A corona-carnival? A carnivalesque interpretation of (im)mobilities under COVID-19 lockdowns

The soviet social theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin developed the theory of the carnivalesque as a logic of exaggeration, inversion and irony. Beyond carnival events themselves, Bakhtin proposed this logic as a creative instance to foresee openings within an assumed normality. The conceptual gaze of the ‘carnivalesque’ helps to rethink the reconfiguration of actors and practices around mobility, borders and migration during the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. This impasse worked as a corona-carnival in the midst of the current mobility regime. The use of ‘carnivalesque’ in this article is not related to the playful aspects of carnival as a parade, but to the potential of the carnivalesque impasse for envisioning alternatives, which are not necessarily emancipatory but deeply ambivalent, grotesque and unfinished. That carnivalesque momentum, marked by social norms placed on pause, is captured in artistic and linguistic production, acting as a collective legacy for imagining futures otherwise. This paper compiles some keywords which emerged during the corona-carnival impasse, each holding hopeful and dystopian glimpses of possible alterations to the status-quo. These linguistic productions question assumed notions and practices of migration management, opening the social imagination to other ways of engaging with human mobilities.