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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

A flurry of scholarly discussion and public debate has engaged the entanglements of the COVID-19 crisis with human mobility. Research on the early phases of the pandemic and its effects on migration management have focused largely on the following trends: the imposition of a generalised immobility at different scales (Aleinikoff, 2020), the institutional response to the pandemic as an opportunity to ‘peer through the cracks’ of a restrictive border regime (De Genova, 2021; Pécoud, 2021), or COVID as an excuse to exaggerate existing trends towards hierarchical and racialised access to mobility (Crawley, 2021; Lundsteen, 2020). This piece complements these approaches through the critical lens of the soviet social theorist Mikhaíl Mikháilovich Bakhtin (1984a, 1984b), and his theory on the carnivalesque. Engaging literary works and developing a theory of medieval popular culture in Europe, Bakhtin identified a series of carnivalesque logics based on hyperbole, inversion, and irony that questioned and ridiculed the status quo. During the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, certain forms of movement and migration management were also exaggerated, inverted, or ironized. Not only did travel grind almost to a halt, but even regular features of current border mechanisms, such as migration detention, were called into question, however, fleetingly. The theory of the carnivalesque allows us to interpret this impasse beyond that of an emergency response. The carnivalesque provides a conceptual gaze to identify how early responses to COVID regarding border control and migration management, unveil the contingency of normalised notions and assumed practices of mobility. Following Bakhtin, the carnivalesque fuels social imaginations beyond the norm, sketching possibilities which remain deeply ambivalent, with simultaneously positive and negative significance. The emergence and spread of COVID-19 led to a series of migration-related responses and terminology marked by the carnivalesque logics of exaggeration, inversion, or irony, temporarily leading to think mobility and its organisation, otherwise. Still, those experimental initiatives and terms disappeared suddenly, seemingly returning to migratory politics as usual. This paper proposes the conceptual gaze of the ‘carnivalesque’ à la Bakhtin, to rethink the reconfiguration of actors and practices around mobility, borders and migration during the initial lockdown phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. This impasse is what we refer as a corona-carnival in the midst of the mobility regime. ¹ The use of ‘carnivalesque’ in the article is not related to the playful and performative aspect of carnival, but to its potential for envisioning alternatives, which are not necessarily emancipatory but deeply ambivalent, grotesque and unfinished.

Thinking through this impasse retrospectively, residing in Spain during the pandemic, we focus on the exceptional measures and recurrent terminology used during the short yet intense period spanning from the earlier fears of coronavirus expansion beyond Wuhan (December 2019), to the end of the rigorous stay-at-home orders in Spain (June 2020). ² In exploring COVID-19 lockdowns, we situate our reading in this particular time-span and location, aware that the chronology of institutional responses to COVID has differed, and still differs, according to the epidemiological needs as well as possibilities and priorities of each country. Thus, the use of the carnivalesque is suggestive to read this specific temporal and geographic conjuncture, but not prescriptive to all situations of the pandemic. Our initial foray is to invite other scholars to explore to what extent the framework of the carnivalesque also applies, or plays itself out differently, in their research contexts. Furthermore, the use of this seemingly festive notion does not deny the suffering brought about by the pandemic by any means. Rather, we engage Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque to further diagnose and denounce the supremacist logics of the current border regime. The exceptional measures taken to respond to a global health risk temporally exposed and exaggerated, the incongruent foundations of current border regimes. Precisely, one of the social functions of the carnivalesque was to show the non-permanence of given power structures, using humour and costume, often inverting social roles. This irreverent short-term questioning of power proper of the carnivalesque is captured by the fable of the naked emperor, assumed to dress luxuriously but suddenly finding himself with no clothes. In the carnivalesque tradition, this fable repeats itself through a mocked and temporary ‘de-crowning’ of those in power. The out-of-norm measures in regards to mobility during the initial lockdowns, showed how the self-evident border order – much as the monarch’s regime during the time of carnival – is after all, disputable, and therefore, ultimately avoidable. It is from this critical stand that we engage the empirical basis of our analysis, mainly media coverage and ethnographic journaling during the early phase of the pandemic in Spain.

The first section engages the theory of the carnivalesque based on a close reading of Bakhtin’s theory. Distinguishing from other understandings of carnival, we propose the Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque as a fruitful analytical gaze for the early pandemic phase. The second section presents the empirical contours of the initial lockdown in Spain. Given this context, the third section addresses how during the space-time of this corona-carnival, several keywords take shape becoming discussion points, or even mantras, related to the pandemic, human mobility and borders. While not exhaustive, these terms glean a certain legacy of vocabulary and alternative imagination left by the pandemic. Focusing on three keywords (super spreader, essential worker and remote-work), we analyse what each term implies and enables in terms of envisioning migration possibilities, and explore hopeful as well as dystopian promises. As such, each one leads to a reconsideration of hierarchies of mobility, spatial divisions of labour, and access to territory, thus signalling potential social reconfigurations. The conclusion reflects on post-carnival time and the return to a ‘new-normal’ following Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnivalesque as persisting beyond the carnival itself.

