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The Imperative of “Human Happiness”

Claudia Jones, the Windrush Generation, and the Emergence of Notting Hill Carnival in 1959, London, England
D. Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson

Abstract

None more aptly describes a TransAmerican art and Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic than Trinidadian journalist, Marxist, and Black feminist Claudia Jones (1915-1964) whose life and work traversed the Caribbean, the United States, and Great Britain in London’s Notting Hill Carnival. Jones organized the first Notting Hill Carnival on January 30, 1959, at the St. Pancras Town Hall in Notting Hill, London, England, in response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, which was a series of racial attacks on West Indians from August 29 to September 5, 1958. After the wave of West Indians, called the “Windrush generation” arrived in Tilbury Docks, England on board their namesake ship, the Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948, West Indians experienced racial tensions and attacks in the first decade of rebuilding Great Britain after World War II, culminating in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. Jones said, “We need something to get the taste of [the] Notting Hill [race riots] out of our mouths” (Younge 2019). Carole Boyce Davies notes that Jones wanted to create “a culture of human happiness over the ignorance and pain of racism, and indeed that it was a people’s culture that provided them with the basis for acquiring their freedom” (2008: 174). Jones used “human happiness” as an imperative in a Trinidad-style carnival, which was a mandate and urgent act of collective joy and liberation, generated from West Indian culture. Jones activated a Trinidad-style carnival that emerged from the liberatory spirit of Emancipation Day festivals on August 1, 1838, in Trinidad and Tobago when freed Africans celebrated Cannes Brûlées or Canboulay (burnt cane) and J’overt or Jouvay (daybreak). Canboulay commemorated the final burning of sugar cane during enslavement (Elder 2004:49; Martin 2004: 285). Jouvay celebrated the first day of freedom on August 1, 1838, when enslaved Africans waited all night until daybreak, shouting in jubilation, “j’overt! j’overt! j’overt!” through the streets at the first light of dawn on the first day of freedom (Lovelace 2004: 187). In the 1840s, the British colonial administration moved emancipation festivals to the pre-Lenten carnival season that morphed into today’s Trinidad Carnival, distinguished by Canboulay, Jouvay, and happiness to excess. Jones harnessed the jubilation of these events in an audacious resolve for human happiness, launching the Trinidad-style Notting Hill Carnival in January 1959, the epitome of a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic.

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Dedication

For Claudia Jones (1915-1964)

Full text

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the reviewers and editors of Angles – New Perspectives on the Anglophone World for their invaluable feedback, insightful comments, and thoughtful notes in this paper.

Special thanks to my spouse, Larry Erickson, and my daughter, Isabella Erickson, for their unwavering love and ever-present support.

Introduction

“– a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom.”

  • 1 Claudia Jones wrote “a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom” on the pamphlet for the first (...)

Claudia Jones, January 30, 19591

  • 2 I use the term, “West Indian” to refer to people from the Anglophone Caribbean, synonymous with “We (...)

1This is the story of how the Notting Hill Carnival in London, England came to be; and how the Trinidadian activist Claudia Jones (1915-1964) enacted a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic in Notting Hill Carnival. After a wave of West Indians2 called the “Windrush generation” arrived in Tilbury Docks, England on board their namesake ship, the Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948, West Indians experienced racial hostility that culminated by the end of the decade in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, a series of racial attacks by white mobs on West Indians from August 29 to September 5, 1958 in Notting Hill, Notting Dale, Ladbrook Grove, and Nottingham in England. The series of mob violence became known as the Notting Hill race riots, despite how widespread it was in other areas (Blackman 2019; Hilliard 2022).

2Incensed by the Notting Hill race riots in 1958, Jones organized the Notting Hill Carnival on January 30, 1959, at the St. Pancras Town Hall in Notting Hill, London, England. What emerged was a TransAmerican art, an anti-racist, jubilant joy within a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic using Trinidad Carnival as its impetus. Jones remarked: “we need something to get the taste of [the] Notting Hill [race riots] out of our mouths” (Younge 2002). With this, Jones harnessed and enacted the liberatory spirit of the Trinidad Carnival by organizing a Trinidad-style carnival that became an emblem of West Indian unity, a tour de force against racial oppression from its roots in nineteenth century Trinidad and Tobago, and grounded in emancipation festivals from 1838 with Cannes Brûlées or Canboulay (burnt cane) and j’overt or jouvay (daybreak) on and around Emancipation Day, August 1, 1838. Nineteenth century Canboulay commemorated the final burning of sugar cane during enslavement (Elder 2004: 49; Martin 2004: 285). Jouvay celebrated the first day of freedom on August 1, 1838, when enslaved people sat up all night until daybreak, shouting in jubilation, “j’overt! j’overt! j’overt!” at the first light of dawn (Lovelace 2004: 187). In the 1840s, the British administration in Trinidad and Tobago moved emancipation festivals to pre-Lenten carnival season to join the wider colonial European carnival that later morphed into the Trinidad Carnival of today, known for its emancipation festivals of Canboulay and Jouvay.

3Carole Boyce Davies notes that Jones wanted to create “a culture of human happiness over the ignorance and pain of racism, and indeed that it was a people’s culture that provided them with the basis for acquiring their freedom” (2008: 174). I argue that Jones deployed “human happiness” as a strategy and performance imperative in the emancipatory spirit of Trinidad Carnival to address the racial hostility in England; and to forge a West Indian coalition with the first Notting Hill Carnival on January 30, 1959. When Davies refers to Jones wanting to cultivate a culture of “human happiness,” I think about Sylvia Wynter’s critique on western, Eurocentric constructs on the “Human Being” (2003: 260). According to Wynter’s formulations of the western binary construct of “Human Being” vs. “Man,” “Man” is conceived as white, male, and western, whereas the “Human Being” is categorized in the social constructs of race, gender, sexuality and the like, and fixed within various power differentials (2003: 260-1). Wynter theorizes that –

all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources (20 percent of the world’s people own 80 percent of its resources, consume two-thirds of its food, and are responsible for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of earth’s peoples living relatively affluent lives while four billion still live on the edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of overconsumption on the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that of overpopulation on the part of the dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the South)—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle. (260-1)

4Wynter’s concept of the “Human Being” is originally devoid of any western social constructs of race, gender, sexuality, and others. In the west, “race” is a social construct used to falsely categorize groups of non-white people in hierarchical structures to justify social exclusion, exploitation, and elimination if necessary. “Race” is not scientific or biological, and a “race” DNA does not exist to prove a human being’s “race” (Angier 2000). Furthermore, Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue that “race as a social construction is not fixed,” (2015) which means that the social construction (of race) can be changed over time because of shifting systems and structures in dominant cultures, but that mercurial constructs of “race” does not eliminate “race” itself. Gender is socially constructed by societies in classification of “male” and “female,” forsaking genderqueer, gender expansive and nonbinary people; and sexuality, defined as desire and eroticism, is socially constructed, and regulated around beliefs of normative heterosexuality and heteronormativity, and with queer sexualities as abnormal or suspect. These interwoven social constructs on human beings, Wynter asserts, emerged from western and Eurocentric formulations during colonization and enslavement (261).

