Tactical Carnival and the Global Justice Movement: The Clown Army and Clownfrontational Protest

Abstract

This chapter looks at an international performance phenomenon, referred to here as ‘tactical carnival’, which has developed as a tactic in the toolbox of the burgeoning global justice movement. As connections and coalitions are forged between Bolivian miners, American anti-corporate activists, Polish organic farmers and so on, organizers have begun to coordinate a celebratory form of protest involving unlicensed street parties and processions that occupy public space, both to assert movement identity and importance and often to disrupt state or corporate events and daily business. Movement organizers and writers use the term ‘carnival’ to describe these explicitly oppositional events, at which flamboyant costumes, dance, puppets, tricksterism, samba bands and other musical groupings all feature. Bogad argues that activists are attempting to deploy the ideal of carnival in a practical, experimental way on the street, in order to create a new, twenty-first-century kind of ‘carnival’ that is not calendrically or spatially circumscribed, nor permitted by the state, but declared and embodied by a movement that identifies itself as global, anti-corporate and anti-authoritarian.

Run Away From the Circus—Join the CIRCA!

(Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army [CIRCA] recruiting slogan)

CIRCA is the only army in the world in which General Strike outranks Private Property.

—Colonel Oftruth, CIRCA

A different version of this text was published as a chapter in L. Bogad (2016), Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play (Routledge).