“Her English ensign tied upside down”: Carnival as a means of anticolonial resistance in Emmanuel Appadocca

Abstract

This article focuses on Michel Maxwell Philip’s mid-nineteenth-century novel Emmanuel Appadocca (1854), which draws upon the cultural institution of carnival to critique British colonialism and advocate for the right of free people of colour to hold positions of power in Trinidad’s government. Philip enhances his characters’ protests against British colonialism and preserves the carnival revellers’ spirit of resistance and rebellion through allusions to the pirate, Red Indian, and military masques of early Trinidad carnival. This is particularly evident in one radical scene in which a pirate ship known as the Black Schooner masquerades as an English wreck in front of an actual English man-of-war, confronting England with an image of its own vulnerability and future defeat. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of utopian carnival, I argue that the image of the triumphant Black Schooner bursting forth from its disguise figuratively represents a united Trinidad replacing England as a world power. However, when Philip uses the diverse pirate crew rather than the pirate ship to symbolize Trinidad, the path to unification and power becomes far less utopic. The second half of this article suggests that Philip presents the pirate captain as a strong brown leader capable of ruling the people, in part through his strategic use of carnivalistic “days of pleasure”. Using the safety-valve theory of carnival, I suggest that the days of pleasure aboard the Black Schooner actually reproduce contemporary social and racial inequalities. Thus, Philip harnesses the disruptive power of carnival to construct a powerful critique of British colonialism, but also, in a far less liberating way, views the “days of pleasure” as a mechanism to control and subdue the people.