5At the core is the “Human Being,” as Wynter notes, is the “ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle” (261). The colonial construct of “race” as defined here in the arrival of the Windrush generation in England, is the process of exclusion, expulsion, phobia, and discrimination of the recent wave West Indian migrants in 1948 to 1971 in England. Therefore, Jones’s impetus towards an imperative of “human happiness” is free of Eurocentric social regulations, controls and constructs of race, gender, and sexuality on “human beings” (West Indians); and is the nucleus of jubilation to disarm ignorance, nullify hate with love, and to liberate “Human Beings” from colonial social constructs to forge a West Indian coalition towards a truly inclusive, multicultural England identified as a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic in Notting Hill Carnival.

6In this paper, I focus on the West Indian community in England who have used Trinidad Carnival, symbolic of pan-Caribbean (West Indian) unity and human happiness. The term “West Indies” came about during Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the East Indies through a western route in 1492, when Columbus mistakenly found present-day Caribbean region, naming it the “West” Indies (Henke 2001: xvii). Since then, European colonies in the West Indies have been variously British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, and Danish for over five hundred years (Cummings and Donnell 2021). Consequently, the West Indies (also known as the Caribbean or the Antilles) is culturally and linguistically Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, Lusophone, Dutch-speaking and Danish-speaking at various times throughout its history (Cummings and Donnell 2021). In addition, mixed languages in the Caribbean such as Papiamento, Patois, Kreyol and Kromanti derive from African, Indigenous Caribbean, and European languages (Johnson and Huggins 2019: 2). Other languages include Sino- and Indo- Caribbean languages from East and South Asian communities since the mid-nineteenth century (Johnson and Huggins 2019: 2). Even though, the term “West Indies” refers to the Caribbean region, the “West Indies” specifically refers the Anglophone Caribbean with its people known as “West Indians” (Henke 2001: xvii). The Anglophone Caribbean includes Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, Montserrat, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago; and British Overseas Territories that include Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos, and Bermuda (Ammon et al. 2008: 2083).

  • 3 I use capital “B” in “Black” when referring to Black people, places, thought.

7I position myself as West Indian, Caribbean American, Afro-Asian-Indigenous-Caribbean, a Black3 performance scholar/artist with Windrush generation grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins of Afro-Asian, South Asian, and African descents in south London, England. My Windrush generation family migrated from Jamaica to England in the 1950s and 1960s. I was born and raised in Jamaica, studied in London, England, stayed with my grandparents and extended family who were West Indians in the Windrush generation. During the 1990s to 2000, I was deeply engaged with West Indian and Black British culture and life. My experiences included living and working in England, as well as participating in events such as the Notting Hill Carnival during August bank holidays. The number of times I have been told to “go back to your country” was staggering when I lived there in the late 1990s; and like many West Indians since post-Emancipation and post-Independence, we have traveled in between various metropoles, with deep significance now residing in the United States as a perpetual outsider and transient immigrant in myriad worlds across the circum-Atlantic.

8First, I will do a literature review around the arrival of the Windrush generation to England in 1948 and then review Claudia Jones’s TransAmerican work in the United States and England in organizing the first Notting Hill Carnival as a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic. I will then review how African (Black) presence in nineteenth century French carnival in Trinidad transformed Trinidad Carnival as a liberatory masquerade (or mas’) grounded in early Emancipation festivals, and later activated in Notting Hill, London, England in 1959 as a collective euphoria and happiness to excess, in reaction to the Notting Hill race riots of 1958. I use performance as lens to view the emergence of the first Notting Hill Carnival in 1959 from the ashes of the Notting Hill Race Riot of 1958. I conclude with the human happiness imperative as a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic in masquerade (or mas’); and explore the ongoing struggles towards inclusion of Black people in Great Britain’s multicultural history with the 2018 Windrush Scandal that sought a mass deportation of West Indians from the Windrush generation to return back to the West Indies (Rawlinson 2019; Shyllon 2016: 223).

Literature Review

9Performance is the act of staging and presenting, a process of accomplishing a task (Micu 2022). Performance is the aesthetics in staging the arts in concerts, theatre, dance, music, interdisciplinary arts. Performance can be more broadly construed as all human behaviors, and activities, including interactions and communications with objects, technologies to the extent that these objects and technologies “perform” through interactions with human beings (Micu 2022). Everyday human behaviors are quotidian performances such as the way humans communicate, entertain, use spoken and body language, gestures (Micu 2022). Traditions, rituals, orality, collective memories, histories, and stories have been transmitted through embodied performances. Cultural performances like festivals, masquerades, and parades that compel performers to act, and reenact. Notting Hill Carnival is a cultural performance in what Jon McKenzie calls “embodied transgressions” and “resistance” (2004: 26). McKenzie explains that cultural performance is “embodied transgression” with “social bodies” [or beings] resisting in site specific events and face-to-face encounters (McKenzie 2004; 26). Notting Hill Carnival performs embodied transgressions and resistance emerging from West Indian coalitions.

10From the earliest form of a carnival in ancient Egypt called Sham El-Nessim, around 2,700 BCE, revelers drove away winter spirits in the spring festival (Deniz 2024: 116). The Festival of Dionysus in Ancient Greece (Borden 2024) and the Roman Saturnalia in Ancient Rome celebrated the rebirth in spring. (Haviaras 2024). In mid-12th century Europe, the Roman Catholic Church incorporated carnival traditions into its liturgical calendar as a pre-Lenten festival celebrated from Christmas to Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) in February or March, marking a period of feasting, gluttony, and excess. The word “carnival” derives from the Latin phrases, carne levare, carnelevarium and carnem, which means “removal of meat” or “farewell to meat” marking a period of feasting, gluttony, drinking, and excess in the pre-Lenten festival before a forty-day period of fasting beginning with Ash Wednesday and ending at Easter celebrations (Crichlow 2013: 1928). Mikhail Bakhtin posits that European medieval carnivals were suspensions of hierarchies for equality in the life of carnival season where a king could masquerade as a peasant and vice versa (1984: 10). European carnivals soon spread to the Americas and Africa introduced through trans-Atlantic slave trade, and colonization.

11In the Americas, Bakhtin’s theory of a hierarchical suspension in the European carnival did not apply in nineteenth century carnivals in colonial West Indies due to existing hierarchies from colonization, enslavement, and expulsions of Africans and Indigenous Caribbeans from European carnivals. At the Emancipation of slavery in 1834-1840, white elites retreated from carnival as freed Africans and Indigenous people in European colonies joined carnival merriment creating and renewing their own masquerade traditions with new meanings of self-determination, spiritual renewal of African and Indigenous practices, and parodies of European colonialism and contemporary issues (Bettelheim and Nunley 1988). With European colonialism in the Caribbean from the late 1400s, European carnival practices over time converged with masquerade traditions from Indigenous Caribbean peoples and Africans in the Americas that morphed into emancipatory and transformative carnivals. Festivals and carnivals such as Rara in Haiti, Trinidad Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, Crop Over in Barbados, Rio Carnival in Brazil, and Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Louisiana in the circum-Caribbean, among others in the region that have emerged from social and political changes from enslavement to full participation in carnivals (Bettelheim et al. 1988:137-147).

