What is the place of the street in the production and consumption of contemporary and commodified African festival? How has the street become a curatorial platform and a contested space through which visuality, cultural aesthetic and commodification, play, vulgarity, and the secular coalesce and tangle in an attempt to create a composite festival that produces different layers of historical, cultural, and visual analysis? (Fig. 1). To answer these questions, we need to briefly look at how the street has been theorized by scholars in the social sciences. The street has been defined as being “both contradictory and complex… distinctive but contested social space” as well as a space for public engagement and community-making (Hubbard and Lyon 2018). Others see the street as venue of governmental surveillance, secular power demonstration, class categorization, and legal systematization (Coleman and Sim 2000). The plasticity of defining the street is multifaceted, yet it overlaps its cultural and visual functionality.In this essay, I read Calabar Festival and carnival and the street as cultural theater through the which performance, play, and visuality are exhibited. Using photographs as my tool of analysis and historical resource, I conceptualize the street as a space of convergence where culture, visuality, creativity, economy, the secular, and the vulgar meet and entangle, creating changes, rhythms, and movements in cultural, political, leisure, and visual aesthetics1 (Fig. 2). While the social life of the street is complex, fluid, and seemingly boundless, its cultural, performance, play, and visual agency seems to diminish and invert the uncanny and domineering “political, legal, and economic forces that reinforce existing social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion” (Barker 2009) (Fig. 3).The Calabar Festival and Carnival is a thirty-one to thirty-two day yearly event that started in 2004/2005. The event takes place on the streets of Calabar, while certain aspects of the events are hosted at city centers like Calabar Stadium, Eleven-Eleven arena, Calabar Cultural Centre, and the Calabar Municipal Local Government ground, where the popular Carnival Village Market is positioned. In 2004/2005, the carnival was originally dubbed “Calabar Carnival Extravaganza” by the organizers, where a few “paradelike walk-about” revelers displayed symbols of different tourism sites and other forms and symbols of government projects with very sparse costuming (Carlson 2010: 47). Performances are orchestrated by different groups from the Cross River Regions and different national and international groups, while other contemporary entertainment events and popular performances are prospective features of the event at different gravity each year (Fig. 4).The festival/carnival dominantly clones the Caribbean carnival genre, with close parallels in performance, costuming, props, colors, floats, and other forms of cultural technicalities. The festival, which was originally built around an existing cultural tradition and performance of Efik people known as mbre ukabare-isua (the popular Christmas celebrations in the Cross River region), has shifted its performance and aesthetic ideals towards the Caribbean carnival genre in an attempt to remake an elaborate modernized and hybridized festival that is now scampering for international recognition and patronage (Figs. 5–6).Here, I position myself as a “visual griot” (as both a producer and an archivist).2 I attempted to document a history of contemporary Calabar Carnival in a visual form (Keller 2008). In this photo essay, I draw from my photographic archive of over a thousand photographs produced in 2019 during fieldwork in Calabar. Calabar is a typical Nigerian city in Cross River State. While rich in cultural antecedents and cosmopolitanism, Calabar is paradoxically a cultural terrain that is known for its social, economic, and political instability and that is larded with corruption, particularly in relation to investigating government-sponsored events (Fig. 7).My focus in this photo essay is primarily Calabar Carnival, one core component of the elaborate thirty-one to thirty-two day Calabar Festival and Carnival. I consider how Calabar Carnival, and the street, have become contested landscapes where performative visual technologies engage with social, cultural, and political entanglements. This essay shows how the street has become an important component in the making of history, in the creation, performance, and consumption of culture, and in curating and advancing visual practices, performances, and technologies. I consider how photography functions as making “raw history” (Edwards 2001: 5), creating documents of a carnival of culture (Fig. 8). However, the visual documentation of carnival by both local and international media networks like Multichoice/DSTV, professional photographers, amateur “vernacular photographers,” revelers, visitors, and residents as well as researchers like myself is so prolific that we can also experience the event as a “carnival of photos” (Figs. 9–10). The street functions as a respatialized landscape through which culture is intensely visualized and visuality is performed, curated, and exhibited, and through which revelers, tourists, and participants experience an “aura of authenticity” (Couldry 2005: 66-67) in relation to carnival participation and a modernized cultural engagement (Fig. 11). Multiple photographic technologies, including