis? (Fig. 1). To answer these questions, we need to briefly look at how the street has been theorized by scholars in the social sciences. The street has been defined as being “both contradictory and complex... distinctive but contested social space” as well as a space for public engagement and community-making (Hubbard and Lyon 2018). Others see the street as venue of governmental surveillance, secular power demonstration, class categorization, and legal systematization (Coleman and Sim 2000). The plasticity of defining the street is multifaceted, yet it overlaps its cultural and visual functionality. In this essay, I read Calabar Festival and carnival and the street as cultural theater through the which performance, play, and visuality are exhibited. Using photographs as my tool of analysis and historical resource, I conceptualize the street as a space of convergence where culture, visuality, creativity, economy, the secular, and the vulgar meet and entangle, creating changes, rhythms, and movements in cultural, political, leisure, and visual aesthetics1 (Fig. 2). While the social life of the street is complex, fluid, and seemingly boundless, its cultural, performance, play, and visual agency seems to diminish and invert the uncanny and domineering “political, legal, and economic forces that reinforce existing social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion” (Barker 2009) (Fig. 3). The Calabar Festival and Carnival is a thirty-one to thirty-two day yearly event that started in 2004/2005. The event takes place on the streets of Calabar, while certain aspects of the events are hosted at city centers like Calabar Stadium, Eleven-Eleven arena, Calabar Cultural Centre, and the Calabar Municipal Local Government ground, where the popular Carnival Village Market is positioned. In 2004/2005, the carnival was originally dubbed “Calabar Carnival Extravaganza” by the organizers, where a few “paradelike walk-about” revelers displayed symbols of different tourism sites and other forms and symbols of government projects with very sparse costuming (Carlson 2010: 47). Performances are orchestrated by different groups from the Cross River Regions and different national and international groups, while other contemporary entertainment events and popular performances are prospective features of the event at different gravity each year (Fig. 4). The festival/carnival dominantly clones the Caribbean carnival genre, with close parallels in performance, costuming, props, colors, floats, and other forms of cultural technicalities. The festival, which was originally built around an existing cultural tradition and performance of Efik people known as mbre ukabare-isua (the popular Christmas celebrations in the Cross River region), has shifted its performance and aesthetic ideals towards the Caribbean carnival genre in an attempt to remake an elaborate modernized and hybridized festival that is now scampering for international recognition and patronage (Figs. 5–6). Here, I position myself as a “visual griot” (as both a producer and an archivist).2 I attempted to document a history of contemporary Calabar Carnival in a visual form (Keller 2008). In this photo essay, I draw from my photographic archive of over a thousand photographs produced in 2019 during fieldwork in Calabar. Calabar is a typical Nigerian city in Cross River State. While rich in cultural antecedents and cosmopolitanism, Calabar is paradoxically a cultural terrain that is known for its social, economic, and political instability and that is larded with corruption, particularly in relation to investigating government-sponsored events (Fig. 7). My focus in this photo essay is primarily Calabar Carnival, one core component of the elaborate thirty-one to thirty-two day Calabar Festival and Carnival. I consider how Calabar Carnival, and the street, have become contested landscapes where performative visual technologies engage with social, cultural, and political entanglements. This essay shows how the street has become an important component in the making of history, in the creation, performance, and consumption of culture, and in curating and advancing visual practices, performances, and technologies. I consider how photography functions as making “raw history” (Edwards 2001: 5), creating documents of a carnival of culture (Fig. 8). However, the visual documentation of carnival by both photo essay