12The study of Caribbean carnivals is broad with several specificities. For one, the pre-Lenten carnival is only one of many cultural events like festivals, spectacles, and parades grouped together as “masquerades,” an umbrella term and theory. For example, the longest running festival in the Caribbean and the Americas is the Festival de Santiago Apóstol (The Festival of St. James, the Apostle) from the late 1400s when the Spanish colonists invaded Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic) (Vizcaino 2023). The festival featured the main character, El Diablo Cojuelo (Limping Devil) that depicted Moors in medieval Spain as “devils.” Centuries later, the festival is now the Carnaval Dominicano (Dominican carnival) as an independence festival for the month of February with a plethora of Diablo Cojuelos (Limping Devils) and other characters as parodies of Spanish colonialism, and historical and contemporary commentaries in one of the most commemorative festivals in the Caribbean (Vizcaino 2023).

13Previous studies on Caribbean carnivals reflected a decidedly western perspective. Today, more studies on Caribbean festivals, indicate African and Indigenous beliefs and a worldview in masquerading as returning ancestors or deities, embodied in the costumes, masks, and dances (Banham et al 2004: 5; Kempadoo 2024 :5). Rex Nettleford contends that this phenomenon of an ancestral return in carnivals, and more broadly, masquerades, is a manifestation of a “psychic, if not physical return” of an ancestral past (quoted in Nurse 2004: 246). Elements of African and Indigenous Caribbean beliefs in Caribbean masquerades indicate performances imbued with returning deities and ancestral spirits in what I theorize as a performance of historical presence. I define the historical presence (or present) in Caribbean masquerades as a performance that uses the present tense in describing historical events. For example, Black and Indigenous artists may use the historical present in performance that detail a moment in history experienced by their ancestors during the trans-Atlantic slave trade or Spanish conquistadors’ invasion of a Taino Kingdom in the Caribbean. The performance of historical presence is not necessarily a reenactment but can be an artistic interpretation of a historical moment experienced by ancestors. Many Black and Indigenous performers use the historical presence when narrating the past as if they were transported back in time, seeing through ancestors’ eyes, or speaking with ancestors’ voices. The same is true that ancestors can be manifested in the present through masquerades or other artistic representations. In various Caribbean masquerade beliefs, ancestral spirits from the past would return to speaking through present-day masqueraders in dance, song, costume, and masking as manifestations of ancestral spirits, or deities.

  • 4 Brazil has the largest Black population outside of the African continent, and the largest Black pop (...)

14In this way, I would describe Trinidad Carnival and other Caribbean festivals as sharing elements of performing historical presence in masquerades where ancestral spirits and deities return in the mask and masquerade to strengthen the collective in the present. Franck Ribard’s work on Afro Blocos, a carnival group in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, shows Afro-Brazilian focus on celebrating and preserving African heritage through the veneration Yoruba Orishas (gods and goddesses) who return as manifestations in the carnival, a practice once outlawed during nineteenth century enslavement, now celebrated today in Afro Brazilian culture (1999). Salvador da Bahia is a predominantly Black (African descendant) city in Brazil.4 Afro Brazilian carnival (or festival) takes on a spiritual obligation for devotees and a connection to African heritage. In another instance, Ribard argues that another carnival group called Afoxé from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, is known for its spiritual practices of the Afro Brazilian Yoruba religion, Candomblé for self-determination separate from the wider Brazilian carnival (Ribard 1999).

15In an ethnographic study of Caribbean carnivals in Fort-de-France in Martinique, London in England, and Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadelupe from 2000-2018, Lionel Arnaud argues that Caribbean carnivals are now more of a “way of life,” and “part of the standardized, limited, context-dependent repertoires” as accepted in both societies (2020). Arnaud suggests that because Caribbean carnivals now appear to be mainstream in Fort-de-France, Pointe-à-Pitre and London, he observes that Afro-Caribbean activists are using carnival as a “tactical choice” in organizing around issues impacting Caribbean communities (2020). It may appear that Caribbean carnivals have moved beyond the nineteenth century emancipation themes and twentieth century racial injustice. However, carnivals, festivals, and parades have always been a means to collectively organize for the welfare of Caribbean communities whatever the issues. The study of Caribbean carnivals indicates a move towards celebrating and preserving African and Indigenous Caribbean heritage and beliefs, engendering a greater and higher purpose, and calling. The act of masquerading in carnivals is to celebrate collective identities, practicing beliefs in returning ancestors with performances of historical presence in communion with ancestral spirits in secular-sacred events.

16Consequently, a plethora of Trinidad-style carnivals abounds in West Indian communities around the world indicating the need to connect to homelands, ancestral pasts, and to perform a historical presence that inspire pan-Caribbean (West Indian) unity. Milla Cozart Riggio observes that of the three largest carnivals in the Americas: “Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, and Trinidad - Trinidad Carnival alone has established its own diaspora,” found in cities across Canada, the United States, and Europe (2004: 241). In Canada, pan-Caribbean Trinidad Carnivals include the Toronto Caribbean Day carnival (formerly known as Caribana) in Toronto, and other Canadian cities such as Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Winnipeg (Nurse 2004: 247). The West Indian Day Parade Carnival in Brooklyn, New York, USA established in the 1920s in Harlem, New York, is probably the earliest carnival outside of Trinidad and Tobago with at least 20 Trinidad-style carnivals across the United States, including Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Georgia, Miami, Florida, and San Francisco, California to name a few (Nurse 2004: 246). In the United Kingdom alone, there are 30 Trinidad-style carnivals in Barrow-in-the-Furness, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford, Reading, Swindon, Wolverhampton, and counting (Nurse 2004: 246). Other European cities with a Trinidad Carnival diaspora are Nice, France, Nyon, Switzerland, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Stockholm, Sweden (Nurse 2004: 247). Each of these Trinidad-style carnivals in North America and Europe has its own historical origin among West Indian immigrant communities as a uniquely Caribbean (West Indian) Diaspora aesthetic. The historical significance of Trinidad Carnival accounts for its diaspora in the Americas and Europe representing West Indian unity.

17I intervene with the significance of Trinidad Carnival and Trinidad mas’ in Trinidad and Tobago, and among West Indians globally, as a festival that emerged from the emancipation experience on Emancipation Day (August 1, 1838) in Trinidad and Tobago. I resist a European “carnival” framework to show a performance theory by, for, about, and from West Indian people in Trinidad masquerade (or mas’). It is important to note that African-descendant people in Trinidad and Tobago refer to their full participation in “carnival” as “masquerade” or “mas’” that emerged from West African masquerade traditions they carried to Trinidad and Tobago during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. French planters brought the Eurocentric carnival to Trinidad and Tobago just after the 1783 Cédula de población that allowed Catholic French colonists, free people, and their enslaved people from other colonies to settle in Trinidad (Baston and Riggio 2004: 31). Soon, French planters started the pre-Lenten carnivals as fanciful costumed masquerade balls and revelry, exclusively for Europeans, excluding enslaved Africans and other freed people of color from carnival festivities and merriment.

