Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
112
diversification of public spectacles, which
are witnessing innovative forms of
professionalisation, of marketisation as
well as of mass consumption.
The analysis develops from the
consideration that the existing literature
has been more concerned with general
assumptions about what festivals ‘aim at’ –
that is, about the institutional intentions
underpinning the organisation of these
events – than with a comparative analysis
of the culture of performance. In this
respect, the contributions aim at
developing a micro analysis of festivals by
engaging with the meanings that these
events hold in relation to community
identity politics (Patel, Lozanovska,
Kuchler and Lo Conte), to contested social
spaces (Elkadi), to the construction of a
specific cultural heritage (Stroe) and to
notions of belonging (Beynon).
In the Introduction, the editors make
two important and interrelated points.
Firstly, they argue there has been a recent
move in the meanings of festivals from the
traditional function of forging collective
forms of remembrance to transcending
everyday reality. They note that what is
today
remembered
through
public
performances is much less important to
festival organizers than the investment
they actively make in the material cultural
aspects of the festival and in the financial
and
infrastructural
dimensions
of
‘festivisation’. In this line, the editors refer
to an emerging ‘culture of forgetting’
which underpins the public role of
contemporary celebrations. Secondly, the
editors place their analysis of festivals in
the context of the increasing diversity that
characterizes urban contexts, and argue the
need to consider how the diversity of
festivals’ producers is translated into the
diversity of consumers across gender,
class, ethnicity and religion. This
recognition leads the editors to crucial
reflections on the limits underpinning
straightforward interpretations of festivals
as harbingers of group solidarity. Indeed,
the Introduction and several chapters
(Patel, Elkadi, Hernandez Sanchez) point
out the dialectics of inclusionist and
exclusionist logics that respectively
enhance or hinder people’s participation
and sense of belonging in festivals, and
they stress the need to explore how public
celebrations both produce and reflect
possible forms of ghettoization.
The book is divided into three parts.
In the first one contributors explore how
the display of contemporary forms of
diversity through urban festivals marks a
change with respect to past forms of public
performances. Of particular interest is the
analysis developed by Laszlo Kurti on the
post-Soviet Hungarian politics of village
festivals. Kurti provides insights on how
the progressive obliteration of socialist
state festivals in Europeanizing Hungary
was replaced by a culture of festivals
centered upon a celebrative, and
ambivalent, engagement with new
religious life, with the reawakening ethno-
national sentiments and with the emerging
culture of democratic citizenship.
The second part delves into the
analysis of how the politics of
contemporary festivals talks to the
construction and consumption of urban
spaces. This part offers a fruitful
comparison between, on the one hand, the
case-study developed by Elkadi on the role
of festivals in Belfast aiming at bridging
conflictual identities and contested forms
