Marketing the Nation

Public festivals provide not only the occasion to make statements about national identity but also offer opportunities to culture brokers seeking foreign exchange through tourism. Within the matrix of the international culture industries and the hegemonic international order of nation-states, culture is both a commodity and a source of national pride. In this article I examine efforts at `cultural entrepreneurship' regarding the Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. Attempts to market the Carnival and, in a larger sense, Trinidad and Tobago, reveal profound ambiguities about cultural authenticity, ambivalence regarding international recognition, and contested ideas about national identity in a complex multi-ethnic, multicultural, postcolonial state. I criticize what I call `academic nostalgia', the propensity of academics, including anthropologists, to lament the supposed inauthenticity and commercialism that is said to accompany changes in Carnival. I show how this concern mirrors local critiques of Carnival, and how this preoccupation was itself a recurrent theme throughout the 20th century.