Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times

Chorus: Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times posits the carnivalesque as a fertile laboratory to understand and go past our crisis-driven contemporaneity. The book engages with sound and noise from Cádiz, one of the capital cities of carnival in Spain, to situate carnivalesque mobilisation as a vibrant platform where our capacity to redemocratise our societies and to envisage liveable futures is revitalised. Chorus argues that the connection between freedom and carnival (carnival being a parenthesis that “liberates” individual subjectivity) has to be profoundly rethought, as freedom and spontaneity have become part of neoliberal governability.

Chorus demonstrates that carnival music is crucial to understand collective ways of being and acting in common, ways that go beyond the structured and established avenues of “formal”, parliamentary politics. Carnival music is also essential to understand and move beyond a carnivalised politics (laughter being simultaneously used to open and curtail public debate; neo-conservative jester-kings that are ascending to power; and a long etcetera). More importantly, carnival sonic is a public intervention that brings its own situated, practice-based thinking. In Chorus, I argue that participating in carnival groups implies acting and being in public politically.