18England passed the Emancipation Act in 1834 in British colonies in the West Indies, including Trinidad and Tobago, with a five-year apprenticeship for freedom that was supposed to be a gradual emancipation from 1834-1839 (Baston and Riggio 2004: 31). In 1840, enslaved Africans would then become fully emancipated from chattel slavery (Baston and Riggio 2004: 31). However, by 1838, enslaved Africans grew restless, demanding their freedom now. With growing unrest, England cut the apprenticeship period short, granting full emancipation on August 1, 1838. Freed Africans initiated cannes brûlées (burning of the cane), later evolving into “Canboulay” (Baston and Riggio 31). The Emancipation Day festival, Canboulay originally commemorated on August 1st, is associated with the forced labor in cutting cane on sugar plantations. Canboulay, associated with the end of a season of hard labor, signified the final and last burning of sugar cane during enslavement (Elder 2004: 49; Martin 2004: 285). Another Emancipation Day festival, Jouvay, from the French, jour ouvert, to the Trinidadian j’overt or jouvert, was the exclamation on the first day of freedom when enslaved people waited all night until dawn for the first light of dawn, the first day of freedom. Freed Africans took to the streets, besmeared in mud, oil, paints, and others, dancing in the streets until daybreak, shouting, “j’overt, j’overt, j’overt!” in great jubilation (Lovelace 2004: 187).

19Freed Africans first celebrated and performed Emancipation Day festivals, Canboulay and Jouvay on Emancipation Day on August 1, 1838. Soon after, the British colonial administration moved Canboulay and Jouvay to the Roman Catholic pre-Lenten carnival season in the mid-1840s (Lovelace 2004: 187). However, African descendant people in Trinidad and Tobago never lost the emancipatory spirit in Canboulay and Jouvay to mark the official start of Trinidad Carnival. Canboulay is traditionally performed at midnight on Dimanche Gras (Fat Sunday) as a full reenactment from enslavement to Emancipation (Martin 285); and Jouvay is performed from 2:00am on Carnival Monday, characterized by revelers’ bodies besmeared with mud, oil, and/or paint as they dance through the streets until dawn, punctuated by shouts of “j’ouvert!” for the first dawn on the first Emancipation Day (Lovelace 187). Both Canboulay and Jouvay mark the official start of Trinidad Carnival with road marches and procession of costumed revelers on Carnival Monday and Carnival Tuesday (Martin 288; Elder 48).

20The performance of human happiness to excess in Canboulay and Jouvay is a collective act and obligation in the Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic – the audacity of euphoria in liberation as only experienced in Trinidad Carnival that Jones deployed in Notting Hill Carnival in 1959 to counter racism, ignorance, and hate. Bakhtin’s carnival theory is specific to medieval European carnivals (1984: 10) and is inept in theorizing Caribbean carnivals born of enslavement to emancipation like Trinidad Carnival. As Bakhtin notes:

the development of the medieval [European] carnival, prepared by thousands of years of ancient comic ritual, including the primitive Saturnalias, a special idiom of forms and symbols was evolved – an extremely rich idiom that expressed the unique yet complex carnival experience of the people.
(1984:10)

21Bakhtin observes medieval European carnivals as a suspension of hierarchies for equality during carnival season within the context of European societal structures (1984: 10). A suspension of hierarchies did not occur in nineteenth century Trinidad and Tobago when the white plantocracy and French elite excluded enslaved and freed Africans in European carnivals. Bakhtin’s definition and theory would not have applied to enslaved people in European carnivals during enslavement and post-Emancipation, due to the fixity of racial hierarchies, making racial equality dysfunctional and void due to the dehumanization factor in nineteenth century enslaved and freed Africans.

22Today, Trinidad Carnival emerged from its own history against structural racism, exclusion, and enslavement from the nineteenth French elite carnivals in Trinidad and Tobago. For freed Africans in the nineteenth century, “carnival” was “masquerade” or mas’ from the West African perspective of returning ancestors in masks to be in communion the “living,” and who have always resisted racial tyranny, and assisted the “living” in the fight for freedom, a core belief in mas’. For Joseph Roach, performance in the circum-Atlantic is surrogation, which is a substitute for another body like an effigy, “a monstrous double” in sacrificial rituals (2022: 40). Roach uses a decidedly western formulation in surrogation with death as the end in the circum-Atlantic. However, for many non-western cultures, “death” is a transition to another dimension in the cycle of life. In African and Indigenous Caribbean cultures, “effigy” and “surrogation” are manifestations of ancestral spirits, temporarily returning to commune with the living in masquerades, rituals, ceremonies, and sculptural objects. This core belief is present in Caribbean masquerades of any kind whether sacred or secular. Afro Indigenous Caribbean worldviews can, and do change, the ways in which Africana performances are “performed” and experienced.

Mas’ as Theory and Lens

23My methodology is performance, and more specifically, mas’ as theory and lens to view with descriptions of the emergence of the first Notting Hill Carnival in London, England, 1959. I theorize the cultural performance in Notting Hill Carnival as an imperative of human happiness, which is a collective act and obligation in the Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic – the audacity of happiness in liberation as only experienced in Trinidad Carnival, and deployed in Notting Hill Carnival with the arrival of the Windrush generation in England. As mentioned earlier, Jones wanted to cultivate human happiness in carnival, which was not by any means an escape from reality, but was about enacting liberation and empowerment, sought and fought during enslavement. As nineteenth century freed Africans subverted French elite masquerade balls, they carried their own West African masquerade traditions and masking with traditional mas’ characters and playing mas’ – the very act of liberation and joy in mas’.

24Despite Jouvay and Canboulay not being part of the indoor Notting Hill Carnivals from 1959-1964 nor the street events from 1966-2003, the sense of liberation and joy in Jouvay and Canboulay remained unchanged. By 2004, carnival organizers added Jouvay to the Notting Hill Carnival with revelers processed, besmeared with mud, paint, oil, and powder to bring the original intention of euphoria to Notting Hill Carnival, synonymous with anticolonialism and antiracism. In the 1950s, Jones underscored the politics of collective happiness and joy in the emancipatory spirit in Trinidad Carnival, emblematic of emancipation from slavery in 1838 when freed Africans created their own emancipation masquerade (mas’), and in euphoria of “playing mas” in Trinidad Carnival. Attillah Springer remarked that Jones was the “ultimate jouvayist [Jouvay enthusiast] … to situate her within that consciousness of the transformative nature of those pre-dawn hours” as enslaved Africans waited for the first dawn of freedom in Trinidad and Tobago on August 1, 1838 (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2021).

25I use Black performance theory as defined by Thomas DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez as “critical paradigms that illuminate the capacities of [B]lack performance and [B]lack sensibilities to enable critical discussions of performance histories, theories, and practices” (2014: 1). By Black “sensibilities,” De Frantz and Gonzalez refer to “the enlivened vibrating components of a palpable [B]lack familiar – demonstrate the microeconomics of gesture that cohere in [B]lack performance” (2014: 8). Black “sensibilities” are the shared lived, personal, and collective experiences and knowledge from a global Black perspective from Africa to the African Diaspora defined as tantamount to wearing “memory on our bodies” and “our” skins (2014: 1-2). The use of Trinidad Carnival as the expression for West Indians in Notting Hill Carnival in 1959 is palpable in Black performance theory with Black sensibilities in theorizing collective memorializing in Notting Hill Carnival, and other Trinidad-style carnivals around the world.

