Power is not enough to make us strong
The heart must also sing the human song.
-- Syl Lowhar

For the first time, an international conference on Carnival will use the African-based celebrations of the Caribbean and the Americas as a Carnival paradigm.

The World Conference on Carnival: Showcasing the Caribbean will bring together an internationally renowned group of scholars, artists, and performers to explore, expand, and redefine concepts of carnival, carnival analogues, and the carnivalesque on the basis of African, Asian, European, and worldwide festive practices.

By highlighting the Caribbean, the conference reclaims the central importance of this region as an axis of human migrations, trade and commerce, and cultural flows in the Americas since 1492.  The region where the enslavement of Africans began in the New World in the 1510s, and the recipient of about forty percent of the African slaves who survived the Middle Passage, the Caribbean has produced an amalgam of festive traditions of Native, European, and African origin accentuated by experiences of colonialism, plantation slavery, and popular resistance for half a millenium.

The conference will focus on Carnival and associated festivities, holiday customs, and activities by viewing them as part of a process of performance and reformulation of personal and collective identities. We posit that those things regarded as "leisure," "pleasure" or "festive" activities are, in fact, basic to the social structuring and the collective identities of communal groups.

The World Conference on Carnival: Showcasing the Caribbean will take place at Trinity College and the city of Hartford, Connecticut, on September 9-13, 1998.   Our urban, inner-city context is also part of our vision of the conference.   Carnival as a festive custom is traditionally urban, not agrarian.  At a time when inner cities have too often become the arena in which communities fight poverty, powerlessness, and decay, our goal is to establish a venue, the study and performance of Carnival, for the examination our own cultural histories, especially as those histories are registered in and through rituals of festivity.

The conference will consist of public interpretive lectures and panels, workshops and performances which demonstrate traditions on which the lectures are based.   The conference will include also A City Celebrates! a public festival designed to showcase Hartford's ethnic communities and cultural performing groups.  In preparation for the conference and the urban festival, over 1,000 students from six school districts including Hartford are currently engaged in a project entitled Carnival of Life, funded by a grant from the Connecticut Department of Education.

Please plan to attend our World Conference on Carnival: Showcasing the Caribbean and associated events.  To learn more about our project, please explore this Website: read our invitation to participate; study the proposals for conference topics; examine our Final Conference Schedule, as well as conference-related Special Events, and a list of Guest Carnival Artistes from Trinidad and Tobago that will participate in various conference events. Finally, please consider registering early for this unprecedented conference.

For more information, please contact the organizers at the
Carnival Hotline

or e-mail us to:
Carnival@TrinColl.edu

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