The politics of the carnivalesque

We propose thinking the reconfiguration of mobility under the early pandemic phase through the prism of the carnivalesque, not in the merrymaking sense, but in the way carnivals act as means to invert roles, to exaggerate tendencies, to mock social norms, and to enact or perform alternatives (Bakhtin, 1984a). Predominant meanings and assumptions are questioned through hyperbole, inversion, or irony, even if only for a carefully delimited and socially acceptable amount of time, after which a ‘norm’ would be reinstated.

There has been much discussion of the pandemic as a crisis, both as an excuse to pass controversial reforms (Klein, 2020), as well as a potential crack to open the door to new social rights and demands (De Genova, 2021). Here, we identify a distinctive element from early in the pandemic, especially spring and summer of 2020. In addition to the devastating health consequences around the world compounded by economic effects, both these falling along axes of existing social inequalities, there were also glimpses of how the normal order of borders and mobility could shift. Certain roles, expectations, and terms usually associated with movement, travel and migration were inverted or exaggerated leading to a surreal stretching of the usual: in a hyper-mobile economy, all were ordered to stay put; business travellers and their expedited border crossings at airports now became super-spreaders; low-income negatively racialised and irregularized workers in sectors such as agriculture and delivery became essential, even heroic. To grasp this discursive flipping of roles, and exaggerating of measures, we turn to the notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ as used in literary and cultural studies. The Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque, particularly in its exploration of ambivalence, may serve as a distinctive compliment to other readings of the COVID pandemic as crisis, emergency or exception.

Carnival is understood as a period of time when accepted rules and conventions are paused, when different codes are invented, when the ordinary occupation of space is transformed, and when people’s identities and positions in social hierarchies shift, flip, or seem to disappear: ‘The law, prohibitions, restrictions, that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival’ (Bakhtin, 1984a: 122–123). For theorists like Bakhtin, these were times of intense creativity and unique instances for the development of alternative folk cultures. He would even go so far as to say that the medieval cultures he analysed regarding carnival lived in a ‘two-world condition’ (Bakhtin, 1984b: 6). One was the official world with clearly defined roles, an established hierarchy and unquestionable order. The other world was based on the experiences and culture of carnivals, an alternative world based on humour, the grotesque, and the abnormal where well-established assumptions and hierarchies were exaggerated, ridiculed, or inverted (Bakhtin, 1984a: 123).

Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual and biographical trajectory had to navigate between the early days of Soviet intellectual and artistic experimentation and the purging of the intelligentsia under Stalin, has become a key figure in many fields. Though often posthumous for Bakhtin, who defined himself as a philosopher, his work has become canonical in literary and cultural theory, as well as studies of social history or the history of popular culture. His work is referential for different Social Sciences and Humanities and is often seen as a harbinger of Western Marxist and post-Marxist approaches towards culture, as well as of Post-Structuralism, though Bakhtin himself never openly embraced any of these (Pechey, 2007; Todorov and Godzich, 1984). His work is associated with a series of key concepts whose importance depends on the field in which Bakhtin is engaged, such as ‘heteroglossia’, ‘dialogism’, and ‘polyphony’ (Morris, 1994). In this piece, we focus on Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as developed primarily in two of his works: Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin, 1984a), and Rabelais and his World (Bakhtin, 1984b).

The carnivalesque is one of Bakhtin’s most popular concepts, and this piece is not able to do justice to its many different interpretations, nuances and applications. The carnivalesque has been used to interpret and analyse phenomena and processes as diverse as fertility rites in Northern Uzbekistan (Yılmaz and Kamalova, 2019); nighttime drinking in the United Kingdom (Haydock, 2016), or pedagogical strategies (Porath, 2019). This diversity shows the elasticity of the concept and the myriad ways it can be applied. For Bakhtin himself, it was initially a means of literary analysis. Furthermore, for Bakhtin the carnivalesque reflects more than just carnival events or days, but rather ‘a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations’ (Bakhtin, 1984b: 4). Opposed to the official culture, Bakhtin states:

The manifestations of this folk culture can be divided into three distinct forms: 1) Ritual spectacles: carnival pageants, comic shows of the marketplace. 2) Comic verbal compositions: parodies both oral and written in Latin and in the vernacular. 3) Various genres of billingsgate: curses, oaths, popular blazons. (Bakhtin, 1984b: 4)

These forms, plus the myriad intertwining they might have, compose what is historically the carnivalesque, ‘one culture of folk carnival humor’ (Bakhtin, 1984b: 4). Beyond carnival events or times, for Bakhtin (1984b: 145–155) the carnivalesque could be manifest in the machinations of the marketplaces and fairs of medieval European towns (Bakhtin in Morris, 1994: 217–219). Yet carnivalesque culture did harken back to the time-space of carnival as a referent and source of codes and representations. Thus, the movement back and forth in Bakhtin’s work between ‘carnivalesque’ and ‘carnival’.

While Bakhtin does refer to merry-making, revelry and joy are not the only, nor perhaps even the central, component of the carnivalesque. In fact, the carnivalesque for Bakhtin holds a strong ambivalence (in Morris, 1994: 201, 211). An ambivalence that oscillated between joy, beauty and laughter, to pain, violence and ugliness. In discussing the work of Rabelais:

Therefore, all the episodes are ambivalent: destruction and uncrowning are related to birth and renewal. The death of the old is linked with regeneration; all the images are connected with the contradictory oneness of dying and being reborn . . . the entire novel is filled with that carnivalesque atmosphere. (Bakhtin, 1984b: 217)

While a party spirit and collective joy are now assumed staples of carnival, the most central trait of the carnivalesque for Bakhtin remains the ambiguous juxtaposition among apparent opposites (Morris, 1994). This juxtaposition was performed during the carnival festivities, and carried on into the visual, written and verbal forms of the carnivalesque.