Windrush generation, Claudia Jones, Notting Hill Carnival, 1959

26England has always been a multicultural society due to being the largest colonial empire in the world, including having the largest Chinese community outside of China in Liverpool since the 1850s, and a thriving South Asian community since the early seventeenth century (Blackman 2019). Black (African) presence in England dates to over 2,000 years from Ancient Roman occupation in England to the English Civil War (43 CE-1651), from English Restoration to the end of enslavement in the British Empire and colonies (1660-1838), from Emancipation to World War I and II (1830s to 1940s), and from post-World War II to the present. Historical records show that Black people have always been integral to British life and society in the royal courts, trades and professions, facing eras of expulsions “to keep England white” (Shyllon 2016: 223), and in the recent deportation orders of many from the Windrush generation in 2018 that sought to remove Windrush generation people from England, some seventy years after they first arrived (McCann 2018).

  • 5 There were 539 people from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948, as the most popular pla (...)
  • 6 June 22, 1948, was the symbolic arrival West Indians to Britain, despite earlier arrivals of West I (...)
  • 7 Lord Kitchener later recorded the calypso, “London is the place for me” in 1951.

27On June 22, 1948, the Empire Windrush ship landed at Tilbury Docks in Essex with over eight hundred British Caribbean citizens (West Indians) from British colonies of Jamaica, Bermuda, British Guiana, Barbados, St. Lucia, Grenada, and Trinidad and Tobago.5 Among the West Indians were 66 Polish immigrants who boarded the Empire Windrush in Mexico, as recent grantees of British citizenship (Royal Museums Greenwich 2024). The British Nationality Act of 1948 provided people from the British colonies in the Caribbean the rights and privileges to live and work in England, answering the call of the British government to help rebuild “Mother England” after World War II. The West Indians who arrived in Britain from 1948 to 1971 were symbolically known as the Windrush generation that included annual arrivals on the Empire Windrush and other vessels.6 The arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 was met with great fanfare at Tilbury Docks. Lord Kitchener (Aldwyn Roberts), described as “the greatest calypsonian of the post-war age” (Thompson 2002:149) arrived on the Windrush and sang two stanzas from his calypso, “London is the place for me” in acapella to British Pathé News cameras.7

Verse 1:
London is the place for me
London, this lovely city
You can go to France or America
India Asia, Australia
But you must come back to
London city

Verse 2:
Well, believe me, I am speaking broadmindedly
I am glad to know my mother country
I’ve been travelling to countries years ago
But this [sic] the place I wanted to know
London, that's the place for me
(1948, 1951)

28Lord Kitchener reflected the optimism of West Indians at the time with a deep sense of belonging with “my mother country” (Royal Museums Greenwich 2024). British Parthé News reported: “[West Indians] served this country well. In Jamaica they couldn’t find work. Discouraged but full of hope, they sailed to Britain, citizens of the British empire coming to the Mother Country [England] with good intent” (Royal Museums Greenwich 2024). However, this welcome was met with a mocking derision from the start with the grand welcome gesture from the media. The next day, the Daily News remarked: “There were even emigrants wearing zoot-style suits – very long-waisted jackets, big, padded shoulders, slit pockets and peg-top trousers – costing £15 to £20” (Daily Mirror, June 23, 1948). This report sarcastically painted a picture of West Indians arriving in style on the Empire Windrush dressed to the nines, despite the poverty in the British colonial West Indies. Oswald M. Denniston, a Jamaican emigrant among the passengers on the Windrush, addressed report’s scorn saying that “most of us are job-seekers [sic], but others are here to finish their trades and education…The very poor can’t leave Jamaica. They must have £28 for their passage and another £5 on them when they sail,” and added that “it wasn’t poverty that brought me here” (Royal Museums Greenwich 2024). Two days later, eleven members of the British parliament wrote letters to Prime Minister Clement Attlee to stop the surge of West Indian migrants, ushering the beginning of racial animus, hostility, and later physical attacks (Royal Museums Greenwich 2024).

  • 8 The first “Red Scare” in the United States occurred in 1917 with the Russian Revolution, and ended (...)

29By this time, Jones had been living in London since December 1955, and experienced and witnessed increasing racial unrest. Jones was born in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago in 1915. She migrated with her family from Trinidad and Tobago to Harlem, New York in the United States when she was eight years old. Five years later, Jones’s mother died of spinal meningitis at work as a machinist in a garment shop in New York City (Jones 1955, 2021). Later, Jones developed tuberculosis at seventeen years old, afflicted by poor health and poverty for most of her life (Boyce Davies 2008). Jones became a social justice activist, vigorously campaigning in defense of the Scottsboro boys in 1931-1932, a group of nine young African American teenage boys framed for raping two white women in the American South in 1931 (Boyce Davies 2008). Later, Jones joined the Communist Party USA in 1936, and became a leading activist serving as the national secretary of the Women’s Commission of the Communist Party USA (The New York Times 1955: 13; Jones 1955). Jones soon attracted the attention of the United States Republican senator Joseph McCarthy in the “House Un-American Activities Committee” targeting artists, academics, labor union activists, and politicians suspected of being communists in what became known as the second “Red Scare”8 (1947-1957) (Burden-Stelly 2023). Jones was imprisoned twice on Ellis Island, charged under the McCarran Internal Security Act as a threat to the United States for her activism and affiliation with the communist party. By 1954, the US Federal government charged and imprisoned Jones for “a year and a day” as a convicted “communist leader” (New York Times 1955). There was even a “Save Claudia Jones” campaign on flyers with the appeal that “a human being’s life is at stake” (BBC World Service 2024).

  • 9 “Jim Crow” is the colloquial name given to the separate but equal law in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguso (...)

30Upon Jones’s release from prison on October 23, 1955, after “a year and a day,” the US Federal government issued her a deportation order to Trinidad and Tobago (The New York Times 1955). Jones had been fighting previous deportation orders in the US court before and after her last imprisonment in 1955 (The New York Times 1950: 13). Eventually, under legal pressure, Jones agreed to leave the United States for England by December 6, 1955, if she dropped all deportation litigation (The New York Times 1955). So, Jones left the United States prior to December 6, 1955, and headed to England at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968) was a social movement that challenged a set of racial segregation laws in the Plessy v. Ferguson case (colloquially called “Jim Crow”9 laws) that ruled facilities for Black people should be “separate but equal” to white people in public and private life (Ricks 2022). This “separate but equal” mandate led to further marginalization, racism, and discrimination of Black Americans after enslavement. In the nineteenth century, the Civil War of 1861-1863 ended enslavement of Black people in America, but did not end or prevent mass discrimination, segregation, and race laws from the late nineteenth century (Mansoor 2014).

