The transgressive festival imagination and the idealisation of reversal

• Published in: Leisure studies Vol. 40; no. 1; pp. 57 - 68
• Main Authors: Jamieson, Kirstie, Todd, Louise
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 02.01.2021
• Subjects: appropriation; crowd; reversal; spontaneity; Transgressive festival imagination
• ISSN: 0261-4367; 1466-4496
• DOI: 10.1080/02614367.2019.1693090

To consider the festival's potential as an activist tactic may seem naïve and disconnected from the colonising practices of event tourism. However, today's curated immersive experiences are indebted to a wider festival imagination: a spatial imagination suffused with reversal and transgression. In this paper, we trace a transgressive festival imagination through four vectors of reversal that have contributed to how we imagine both festivals and activism: the crowd, play, appropriation and spontaneity. Each point to the significance of festival space as mutable, protean, volatile and transitional. Together, they extend a techne of activist tactics, and contribute to the somatic language of the creative industries' experience economy. By tracing the transgressive festival imagination in this way, we reveal how the contemporary urban festival and the performative tactics of social movements share visions of contingency, playful performance and an aesthetic-political heightened energy.