Other uses of carnival and the carnivalesque

Understandings of carnival today are often influenced through the association with carnival events and parades (with occasions such as the Rio de Janeiro Carnaval or New Orleans Mardi Gras). These are often limited to short periods of a few days a year, and to a strict list of ingredients. Bakhtin (1984b: 218) interprets the carnivalesque ‘not only as carnival per se in its limited form, but also as the varied popular-festive life of the Middles Ages and the Renaissance’. For Bakhtin, as carnival begins to centre solely on the parade-event just before Lent, the carnivalesque as in the broader folk culture, disappears. The focus on an event, with spectators and audience, is no longer the carnivalesque, partly because there is a clear distinction between observers and participants in a parade (Bakhtin, 1984b: 220). In fact, where there is significant observation there is not the carnivalesque. This comes out particularly in his discussions of carnival laughter, a central element of the carnivalesque: the laughter ‘is also directed at those who laugh (. . .). The people’s ambivalent laughter . . . expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it’ (Bakhtin in Morris, 1994: 200–201). For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque erases the distance and distinction between observer and observed, as if the carnivalesque involved everybody, making people participate in an almost non-voluntary fashion.

In addition to reading the carnivalesque in the strictly festive carnival event sense, there is significant literature that understands the carnivalesque as a progressive future-oriented utopia, a site of resistance to powers that be and a place to pre-figure alternatives. Specifically, this literature uses the idea of carnival and Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as a way to interpret different protest movements and events (e.g. Blandford, 2015; Hammond, 2020; St John, 2004; Tancons, 2014). This literature often engages movements that explicitly embrace their protest events as ‘carnivals’ (see Boyd and Mitchell, 2012; Notes from Nowhere, 2003).

Carnivals may or may not have led to rebellion but they seemed rebellious. For James Scott (1990: 178–182), carnivals were considered potentially dangerous moments where rebellious behaviour could turn into open rebellion. Local elites thus had a cautious eye towards them, and carnivals were tolerated begrudgingly. For some historians (Humphrey, 2001), the carnival was a carefully delimited time where the populace could let off steam as it were and after which, social roles, hierarchy, and the previously existing regime could reestablish themselves, perhaps more firmly. Some of the carnivalesque ideas might even be incorporated into a new ‘norm.’ These readings of carnival as a potential protest model are different from the Bakhtinian theory of the carnivalesque.

Bakhtin’s writing often stresses utopian impulses (see Gardiner, 1992), though how much so is a point of contention for some Bakhtin specialists (Morson and Emerson, 1990). When embracing the utopian impulses in Bakhtin’s thought, his understanding of utopia in the carnivalesque is not a straightforward precursor of an orderly future, or a denunciation of specific injustices. It is an ambivalent juxtaposition of extremes, exaggerations, switched roles, negative and positive elements of the beautiful and the grotesque. According to some Bakhtian specialists (see Hammond, 2020), this ambivalence is partly lost in many adoptions of the carnivalesque in literature to interpret protest events or alternative culture. While the use of elements of the carnivalesque is helpful to analyse social protest and utopian plans, the carnivalesque goes beyond conventional notions of emancipation. Bakhtin’s idea of utopia is tied to his notion of unfinalisibility (Gardiner, 1992), as in conceiving of social norms, arrangements, even someone’s personality, regardless of how permanent and unmoving they may seem, as never reaching ‘the be-all end-all’ of human possibility or social organisation. In that regard, the carnivalesque experiments with alternatives, including unexpected escalations and surreal exaggerations of current arrangements. Connected to his understanding of human existence -both collective and individual- as unfinished or incomplete, is the key carnival element of the grotesque, as in gross, weird, incongruous. Grotesque humour and literature focus on the body as unfinished, in reference to both a person’s body and a social body. Ugly protrusions and excessive growths, represent contradictions between the low and the high, the known and the unknown, death and birth (Bakhtin, 1984b: 29, 165–166). The grotesque in the carnivalesque is also linked to scenes and representations of violence and gore; the grotesque as exaggeration, hyperbole, excessiveness (Bakhtin in Morris, 1994: 232).

The time and space of the carnivalesque

A defining feature of carnival was their limitation in time. It was known roughly when they would occur and when they would end. Things might completely flip for a bit, but there was no imminent threat or promise of long-lasting change. For Bakhtin, this carnival time was outside of ordinary time and allowed for the bracketing of certain norms. These norms could be altered, toyed with, or exaggerated. Furthermore, types of speech, literature, and even vulgar expression could develop during carnival time which would always refer back to it even if used outside that time. While in the case of COVID, it was not known when the pandemic would come nor when it will end, the shock to the normal functioning of society and economy was sufficient to question (through exaggeration, reversal, irony) existing norms, categories and practices of mobility management. This is what we term, playfully, the ‘corona-carnival’ highlighting a social and political impasse full of grotesque ambivalence, during the early phase of the pandemic, in regard to dealing with migration and mobility.

