Carlson Presents on Carnival at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto

Amanda Carlson, assistant professor of art history, A&S, presented her research, "Calabar Carnival: A Trinidadian Tradition in Africa," at the Royal Ontario Museum's symposium, "Carnival: Exploring the Cultural Identity of Mas" (February 24, 2013).

While there are more than 60 Trinidadian-style carnivals around the world (Toronto being one of the biggest), the only one that is not run by a Carribbean community in the diaspora exists in Africa.

Calabar Carnival (Nigeria) is a large-scale importation and adaptation of a foreign tradition into a new localized space where it fuses and celebrates the local and the global. People from the eastern Nigerian region were among the largest groups of slaves brought to Trinidad where they planted cultural seeds, the products of  which are now embedded within Trini-Carnival. However, this fact is not well known in Calabar, where in the minds of Carnival participants there have been few tangible ties between Calabar and T&T—until now.

Nevertheless, in this process Nigerians are tracing (in a more general sense) the path of their ancestors to the Caribbean, celebrating the interactions and influences their ancestors had in the Caribbean, and then manifesting that history within a new performance style. As Carnival "returns" to Africa, it is difficult to determine exactly what is returning. However, it is the idea of a return that matters. Carlson discussed the progression of this new performance tradition (and "Africa's largest street party") from 2006 until the present.