Of Chicks,Lice and Mackerel: Carnival and Transgression in a Cosmopolitan Spanish Enclave in Morocco

In 2006, a group of Ceutan Carnival performers were sued for their anti-Muslim lyrics, resulting in a convoluted trial that took six years to resolve. Ceuta is a small, cosmopolitan Spanish enclave on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Its Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish communities are tenuously held together by the City-led ideology of convivencia, that challenges mono-cultural models of Spanishness in favour of the idea that that Ceuta's ethno-religious groups live in harmony, all being validly Spanish. This paper contends that the Ceutan Carnival does not fit functionalist theories describing it as a stress-tap that reproduces power-relations by temporarily allowing their transgression. The long-drawn-out trial, which incurred vicious feuds, spiked tensions between Christians and Muslims, collapsed ‘convivencia’, and challenged the authority of State institutions, suggests that the Ceutan Carnival is an uncomfortable space, better understood if treated as a Foucaultian ‘mirror’, a space where society appears to itself as dangerously anarchistic, making individuals long for, not resist, State control.