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2 results

  • Carnival Laughter: Resistance in Incidents

  • Edited by Deborah M. Garfield, University of California, Los Angeles, Rafia Zafar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
    Published online:
    22 January 2010
    Print publication:
    26 January 1996, pp 216-232

  • Summary

    Every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the Johnkannaus. Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its greatest attraction.

    Harriet A.Jacobs

    [The carnivals] were the second life of the people, who for a time entered the Utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.

    Mikhail Bakhtin

    The Negroes have no manner of religion by what I could observe of them. It is true that they have several ceremonies, as dances, playing etc., but these for the most part are so far from being acts of adoration of a God that they are for the most part mixed with a great deal of bawdy and lewdness.

    Sir Hans Sloane

    The Johnkannau festival of the New World seems as diverse in its origins as in its interpretations. In itself a heteroglossia of African languages and rituals re-created in the hostile environment of New World slavery, the Johnkannau has been perceived as children's amusement, godless bawdy, sacred ritual, and folk resistance. Occurring in a critical middle chapter in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs's description of the Johnkannau becomes a central trope for the multiple concerns of her slave narrative. She deliberately blends her narrating voice with this all-male raillery, suggesting Linda Brent's female appropriation of an African American trickster figure. And in this role Linda Brent enacts the ritual, undertaking – through dialogue and disguise in the narrative – diverse voices. The dance, music, and song of the festival, both in action and language, become a multidimensional medium of expression for the African American in slavery.