Masquerade politics : explorations in the structure of urban cultural movements / Abner Cohen.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Resurrected London Fair -- Corporate Organisation and the Trinidad Conventions -- Youth Rebellion and the Jamaican Connection -- The Carnival is Contested -- The Carnival is Contained -- Communal Organisation -- The Political Dimension of Art and Music -- The Leadership Process -- The Politics of Joking Relationships -- The Aestheticisation of Politics.

Carnival, that celebration of sensuous frivolity, is shown by Abner Cohen to be a masquerade for the dynamic relations between culture and politics. His masterful study provides a microsociological analysis of the processes involved in the transformation of a local, polyethnic London fair to a massive, exclusively West Indian carnival, known as "Europe's biggest street festival," which in 1976 occasioned a bloody confrontation between black youth and the British metropolitan police and which has since become a fiercely contested cultural event. Cohen contrasts the development of the London carnival with the development of other carnivalesque movements, including the Renaissance Pleasure Faire of California. His analysis of these relatively little-explored urban cultural movements develops further the theoretical formulations, advanced in his previous studies of ethnic and religious movements, about the dynamic relations between cultural forms and political formations.