In addition to a temporal parenthesis, the carnivalesque also implied spatial shifts. For Bakhtin, the carnival was spatially expansive, such that normally off-limits spaces could be included in the festivities, and changing the roles of these spaces (Bakhtin, 1984b: 7–10). Echoes of this spatial change might resonate with how the ‘home’ shifted in meaning and role during lockdown, as did the meaning of mobility, and places such as airports. Furthermore, the carnival time-space augments encounters between opposites, such as beautiful/ugly, rich/poor, high/low culture (Bakhtin, 1984a: 126). As such, carnival time-space facilitated a dual process of asserting and denying, praising and insulting simultaneously, generating as it were, a carnival idiom that makes its way into literary and linguistic production. This allowed for the ‘temporary suspension. . . of certain norms and prohibitions of usual life’ (Bakhtin, 1984b: 15). This suspension was enmeshed in the grotesque forms that the dual process might exhibit, for example, representing royalty then disembowelling the effigy, or placing a banquet out that turns into a representation of a slaughter (Bakhtin, 1984b). Due to the spatial expansiveness and the encounter of opposites, some roles were able to flip during the time of the carnival (Tancons, 2012). The social inversion of subjective roles was enacted through the mock crowning of a ‘carnival king/queen’ and perhaps a ‘dethroning’ in effigy of a ruler (Bakhtin, 1984a: 124–125). The process of assertion and denial, could facilitate the rhetorical or symbolic lifting of the lowly and the throw down of the mighty. This could be done directly with explicit vocabulary of praise or insult, through humorous spins on existing verbal forms used in seemingly inappropriate ways, or simply through the grotesque exaggeration of existing trends. Therefore, the carnivalesque questions certain norms by ironizing, exaggerating, or inverting them, highlighting relationships that are barely perceptible due to their normalisation. It is precisely this questioning potential that attracts us to read the initial reaction to COVID-19 as a carnivalesque moment regarding migration management. We are referring to the temporary and partial pause of the normal functioning of an economy based on hypermobility for some, forced mobility for others, and hardened bordering mechanisms for the many.

The contours of the corona-carnival

Biao Xiang’s notion of mobility economy captures the pre-pandemic developments in late capitalism which were put into sharp focus by the health crisis. This economic organisation depends on continuous, increasing and intense forms of circulation at different scales. Biao Xiang sees this type of economy as characterised by a ‘gyroscopic spin’ that requires ever more speed to maintain stability (Xiang, 2020a, 2020b). Thus, the early pandemic response of freezing mobility became all the more disruptive, to national economies but also to increasingly casualized and precarious workers dependent on their mobility (Xiang, 2020a, 2020c). For an economy based on stretched global value chains and outsourced production, the freeze on mobility had important effects on production, distribution and sale, to the point that the ability to acquire medical products seemed questionable. This ‘freeze’ affected not only monetarized economic circulation, but also the care practices of transnational families, the ability to search for or retain livelihoods and more. The freeze on the continuous back and forth of intermodal container ships in ports was compounded by the halting of hectic routines to and from jobs, offices, schools, care centres and commuter systems. Daily itineraries that encompassed movement through neighbourhoods, entire cities or more, were now restricted to the domestic space. A cultural and economic imperative to ‘get moving’, and even movement as a sign of self-worth, or self-investment, froze rather suddenly.

Such ‘sitting still’ had multiple social effects. Social interaction for many was heavily reduced, or had to switch online; millions had to learn homeschooling techniques quickly; juggling care work and potential job requirements created a sense of unending days of work, and for many, bluntly meant losing their job. People already suffering isolation, and those trapped in abusive situations had these exacerbated, leaving them exposed to further health risks.

Coping with this forced stasis found different expression in different countries. We provide a few examples from our observations as recent arrivals in Spain. ³ In many urban settings, balconies became temporary zones for socialisation: neighbours would gather around 8 pm every day of the 3-month period of government mandated stay-at-home orders or ‘confinement’. At that hour music was played loud out of the windows, taking turns to choose songs among neighbours. This finalised in a collective moment of applause in support of health professionals fighting the pandemic away from home. These, together with decorations in windows and pot-banging became quickly normalised rituals. Early discussions of CO₂ emission reductions and healing ecosystems, paired with appreciations of new songbirds being perceptible, unexpected presence of wild animals in urban areas with no traffic, or even larger than normal ‘weeds’ beautifying sidewalks became a kind of natural carnival dress. In this way, the halt produced by the initial lockdowns created a sort of exceptional, out of the norm time. This is similar way to the kind of time evoked by the carnivalesque: ‘moments of crisis, of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man. Moments of death and revival’ (Bakhtin, 1984b: 9). Similar dynamics occurred in other countries, such as the appointed times for saluting healthcare workers from balconies (i.e. in Italy, India, Israel or Canada, see Paradkar, 2020; Times of Israel, 2020), adopting cacerolazos (pot-bangings) to protest during confinement (i.e. in Brasil and China, see The Guardian Associated Press, 2022; Paradkar, 2020), and insight into human–wildlife interactions during the so-called ‘anthropause’ (Rutz et al., 2020) have been recurring features of pandemic space-times.