  • 10 Between 1954 to 1968, Civil Rights activists protested the “separate but equal” facilities in trans (...)
  • 11 The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case deemed racial segregation in education unconstitutional, (...)

31By the mid-twentieth century, Black people and other allies began the long fight for equality in the Civil Rights Movement through peaceful protest and legal challenges in the United States Supreme Court. One of the several legal cases was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education that ruled racial segregation in all schools (including colleges and universities) as unconstitutional, invalidating the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case for racial segregation (Ricks 2022).10 The Civil Rights Movement ended in 1968 with the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, and with the passing of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 on April 11, 1968 that ended housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, and religion (Dierenfield 2013).11 Had the United States court allowed Jones to stay in the United States beyond 1955, she probably would have continued at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement (1950s-1960s) and the Black Power Movements (1965-1975) given Jones’s activism in the 1930s, and had she lived beyond 1964 when she died in England. Although Jones arrived in England in December 1955 missing key milestones in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the United States, she continued her activism in the fight against racism and the welfare of Black people in England that was already sweeping across the global Black world with independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean.

  • 12 The term “Pan-African” was coined by Trinidadian Barrister in Henry Sylvester Williams living in Lo (...)

32The influx of West Indians to England (1948-1971) coincided with the fight for political independence from British colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean, forged in Pan-Africanism,12 a global social and cultural movements in Africa and the African Diaspora as a framework for unifying Africans and African descendants in ending colonialism and racism (Adi 2018). Pan-Africanism had taken hold in England from with the first Pan-African Conference in 1900 with subsequent Pan-African meetings called “congresses” held in Paris, France in 1919, and later in London, England in 1921 and 1923, followed by New York City, USA in 1927, and in Manchester, England in 1945, all committed to decolonization, anti-racism and self-determination among Africans in Africa, and African-descendant peoples in the African Diaspora (Adi 2018). By the 1945 Pan-African congress, several African and West Indian students in England were in attendance, and many of them went on to be future Prime Ministers and heads of states in newly formed independent nations, including Kwame Nkrumah the first Prime Minster of Ghana (formerly, the gold Coast), the first independent country in Africa in 1957, and Jomo Kenyatta, the first Prime Minister (1963) and President (1964) of Kenya (Adi 2018).

33Taken together, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States, and the Independence and Pan-African movements globally had profoundly influenced Jones’s organizing in England at this pivotal moment in global Black activism in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. As soon as Jones arrived in England in December 1955, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and founded the West Indian Gazette (WIG), later renamed as the Afro-Asian Caribbean News, the first Black newspaper in England (Boyce Davies 2008: xv). In the first decade after the Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury Docks in Essex in 1948 with West Indians, a series of racist attacks by white youths who went “nigger hunting” in Nottingham and Notting Hill culminated in the Notting Hill Riots from August 29 to December 5, 1958 (Blackman 2019; Brinkhusrt-Cuff 2021). Jones saw the racial hostility against West Indians and intervened. In the 1950s, white political organizations mobilized to form Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement (UM), and the Colin Jordan’s White Defense League (WDL) headquartered in Notting Hill with their “Keep Britain White” campaigns and increasing provocation leading to the Notting Hill Riots (Blackman 2019). The UM and the WDL recruited young white working-class men organized in gangs known as “biff boys” in the 1930s, later replaced by the Teddy boys in the 1950s who continued their sustained intimidation of Jewish and Black people (Blackman 2019).

34Racial attacks on Black people included beatings, stabbings, broken windows, petrol bombs or Molotov cocktails (Blackman 2019). Gangs of white teenagers roamed the streets at night attacking Black people. White people in cars attempted to run over Black people in the streets (Blackman 2019). Then by August 30, 1958, in an incident widely known to have sparked days of rioting, a white Swedish woman Majbritt Morrison was in an argument with her Black Jamaican husband Raymond Morrison outside Latimer Road tube station (Blackman 2019). The next day a white mob followed Majbritt hurling abuse at her over her interracial marriage to a Black man, throwing milk bottles, and beating her with an iron bar. Reports detail how a large throng of about 400 white men gathered in a frenzy shouting, “kill the niggers,” roaming through the streets, defacing houses in West Indian communities, including a sound system and blues party organized by Count Suckle (Blackman 2019). Some of the first reactions to the Notting Hill Riot in 1958 were from the Musician Union (MU) and the Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship (SCIF) who promoted music, culture, anti-fascism, and anti-racism. In the 1970s, Rock Against Racism (RAR) since the 1970s, and Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) from 2002 to the present, have continued a sustained program of music and the arts against racism (Blackman 2019).

35Jones was determined to organize a Trinidad-style carnival on Friday, January 30, 1959, in St. Pancras Town Hall to bring people together and to resist with “happiness.” It is not immediately clear why Jones scheduled the carnival on January 30, 1959, and not on the liturgical pre-Lenten carnival dates of Monday, February 9 and Tuesday, February 10 in 1959 (“Carnival Dates 1826 to 2124”). The St. Pancras Town Hall may have been available only on January 30, 1959 for an indoor carnival due to winter. On the event’s pamphlet, Jones wrote: “The people’s art is the genesis of their freedom” (Jones 1959; Younge 2002). It defined the Trinidad-style carnival as a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic. The West Indian Gazette (WIG) sponsored the event, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) televised the carnival featuring costume parades, masks, dancing, steel bands, calypso, a Caribbean Carnival Queen beauty pageant, and several Caribbean dishes from souse to rice and peas (Younge 2002). Throngs of West Indian people traveled by trains and busses to St. Pancras Town Hall dressed in their carnival costumes in the winter cold without fear, determined to “play mas’ ” (Younge 2002). From all reports, the people enjoyed themselves, but were afraid to leave the safety of the carnival due to racial attacks and intimidation by white mobs who were lying in wait (BBC World Service 2024).

36Notting Hill Carnival provided safety in numbers from racial intimidation and attacks, but this only strengthened West Indian resolve to express their cultural identity. De Frantz and Gonzalez argue that “Black performance contains history and racism, but it is not about either of those things. Black performance injects itself into pertinent political discussions” (2014: 9). During this time, Notting Hill Carnival as a Black performance was not solely about issues of racial discrimination and attacks, but served to rally West Indians with strategies in community-building and collective expression. From1960 to 1964, Trinidadian spouses Edric and Pearl Connor organized the Notting Hill Carnival at Seymour Hall, alternating with the Lyceum each year to keep up the momentum. Jones was always present to declare the Notting Hill Carnival open (BBC World Service 2024). Corinne Skinner-Carter, a close friend of Jones, described her as a “live wire” – energetic, and brimming with life (Younge 2002). Skinner-Carter remembered how “[Claudia] was so full of energy, she exhausted everyone, including herself;” and how “she used to chain-smoke but I never saw her actually finish a cigarette. And she talked like she smoked” (Younge 2002). These descriptions were indicative of Jones’s happiness to excess, exuberance and zest for life, high-energy to exhaustion, poverty, and poor health. Film director Frances Ann Solomon remarked how “[Claudia] smoked, she drank, and she was an extrovert,” and “she loved to party,” with a “personality that attracted people, so she could get people to do anything. Everybody loved Claudia” (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2021). Fiona Compton explained how Jones “looked at many different ways of trying to make changes in society and she realized that carnival was the way because it showed that we create joy, too” (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2021), staying true to the ideals of happiness in all the festivities afoot. Jones understood Trinidad carnival as collective action to “create joy” (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2021), proving her resolve in the imperative of human happiness.

