Franchising carnival: Issues of rights and cultural identity

Introduction In March 2011, it was reported that South Africa would be hosting a Trinidad-style carnival later that year. The South African government had already set up a unit to manage the festival and was receiving ‘technical support’ from Trinidad and Tobago. The interest in Trinidad Carnival was because of the ‘social cohesion that Carnival produces’. The same report stated that Uganda was also planning to have a Trinidad-style carnival in Kampala. This chapter will reflect on franchise-like activity in relation to carnival in Trinidad and Tobago over the past fifty years, and the possible reasons for the replication of this festival in approximately sixty cities in North America and Europe. Section 2 covers a brief history of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, of which calypso/soca (music), mas (masquerade) and pan (the steel pan musical instrument) are taken to be the defining ‘authentic’ elements. The rationales for the global proliferation of the festival will be explored in section 3. As festivals are catalysts for creativity, intellectual property is generated at those times and governed by existing intellectual property laws where applicable. Carnival also embodies properties in traditional knowledge and intangible cultural heritage. However, there is an uneasy accommodation of those diverse properties in carnival within intellectual property and emerging traditional knowledge laws that will be discussed in section 4. The difficulties involved in ‘formally’ franchising the carnival ‘product’ will be explored in section 5. © Cambridge University Press 2014.