In terms of migration policy, one of the most graphic examples of altering the normal order of things was the national mandate to close all migrant detention centres in Spain. While some individual migration detention centres were closed in different countries due to epidemiological concerns, in Spain all pre-deportation centres were intentionally emptied and shut down. Spain was the only country where this decision was taken at the national level, having no detention centres open during the first months of the pandemic. The entire period of closure was 4 months and 17 days, with 0 detention centres operating. Brandariz and Fernández-Bessa (2021) analyse this period in ‘Short Summer of Abolitionism’ pointing to two different directions. On the one hand, this political decision shows how an entire country could, and did, shut down all its deportation centres, release all of the detainees, and cease and desist from rounding up new ones. None of these occurrences disturbed the peace, acted as some sort of ‘call effect’ for further irregular migration, increased insecurity, and such usual menaces. This intense, yet under-discussed process, points to possibilities even within existing legal frameworks bent towards migration control. This case from the first 4–8 months of the pandemic is an example of that ‘second world’ of the carnivalesque. The temporary suspension of migrant detention signals a carnivalesque logic. Also, as during a carnival, the change is not the result of a political campaign for reform, nor an insurgent movement. Rather the ‘shift’ takes place within existing structures ‘putting them on hold’ as it were, as if previous expectations did not exist. Yet, this experience, which would seem promising for abolitionists, also holds the ambivalence of the carnivalesque. The surprising closure of the detention centres in mainland Spain was accompanied by growing rapid deportation at the border, including the expansion of crowded temporary camps in the North African Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and the Canary Islands, increasing the number of deportations. Thus, the short summer of abolition, as hopeful as it may be, points both to a promising future as well as to a grim twist: that detention with all of its problems, may give way to other systems of control, in this case a spatial one that detains people less, but deports more. The carnivalesque appears at that ‘breaking point’ of the cycle of migration control politics, when the possibility of closing migrant detention centres is enacted. This temporarily gives birth to a parallel ‘second world’. The carnivalesque exaggeration from detention as a norm to zero detention, also acts as a practice run for abolishing one mode of carceral social control (detention while residing in national territory), and replacing it with another (more deportations at the border line). Normalised detention politics were reinstated shortly after the closure.

This ambivalence, both opening possibilities while re-instantiating previous problems, runs throughout the following selected keywords; words that grew in salience in everyday parlance and media coverage both in Spain and internationally. ⁴ Each reflects how the pandemic both challenged and reinforced existing modes of mobility and their boundaries. The terms highlight how mobilities and their control produce a certain kind of world, and a certain regime of mobility. The carnivalesque spirit is embedded in these keywords, each engaging assumed social norms with irony, inversion or exaggeration, signalling both potential emancipatory promises as well as possible gloomy effects. This ambivalence is highlighted by the temporariness of the experiments as well as by a vigorous reinstatement of a status quo. These terms serve as glimpses of both more just mobility futures as well as ever-increasing hierarchizations of in/mobility. What is fantasy and what is harbinger of the future is up to debate. Despite their apparent transience, the following terms could become sites for future openings, both hopeful and dystopian, their role being to harken back to the moments of mobility impasse during 2020, similar to the role of carnivalesque language and composition for Bakhtin.

Carnivalesque keywords

The super spreader

During the initial peak of pandemic panic, travel restrictions were one of the main measures used to reduce viral expansion. While many were bracing for winter 2020 under lockdown measures, others prepared to break travel bans. A press article titled ‘Winter break wasn’t canceled for the rich’ states: ‘Staring down a long, cold Covid-quarantine winter, the wealthy are doing what they have always done: getting out of town’ (Seligson, 2021). This happened when most people were aware of the sensitivities and judgements that travel raised at that tense moment. Further details on the vacations of the wealthy during COVID quarantine emerged: ‘From private jets to island hideaways, those who can afford it are shelling out on expensive workarounds to shield them from the risk of COVID . . . for the rich, there has never been a better time to travel’ (Sykes, 2021).

Once COVID-19 mutated to infect humans, global air travel was seen as a key vector for the virus. Still, some elite travellers kept enjoying their privileged mobility, as shown-off boldly in social media and critically exposed in some press. In early spring of 2020, these same rich travellers became suddenly reviled not only due to their ability to flout travel restrictions, but for reckless behaviour seen to put others, less fortunate, at risk. Their mobility became a danger, rather than something unquestionable or harmless.

Beyond the super elite, a similar shift in perception occurred towards certain countries. G20 countries were seen as key players responsible for the geographical spread of the virus, in particular travel to and from North America and Europe. Early controls in those regions focused on avoiding ‘import’ of the virus and not ‘export’, assuming they were not net exporters, an assumption quickly proven wrong (Woods and Petherick, 2021). Numerous countries thus placed travel restrictions on residents from countries with high COVID infection rates. Early on these were primarily China, the United States and European Union countries. Several African countries, whose citizens normally require a health certificate to obtain EU visas, imposed health controls on European travellers, or deported those who tried to skip out on mandatory quarantine periods (Penney, 2020).