37And so, when Jones was found dead at her home in London, England on Christmas Eve in the cold winter of 1964, after a long struggle with poverty and ill-health, it was a shock and loss to the whole West Indian community (Sherwood 2021). In honor of Jones’s life and work in London’s Notting Hill Carnival, organizers paused the Notting Hill Carnival in the pre-Lenten 1965 season to remember Claudia Jones (1915-1964) (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2021). By 1966, community activist Rhaune Laslett, revived Notting Hill Carnival as the “Notting Hill Fayre,” moving it outdoor for the first time during the August bank holiday, the last Monday in August. That same year in 1966, Trinidadian musician Russell Henderson first paraded in the streets with his steel pan band in an impromptu performance that launched the first outdoor carnival procession (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2021). By 1973, Trinidadian activist Leslie Palmer introduced Jamaican sound systems on flatbed trucks in the carnival procession with large crowds following and dancing behind trucks (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2021), as done in Trinidad Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, and in other Trinidad carnival diasporas in Europe and North America. Over the years, Notting Hill Carnival had attracted several Black celebrities, intellectuals and politicians from the United States and the Caribbean, including Sammy Davis Jr., Nina Simone, Vanessa Redgrave, Walter Rodney, Darcus Howe, Maurice Bishop and many others who had come to witness and participate in the euphoric, multicultural, and inclusive Notting Hill Carnival (Phillips and Phillips 1998: 279).

38Despite Jones’s imperative of “human happiness” that sought joy and true liberation from racial attacks with the Notting Hill Carnival, racial tensions erupted again in the May 1959 with the stabbing murder of Antiguan law student Kelso Cochrane by a white mob, just four months after the first carnival in January of that year in 1959, By the late 1960s and 1970s, the Notting Hill Carnival was heavily policed and censored to control the throng of West Indians of the Windrush generation on Notting Hill streets perceived as a threat to public order (Phillips and Phillips 1998: 273). Racist attacks continued unbated in West Indian communities. The 1976 Notting Hill Riots came to a fever-pitch when the police clashed with Black youths abruptly ending of the carnival in August 1976 with police brutality and violence; and again, in August 1988. By the 1990s, Notting Hill Carnival was “peaceful” and without incidents, until 2000 with reports of two murders (BBC – On this Day – 1950 to 2005). In 2002, Scotland Yard Police unsealed secret documents of the 1958 Notting Hill Riots revealing even more graphic crimes and incidents against West Indians (Blackman 2019), renewing the focus on Jones’s original intention in organizing the first Notting Hill Carnival in 1959 for collective joy and happiness as resistance and West Indian unity.

  • 13 New York City revoked the permit in 1964 due to the Harlem Race Riots of 1964 (or New York Race Rio (...)

39Marika Sherwood contends that Jones’s activism against racism and McCarthyism in the United States prepared her well for the activism in England (2021). However, I surmise that Jones already understood the Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic in the emancipatory spirit of Trinidad Carnival as a child in Trinidad and Tobago, and growing up in the West Indian community in Harlem, New York City, USA since she was eight years old. Jones would have participated in the West Indian American Day Parade (Caribbean carnival) in Harlem, New York City, founded by Trinidadian migrant Jessie Waddle in the 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement or Jazz Age, known as a flourish and outpouring of Black arts in theatre, music, art, and literature (WIADCA; Kasinitz 2004: 270-5). From the 1920s, Waddle, along with Trinidadian and other Caribbean migrants hosted indoor pre-Lenten Caribbean carnival costume parties at the Savoy, the Renaissance, and the Audubon in Harlem due to the wintery months of February or March on pre-Lenten dates just like Trinidad Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. In 1947, Waddle applied for and received street parade permits in the 1940s for the outdoor carnival in Harlem, New York for Labor Day, the first Monday in September, in warmer temperatures (Kasinitz 2004: 270-5).13 And so, Jones’s experience of growing up in the West Indian community in Harlem, New York City in the United States would have been formative, and more than a passing memory. She started the Notting Hill Carnival in 1959 indoors, just like West Indians did in Harlem, New York City decades earlier organizing indoor pre-Lenten Trinidad Carnivals during cold winters. When Jones arrived in London, England in 1955, after her long imprisonment for political activism in the United States, she enacted a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic in starting the Notting Hill Carnival in London, England as an obligation and mandate for human happiness in mas’, reaffirming that the “people’s art is the genesis of their freedom” (Jones 1959; Younge 2002).

Conclusion

40In conclusion, Lord Kitchener sang that “London is the place for me” as he disembarked from the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks on June 22, 1948. The Windrush generation is known for their hopes, aspirations, and dreams in post-World War II “Mother England.” Jones harnessed the imperative of human happiness in the liberatory mas’ of Jouvay and Canboulay in Trinidad Carnival that commemorated the first Emancipation Day in Trinidad and Tobago on August 1, 1838, the true essence of Trinidad Carnival for the first Notting Hill Carnival in 1959. Jones, a pioneer in the Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic, exemplified a TransAmerican arts movement from the West Indies to the United States and to England in Atlantic triad worlds, meeting at the inflection point of the Windrush generation in England. And yet, decades later under the 2018 hostile policies instituted by former Prime Minister, Theresa May - the UK Home Office wrongly detained West Indians of the Windrush generation (1948-1971) with mass deportation, lost wages, historical erasures, and revoked British citizenship in what is now known as the “Windrush scandal” (Rawlinson 2019). Public perception of the whole affair pointed to the usual historical purging of Black people from England as done throughout the ages (Shyllon 2016: 221). In 1959, Jones set into motion a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic as a performance imperative of human happiness in Notting Hill Carnival that still resonates today with ongoing debates over the Windrush generation (1948-1971) and the 2018 Windrush scandal. Jones’s impetus towards a “human happiness” imperative in 1959 was free of Eurocentric social regulations on human beings, forging a West Indian coalition for an inclusive, multicultural England. Truly, one cannot ignore the magnetism and allure of a Trinidad Carnival in the metropoles of Europe, United States, and Canada as a TransAmerican arts movement for human happiness - the epitome of a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic to seek restitution and reconciliation for the Windrush generation (1948-1971) towards a new, and reinvigorated Black British identity for the twenty-first century.

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“Windrush: Arrival 1948 Passenger List.” Goldsmiths University of London. 2024. https://www.gold.ac.uk/windrush/passenger-list/

“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3) 2003: 257-337. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/51630

Vizcaino, Yeseri Johenny Rosa, “The African Diaspora in the Dominican Republic’s Culture: It’s More Prominent Than You Think.” CISLA Senior Integrative Projects. 58. 2023: 1-12.