aerial photography and the production of the larger festival landscape through the use of drone photography, are exhibited (Fig. 12). Still and moving images produced through developing technologies have been broadcast across several online platforms. This virtual repository and circulation of images stimulates viewers additionally through live feeds, social media platforms, and television production. Social media repositories have become virtual sites for the circulation of carnival images in real time, thus extending carnival performance, participation, and animation beyond its real time and beyond the cultural spatiality of the street.The visual landscape of carnival is laced with vibrant aesthetic and performative scenes that are well suited for photography. Intermittent shutter sounds and flashes flicker within each second. Hands popping out from the crowd and focusing phone cameras on certain picturesque targets are very common. Cameramen representing different media institutions stand amidst masqueraders, performers, and spectators with their tripods ready to “shoot” and to record carnival videos. These images and videos are either posted in real-time transmission or are used at a later stage on several social media handles. Commercial street photographers also position their mobile studios at the margins of the streets and cultural arenas in search of patrons who want a document of the day and the people they shared it with. The images and videos produced during these events also jostle for dominance, relevance, and patronage on virtual platforms, commercial branding, and on several print media outlets (Figs. 13–14).In this era of image proliferation, visual craze, and digitization represented by the abundance of sophisticated digital cameras, camera phones, and virtual storage applications, the boundaries of visuality have been loosened, with frequent obstacles overcome in the context of photographic technology, image production and manipulation, virtual participation, digital storage application, and seamless, immediate, and uncontrollable circulation of images along internet networks. Leslie Witz argues that cultural productivities like performance, dance, floats, masquerades, touristic spectacles, as well as the visuals produced during festivals, are by themselves “domains of historical representation” which can “articulate with each other” to offer analytical landscapes for the “production of history” (Witz 2003: 7) (Fig. 15).In this sense, and particularly in Calabar Carnival, the street becomes the curatorial stage for the interplay between cultural authenticity and invention, as well as between the secular and the vulgar. Carnival, and by extension the street, has become an arena for sociocultural and political entanglement, a site for differentiated sociocultural contestations, politicoeconomic engagements, a space for international cultural diplomacy, and a landscape for performative visual technologies and a different form of curatorial practices (Fig. 16).I consider how the street has also been a contested space where the “displays of excess and grotesque” (Bakhtin 1984: 18-24) tangle with power through the excessive and outrageous costuming of participating government officials, the flagrant display of wealth by state officials in different forms, and the public exhibition of political control. The Calabar Carnival brings political power to the street and extends the spatiality of administrative control beyond the confines of political secretariats and administrative structures. It displays the divisions and hierarchies that exist in the society and lays out the street as a “landscape of power” (Zukin 1991: 232) where images that provide a “visual record of forms of [subtle] violence that reads as signs of a history” of political neglect and nonchalance are visualized on the street (Thomas 2012: 207). In the streets of Calabar during Calabar Carnival, power relations persist and follow the social dynamic of “dominance and subordination in modern capitalist societies” (Lears 1985: 567). Because of the capitalist economic motivation of the state's political elites and their supporters, who institute, organize, and direct the carnival on their own terms, the “subalterns” or the masses follow through a hegemonic system, with minor forms of unrecognized resistance from the margins. (Fig. 17).While the streets are laced with different forms of color, costume, sound, and performance that are either cultural, technical, or sophisticated stunts, as well as arts, creativity, entertainment, and commerce, the mechanism of power exhibited by agencies of government are also very prominent and easily noticeable, thus placing them “at the borderline between politics and aesthetics” (Peeren 2007: 69). There are also the voices of dissidents heralded in the streets (seemingly unheard), pointing to governmental negligence and misappropriation of public funds evidenced by a plethora of dilapidated and abandoned infrastructures, poverty, insecurity, and the spate of violent political acts perpetrated in the port capital city in recent years. During Calabar Carnival, the street becomes a converging space where cultural authenticity and invention, the secular and the vulgar, and cultural and visual performance, as well as local, national, and international identities and an “unnoticed” voice of dissent contest for dominance, while also converging to create a “multifocal spectacle” of a complex carnival.