In this scenario, elite tourists, business travellers and even frequent flyers suddenly morphed from a positive into a negative kind of global mobility, as ‘super-spreaders’ of disease (Khan, 2021). Their legally and financially facilitated mobility became an epidemiological threat (Sieff, 2020). This perception extended not only to the hyper-wealthy, but also to visitors to sites such as Austrian ski resorts in 2019/2020 (Deutsche Welle, 2021; Karsak, 2021). Thus, one central pillar of the pre-pandemic mobility regime, the assumption of privileged access to mobility of certain populations, was rhetorically inverted. That is, the taken-for-granted unevenness of mobilities, where some are not allowed to move while others are facilitated not only to move, but to move as much as, when and where they please. In fact, rather than a sign of prestige, hyper-mobility itself, the glamorous trademark of globalisation, suddenly became a risk, a public threat, a sign of ruthlessness.

In this scenario, elite travellers resorted to all sorts of tricks to remain mobile and retain their lifestyle in the midst of the pandemic lockdown, but this was frequently considered unjust, immoral or criminal behaviour. This re-naming of the business traveller and elite vacationers from VIP to reckless and selfish trouble-maker, echoes the carnivalesque practices of ‘throwing down’, disrespect, or cursing those in authority. Such re-labelling did not lead to, nor reflect, a lasting halt on the practices of the wealthy. Still, the hopeful glimpse of this carnivalesque flipping of the businessman as super-spreader consisted in providing the possibility to think past the current criteria used for legal and socially accepted mobility. Nowadays, owning certain passports of Global North or G20 countries nearly guarantees the privilege to move internationally in a highly restrictive migratory regime. This geopolitical birthright to mobility, is complimented by wealth. Whether born in a country whose passport confers special access to mobility or not, sufficient funds can provide mobility for the rich. At least discursively, during the corona-carnival impasse, these two factors—a passport from a rich country and sufficient personal wealth—were not guarantees for socially accepted mobility.

The discursive shift of the super-spreader, has a possible dystopian twist. Similar public health criteria can be used to further complicate the mobility of those whom already have less access. Reaching certain standards of vaccination, or the suggestion of ‘vaccination passports’ (Schoenwalder, 2021) during the pandemic, implies high medical costs for many. Glimpses of these possibilities can be perceived in discussions of ‘vaccine apartheid’ (Bajaj et al., 2022), or the use of the public health order ‘Title 42’ by the United States to justify rapid expulsion of 100,000’s of asylum seekers crossing the US-Mexico land border (Blue et al., 2021).

The label of super-spreader deployed towards those with privileged mobility early during the pandemic was momentary, in line with a Bakthinian appraisal of the carnivalesque. In turn, this re-labelling sets the stage for the sudden valuation of the marginalised migrant as essential worker.

Essential worker

A former farmworker signed an op-ed piece in the New York Times during the height of lockdown measures denouncing the hypocrisy of US migratory policies: ‘In the pandemic, “illegal” workers are now deemed “essential” by the federal government’ (Corchado, 2020). In similar terms, a rider for UberEats of Senegalese-origin, spoke about his food-delivery journeys in lockdown Madrid as ‘a sign of patriotism and essential service to Spanish citizens’, who were safe in their homes under quarantine orders (Sin Papeles Association video, February 2020). While he did not have the necessary administrative paper work to reside or work legally, as many riders for platform industries in Spain, he considered himself essential in the midst of a national emergency. As such, both institutional and migrants’ renaming of ‘illegal aliens’ as ‘essential workers’ reversed assumed parameters in terms of mobility and residence. This bold way of putting engrained assumptions into-question is characteristic of the carnivalesque. The metamorphosis of elite tourists, executives and others into unethical vectors for a pandemic is the spitting image of the de-crowning of the carnivalesque. The medieval crowning of the carnival king, as in the temporary high esteem given to someone of seemingly low rank, is captured by the figure of the ‘essential worker’ during the pandemic. While this term had different iterations in different countries, it shows how certain types of work and services were recognised indispensable for the basic functioning of social life. This renaming in the midst of the pandemic constitutes an element of the corona-carnival, where the kings to be crowned are those with jobs of low social esteem, often considered part of marginalised and even criminalised populations, in many cases undocumented migrants (see also the contributions by Mezzadra and Nielson as well as Vergnano and Anong in this Special Issue).

The chosen terminology of ‘essential worker’ highlighted the social contradictions of the pandemic response (De Genova, 2020; Nimer and Rottmann, 2021). That is, the notion of ‘essential’ begs the question: essential to whom, and essential for what? Its very articulation implies a conceptual elasticity and even inconsistency, unfolding in two directions in which the term was used. Is it the people themselves who are essential, in which case they should be valued, legally rewarded, and their health safeguarded; or is it the work itself that is essential, in which case people can be sacrificed in order that the work go on? It is in the ironic combination of both these otherwise juxtaposed interpretations, where the carnivalesque is at work.

Essential worker became a title connected to ‘basic necessities’, referring to those services deemed indispensable to survive: besides medical services, food production, processing, distribution, sale, delivery as well as transportation and care work were also considered. Many of these ‘essential’ needs were often highly invisibilized sites of the economy, some of the most precarious in terms of employment conditions and benefits, poorly remunerated, negatively racialised, gendered and migrantized. The redefinition of this labour and workers as ‘essential’ was declared publicly, becoming commonplace. As such, they echo carnivalesque practices of enthroning and praising those populations normally placed in the margins. This inversion of their social value, at least discursively, led to various claims: if migrant farmworkers were now ‘essential’, it would do no good that they be detained or deported. Thus, an ‘essential worker pass’ was created in the United States for farm labourers to avoid ICE raids (Jordan, 2020). The press also echoed similar efforts in Europe. Specifically, partial regularisation programmes were set up quickly in Portugal and Italy (del Barrio, 2020; Human Rights Watch, 2020). Also, during the hardest part of the lockdowns in Spain and Germany the only type of itinerant labour allowed to cross borders were farmworkers (Arango et al., 2021). Though patchy in success, these institutional responses reflected the basic dependency of the economy, as currently organised, on this type of ‘essential’ labour and those national and racial groups slated into it. Thus, the carnivalesque use of language, ‘essential’ in this case, was followed up with experimentation to ensure these essential people could make it to work and avoid detention, temporarily.

