CREATIVITY AND CONTROL IN TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL COMPETITION
ABSTRACT ” The author discusses how organized competitions during Trinidad carnival have been used to control aesthetic expression and public behavior, and how these attempts at control are balanced by the creative impulses of participants. While today’s competitions – like Calypso Monarch, Panorama (steelband), and Best Band (masquerade) – can be explained in terms of such colonial or nationalist attempts to establish cultural hegemony; they are also characterized by artistic creativity, festivity, and resistance to authority. Examples of competition in Trinidad carnival during the nineteenth 19th and early twentieth centuries are presented, as well as corroborating examples from other cultures, in order to delineate patterns of rivalry and competition that can be distinguished from colonial and nationalist politics. ” Quote of ‘Abstract’ from the Full Text
