Calabar Carnival: Visualizing Cultural Authenticity and the Paradigm of the Street

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...