Furthermore, this notion of essential facilitated revisiting the idea of mass regularisation for all migrants as essential members of a given national community. This was the case in Spain during the first national emergency decree of 2020. A pro-migration wave emerged through the campaign #RegularizaciónYa, mainly based on online demonstrations as well as proposals in Congress (López-Sala, 2021). This was the first time in years when a significant call for regularisation occurred simultaneously inside institutions and out. One leading politician publicly called for regularisation, stating irregular residents of the country performing essential work were ‘heroes of the pandemic’ (Casqueiro and Díez, 2020). Yet, in the same way that carnival has a temporal frame, after which the prior norm tends to reinstate itself with little noticeable lasting change, something similar with essential workers happened. While a short debate about what was essential took place in the public sphere, and documents of temporary validity were provided to some migrants in those sectors, when it came to raising salaries or improving working conditions and benefits, these longer-lasting implications of having been deemed ‘essential’ did not, for the most part, materialise.

In this regard, it was often the ‘work’ itself deemed essential and not the ‘worker’, who was defined in strictly utilitarian terms. While these workers are essential, they are also disposable (De Genova, 2020; Nimer and Rottmann, 2021). It is ‘essential’ that they get to the work site and provide their labour for the basic reproduction of society to occur. Since their work is essential, it cannot ‘stop’ or ‘stay at home’. The ‘work’ must go on, regardless of the health risks or possible infection with COVID, given the ‘essentiality’ of the service. This is ironically a central carnivalesque aspect, namely that praising is rapidly followed by debasing. The essential worker, from being valued, is quickly sacrificed.

Remote work

Essential work usually implied a kind of labour to be done in-person and at a particular work place to commute to (such as hospitals or agricultural fields), or a kind of labour intrinsically linked to mobility (transport and delivery). That is, a type of job impossible to conduct remotely. The pandemic highlighted these types of ‘essential workers’ forced to keep moving in spite of lockdowns. Yet, another carnivalesque experimentation with labour was the mass expansion of remote work.

As part of the pandemic injunction to stay at home, the growing practice of telecommuting became mainstreamed. Many people who commuted to an office to work from a screen, were now working from a screen at home. Online security systems, passwords and other protocols were set up to facilitate this. Workplace inspection and insurance companies setup questionnaires for employees to ‘review safety procedures’ of their bedroom/dining room/home office/etc. in an ironic attempt to push the legal definition of workplace into the home. The ability to ‘telecommute’ signalled not only technological developments, but also the ‘privilege’ to be able to quarantine at home while keeping your job. While the pandemic did not birth these practices, it exaggerated them, making them widely available and not only acceptable but even preferable.

The spatial implications of this moment and its potential long-term effects have not been analysed in-depth. This ability to do much, if not all, of one’s work from a laptop and some basic infrastructure meant that an important part of the economy could carry on despite the pandemic. This telecommuting enabled working ‘longer hours’ and being available more often. The spatial division between work and personal life was blurred, if not erased, and led to curious quotidian practices such as divvying spaces at home for ‘work’, or getting dressed differently (at least on the upper half of the body) for parts of the day considered ‘working hours’ in front of the screen.

This melding of work and life, the blurring and re/bordering of sites of production and reproduction has been analysed from the inception of studies of flexible labour, precarity and post-fordism (Corsani and Lazzarato, 2008; Precarias a la Deriva Collective, 2004). During the corona-carnival this fusion went into overdrive, temporarily highlighting ambivalent tendencies in the re-organisation of labour. On the one hand, work invaded the space of home and personal time in insidious ways. The overlap of paid labour and the (usually unpaid) work of social reproduction, particularly with childcare, supervision of remote schooling, and care for other dependents became intensely acute. At the same time, this overlapping of job time-life time happened because workers had (some) more control over the temporal organisation of work and could interrupt or defer the working day. A dizzying dance ensued with labour-life-labour-life switching back and forth continuously. This harkens to the spatial confusion of the carnival moment, where clearly demarcated spaces of social behaviour and roles are meshed and exaggerated in carnival time. The norms of office and home, appropriate dress and attitude towards ‘school’ or classroom, all mixed together.

This spatial shift can be thought through the potential connections of telecommuting and migratory policy. The ability to ‘work remotely’ could be used to argue against facilitating work visas: a hardened border need not exclude the incorporation of foreign labour, even of the highly qualified type. In fact, remote work of this character may facilitate the maintenance of significant wage differentials depending on the ‘home’ country of the remote worker in question. Remote work may expedite further rounds of outsourcing as have already occurred in sectors such as manufacturing and phone-based customer service. Aneesh (2006) referred to this as ‘virtual migration’ regarding the restructuring of computer engineering labour between India and the United States. A flexible digitisation of work and communication allows for the extraction of labour power from bodies that remain put: labour migrates, but the labouring body remains in place.

