Scotiabank Caribbean Kiddies’ Carnival: Children and Nationalism(s) in Toronto’s Caribbean-Canadian Community

Abstract

Carnival is the most recognizable and popular event in the Caribbean diaspora, celebrated in the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America. Toronto’s annual Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival festival1 is one of the largest diasporic festivals of its kind in North America,2 celebrating Caribbean culture, cuisine, and performance for three weeks in July and August. The marquee event, the Parade of the Bands, draws over a million spectators to Lake Shore Boulevard to watch the colorful masqueraders, yet the festival’s Junior Carnival Parade (also known as the Kiddies’ Carnival), the largest children’s Caribbean event in North America with over 2,500 participants and 30,000 spectators, often goes overlooked. The Toronto Carnival plays an important role for diasporic Caribbean adults and children, especially those from the second and third generation who were not born or raised in the Caribbean. As Keith Nurse argues, carnival is a cultural activity that is more than mere “merriment, colourful pageantry, revelry and street theatre. Carnival is born out of a struggle of marginalised people to shape a cultural identity through resistance, liberation and catharsis . . . values that have facilitated its replication wherever the Caribbean diaspora is found.”3 In Toronto, the carnival is the performative articulation of variously “a Caribbean community, a Black community, or even sometimes an Afro-Canadian community” or, I would argue, a constructed or imagined multicultural community, and carnival exposes “the identities that are constructed and performed for those imagined communities.”4 Transplanting the carnival to Toronto transforms its practices into a uniquely diasporic form of performance, gesturing to a localized expression of “Caribbeanness.”