Younge, Gary. “The Politics of Partying.” The Guardian, August 17, 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/aug/17/nottinghillcarnival2002.nottinghillcarnival

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Notes

1 Claudia Jones wrote “a people’s art is the genesis of their freedom” on the pamphlet for the first Notting Hill Carnival held at St. Pancras Hall, January 30, 1959 (Younge 2002).

2 I use the term, “West Indian” to refer to people from the Anglophone Caribbean, synonymous with “West Indies.”

3 I use capital “B” in “Black” when referring to Black people, places, thought.

4 Brazil has the largest Black population outside of the African continent, and the largest Black population in all of the Americas (Nugent and Regina 2020; Brito 2022).

5 There were 539 people from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948, as the most popular places of origin, with 139 people from Bermuda, 73 people from Trinidad and Tobago, 44 people from British Guiana, and other Caribbean and non-Caribbean countries (Windrush: Arrival 1948 Passenger List. https://www.gold.ac.uk/windrush/passenger-list/).

6 June 22, 1948, was the symbolic arrival West Indians to Britain, despite earlier arrivals of West Indians in Liverpool in March 1947 on the SS Ormonde with 108 Jamaicans, and arrival in Southampton in December of the same year on the Almanzora carrying 200 West Indians (Royal Museums Greenwich 2024). Prior to these arrivals, West Indians had been in Britain for decades to hundreds of years, and including African presence in Britain for well over a millennium from the Roman occupation to the English Civil War to the Restoration to the end of enslavement in the British colonies in the Caribbean, and from Emancipation to World Wars I and II, and from post-World War II to the present (Shyllon 2016: 222).

7 Lord Kitchener later recorded the calypso, “London is the place for me” in 1951.

8 The first “Red Scare” in the United States occurred in 1917 with the Russian Revolution, and ended in 1920, marked by the fear of communist, socialists, anarchists, and dissidents (Burden-Stelly 2023).

9 “Jim Crow” is the colloquial name given to the separate but equal law in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case where Homer Plessy, a light-skinned Black man (who could have passed for white as “7/8th white”) in Louisiana, was arrested and taken to court for riding a white-only train car in the 1890s (Ricks 2022). The case went to the United States Supreme Court where judges ordered a “separate but equal mandate” in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision to separate Black people from white people in the United States. Almost sixty years earlier, white comedian Thomas “Daddy” Rice, the inventor of blackface performance and minstrelsy, created the comedic character, “Jim Crow” in 1828 to make fun of an enslaved Black man on a slave plantation by smearing black cork on his face to blacken his face, and by wearing tattered clothes (Lhamon, Jr.: 2003). Rice created comedy routines “Jim Crow,” accompanied by the song, “Jump Jim Crow” (Lhamon, Jr.: 2003) The character and song were so popular throughout the nineteenth century that the name, “Jim Crow” became the name associated with 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision (Lhamon, Jr. 2003).

10 Between 1954 to 1968, Civil Rights activists protested the “separate but equal” facilities in transportation, bathroom, schools and universities, employment, and housing and all public places, and the ban on interracial relationships/marriage between Black and white people (Ricks 2022). Protests included the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 where African Americans boycotted public transportation to protest racial discrimination, Freedom Riders protested discrimination on public buses, Selma to Montgomery Marches for voting rights for African Americans, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, and other protests and demonstration. These protests were matched with legal challenges in the US Supreme Court that sought to invalidate the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision in all areas of life for Black people (Mansoor 2014).

11 The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case deemed racial segregation in education unconstitutional, referenced above in the text. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, national origin. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 ended racial discrimination in voting. The1967 Loving v. Virginia case ended the ban on interracial marriage that later led the way towards marriage equality act in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 expanded previous civil rights litigation to end racial discrimination in housing, employment, and voting, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 ended housing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin and religion, the last major legislation during the Civil Rights era, and days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 (Dierenfield 2013).

12 The term “Pan-African” was coined by Trinidadian Barrister in Henry Sylvester Williams living in London, England, and who later organized the first Pan-African Conference in 1900 in London, England in response to the recent Scramble for Africa, and to develop strategies to end colonialism and racism and agitated for independent nationhood and the right to self-government in Africa and the West Indies (Sherwood: 2012). Presenters at the conferences were from African countries, the United States, and the West Indies, the United Kingdom including current and present leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois as secretary, Anna Julia Cooper, Anna H. Jones, John Alcindor among over forty-seven delegates (Sherwood: 2012).

13 New York City revoked the permit in 1964 due to the Harlem Race Riots of 1964 (or New York Race Riot) that occurred two months earlier than the scheduled West Indian American Day Parade for September 7, 1964, and unrelated to the 1964 Harlem Riots. The Harlem Riots was a six-day protest of an off-duty white police officer shooting and killing a fifteen-year-old African American teenager, James Powell, on July 18, 1964. An estimated eight thousand Harlem residents took to the streets protesting the racial injustice. Protests soon turned into six days of looting and destruction of property. However, the city revoked parade permits, unrelated to the Caribbean carnival by West Indian American Day Carnival Association scheduled for Labor Day two months later, due to New York City authority’s fears that the mass crowds of Black revelers would inspire more protests (WIADCA: Civil Rights Digital Library 1964).

After a five-year absence, Trinidadian Carlos Lezama reapplied for, and received another permit in 1969 for the West Indian American Day parade for carnival on Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. Since then, the carnival paraded on the Eastern Parkway, starting at the Eastern Parkway and Utica Avenue, and ending at the Grand Army Plaza. Today, the West Indian American Day Parade is one of the biggest carnivals in New York City attracting, over four-million-strong participants from around the world, a display of West Indian pride, culture, and heritage (WIADCA: Civil Rights Digital Library 1964).

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References

Electronic reference

D. Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson, The Imperative of “Human Happiness”Angles [Online], 19 | 2025, Online since 01 April 2025, connection on 13 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/8462; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13ofs

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About the author

D. Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson

D. Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson is a Caribbean American scholar, born and raised in St. Andrew, Jamaica. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA. She is the founder and artistic director of the Pan-African Theatre Ensemble dedicated to Black theatres in the African continuum featuring African, Caribbean, and African American plays and performances. Other creative works include previous sculpture and theatre design in commissions and exhibitions. Scholarly pursuits focus on the social constructs of race, gender, sexuality, coloniality/decoloniality, and Black feminisms, African and Indigenous spiritual practices, and sacred queer spaces in masquerades. Her peer-reviewed scholarly research has been published in areas of African, African American, Latin American, and Caribbean theatres and performances. She currently serves as a guest editor with Dr. Frédéric Lefrançois in the thematic issue: “The Pioneers of TransAmerican Art: In the Footsteps of a Caribbean Diaspora Aesthetic” in Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World. Her book (in progress), Caribbean Masquerades as Palimpsests: A Chronological Survey from the 16th Century to the early 21st Century (Edwin Mellen Press), traces the emergence of masquerade figures in carnivals, balls, and parades from the point of contact between European conquest, and Indigenous and African peoples in the Caribbean from the 16th century to the early 21st century. She holds a PhD in Theatre: Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin with a doctoral portfolio in African and African American Studies, specializing in African Diaspora performances.

By this author

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