The dilemmas of telecommuting and migration are brought to sardonic conclusion in the artistic work of Alex Rivera. Rivera imagined a scenario where visa access to the United States became near impossible, but ‘essential’ work still needed to be done by negatively racialised groups with poor remuneration. Thus, a system of robotic, remote-controlled farmwork was created. CyBraceros could plug in to virtual reality platforms to remotely control farmwork robots, and thus ‘Remain in Mexico’ while harvesting US crops (Riviera, 1997, 2008). While fanciful, it does force creative thinking about the potential of remote work as a means to reinforce unequal and racialised labour markets through tight migration policies.

Carnivalesque conclusions?

Taking a Bakhtinian view, carnivalesque culture exists as a parallel world. A time-space where the present is ironized, inverted or exaggerated and new lexicon is explored. A folk culture which develops over a long stretch of time. Could early COVID-19 measures have been such a site? A ‘breaking point. . . of death and renewal’ that inspires experimentation with other cultural and linguistic forms and politics? What insights into the pandemic, or other such impasses, might an approach like the carnivalesque provide?

A Bakhtinian carnivalesque approach would require examining the social response to the early COVID-19 pandemic as something other than crisis or emergency. Further, it would distinguish itself from approaches towards carnival as a ‘dress-rehearsal’ for revolt, or a ‘release-valve’, both overtly conclusive approaches. Instead, the corona-carnival remains ambiguous and ultimately unfinalised. A Bakhtinian approach towards the carnivalesque accounts for the ability to ignore what happened during carnival time, relegate it to another exceptional space-time, and return to a previous existing order. As such, the carnivalesque exaggerations and inversions during the COVID pandemic may not serve in any immediately apparent way as an opportunity to transform mobility and migration policy.

For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque was a vast realm that held a parallel existence with ‘official culture’ and social norms (Bakhtin, 1984a). The carnivalesque often subsided again and again, into a series of codes or cultural referents. Yet for Bakhtin, this culture was key in nourishing an imaginary that could relativize powerful structures, as well as wars, plagues, and other disasters. This cultural code also relativized individual experience into a larger social body. For Bakhtin, this ambivalent thinking was key in the long-term to the development of cultural forms like the novel, some strands of humanist thinking, and more broadly an approach that saw earthly power (of kings for example) as a part of, and not above, the grotesque social body and its protrusions.

If this is translated into the corona-carnival, then the experiences and the debates generated may subsist as a sort of subcultural context from which future openings may imbibe. They may be recalled in written or spoken tracts of one form or another. But for the most part they will seem to disappear into a reaffirmed ‘new normal’. The insights of the corona-carnival, regarding the management of human mobility can appear ‘overlooked’. In fact, it remains a question how much the ‘parallel’ world of the carnivalesque provides innovation and experimentation for the status quo itself.

As signalled in exploring the keywords, each had potential hopeful and dystopian developments. The carnivalesque provides a ‘teachable moment’ where the stakes and opportunities of a particular logic are highlighted. Tensions and contradictions of a given regime are signalled, by ironizing, inverting and exaggerating norms or assumed roles. The period of lockdown, where an economy based on mobility, just-in-time production and fast delivery, grinds to a halt, sets up the context. A resignification of well-established assumptions about certain mobilities was opened, such as the privileged traveller becoming an immoral viral vector, while the undocumented migrant appeared as essential worker. Likewise, the emptying of detention centres flipped the status quo of migration control, becoming suddenly unnecessary. Yet, simultaneously, alternative forms of detention expanded, highlighting potential dystopic future directions. As such, the corona-carnival provides a glimpse into possible futures showing how mobility management could be done differently, whether inverting the dynamics normally at play, or by exaggerating existing tensions. To conclude, the applicability of the carnivalesque to the early experience of the COVID-19 pandemic is partial. Many elements of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque concept are absent at first look when analysing the reaction to the pandemic. The emphasis on carnival laughter, on banquets, and feasting for example, seem lacking. But other key elements of the carnivalesque, such as its unique space-time, its features of exaggerated and inverted roles, the juxtaposition of opposites, its momentary re-arranging of social relations, the emphasis on unfinalisibility, are relevant to re-thinking the social effects and possibilities brought about during the early COVID-19 pandemic. As such, despite returning to a ‘new normal’, these linguistic productions can question assumed notions and practices of migration management, opening the social imagination to other ways of engaging with human mobilities.

Author biographies

Maribel Casas-Cortés is a research fellow at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), funded by the Ramón y Cajal research programme of the European Union and the Spanish Research Agency (RYC2018-024990-I). PhD in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she is currently leading a national research project on platform precarity among migrant couriers in Spain, developing intersectional analysis of differential mobilities. She has published in journals such as Current Anthropology, Citizenship Studies, and Rethinking Marxism.

Sebastian Cobarrubias is a research professor for ARAID, the Aragon Research & Development Foundation, working in the Geography Department at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he has been steadily contributing to the field of Migration and Border Studies, publishing in journals such as Political Geography, Antipode, and Geopolitics. He is currently investigating the citizenship regime in Spain as a case of racial preference.