Protestival: global days of action and carnivalised politics at the turn of the millennium

In carnival the body is always changing, constantly becoming, eternally unfinished. Inseparable from nature and fused to other bodies around it, the body remembers that it is not a detached, atomized becoming, as it allows its erotic impulses to jump from body to body, sound to sound, mask to mask, to swirl across the street, filling every nook and cranny, every fold of flesh. During the carnival the body, with its pleasures and desires, can be found everywhere, luxuriating in its freedom and inverting the everyday. On 16 May (M16) 1998 a Global Street Party took place in thirty cities on five continents coinciding with the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Birmingham, England, and the following week’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial in Geneva.