Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present

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St John, Graham
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2015
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On 16 May (M16) 1998 a Global Street Party took place in thirty cities on five continents coinciding with the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Birmingham, England, and the following week’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial in Geneva. This was the first Global Day of Action, a transnational mobilization signifying the emergence of the alter-globalization movement. Called by those identifying with the People’s Global Action (PGA),1 the M16 Global Street Party was pivotal, since it signalled the re-emergence of a carnivalized cultural praxis which Brian Holmes – in the most comprehensive testament to the activities and events of the alter-globalization movement, We Are Everywhere –deems a ‘carnivalesque ritual’ (in Ainger et al., 2003, p. 346).2 Momentous in this regard, the 1960s has been identified as an experimental laboratory of emancipatory cultural politics (see Stephens, 1998). A context for the emergence of guerrilla theatre and other nascent tactical media practices associated with an anti-disciplinary protest in which a ‘new parodic political language’ (Stephens, 1998, p. 25) was being forged, the period was the ‘privileged era of carnivalized politics’ (Stam, 1988, p. 136). In the interventions of the Situationist International, the Youth International Party (Yippies), the Diggers (an offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troupe) and other avant-garde, theatrical and political groups the carnival’s ‘perennial repertoire’ of gestures, symbols and metaphors had, according to Robert Stam (1988, p. 135), been ‘deployed to give voice to desire for social and political justice’. But while the carnivalesque possesses deep historical roots, and the repertoire adopted and translated by social movements in the 1970s and 1980s, it would experience an explosive resurgence as the Carnivals Against Capital (and For Global Justice) mounted on numerous Global Days of Action from the late 1990s provided vivid proclamation of the emergence of a movement mobilizing against neo-liberalism and war, and for autonomy and peace. Massive anti-capitalist and anti-war convergences signalled the emergence of the protestival as a variegated complex of action performances enabling exposure and revelation.

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Playgrounds: Reinventing the Square

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Social Change

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