Trinidad Carnival Today: Local Culture in a Global Context (New Release) (Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival) (Book Review‪)‬

Garth L Green and Philip W. Scher (eds.), Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007.254 pp. When I first started looking at Festival on the Eastern Caribbean island of Tortola almost two decades ago, there were a few articles that treated Trinidad's Carnival and Caribbean festivals in general and two books dealing specifically with Trinidad Carnival--Errol Hill's classic Carnival: Mandate for a National Theater (1972), and a magnificent collection of illustrated essays--now out of print--Caribbean Festival Arts (Nunley and Bettelheim 1988). Even today it is difficult to find a single work that deals with Caribbean festivals in terms of their varied histories and events and their intersections with nationalisms, transnationalisms, and global mobilities. This collection changes this. While focused specifically on Trinidad Carnival, the essays in this collection have broad relevance, not just to the Caribbean and other festivals in the region but to the imbrication of local performances of nation, culture, history, and identity within wider-ranging networks of people, politics, and powers. Festivals in the Caribbean celebrate a variety of events, ranging from the emancipation commemorations of the British Virgin Islands and Antigua (Cohen 1998; Manning 1977, 1978) to the Easter celebrations of St. Thomas in the USVI (de Albuquerque 1990) to the pre-Lenten celebrations of Trinidad. But while Caribbean countries may put on festivals for different occasions and may even try to distinguish their celebrations by referring to them as Festival rather than Carnival, it is from Trinidad's Carnival that they take their inspiration, form, and structure.