Carnival and the Carnivalesque

Catalog description

The world turned upside down! This graduate seminar focuses on the carnivalesque as an analytic concept as well as on carnival as social practice in a comparative frame. We read ethnographic and historical studies of diverse junctures where radical play comes together with social change: rituals of social inversion, revolutionary performances, millenarian social movements, charivari, drag balls. Brazil, India, Haiti, England, France, Japan; Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Emma Goldman.