Articles Available Online

The unofficial anthem of this year’s London Carnival was ‘Famalay’, a bouyon-influenced soca song that won the Road March in Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival in March Almost every time a mas float arrived in front of the judges, ‘Famalay’ was played and the crowd chanted its chorus – ‘Famalay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay-lay’, and its praise of Caribbean unity: ‘We doh see skin / We doh see colour / We see strength / We see power’ At London Carnival, one mas troupe featured a little boy and girl dressed as what seemed like a nineteenth-century French bourgeois couple, parading in coat and tails under a sun umbrella These costumes continued one of the earliest Caribbean Carnival masquerades, where enslaved peoples would hold balls in which they would dress up as their masters in order to mock them, a mockery they brought into Carnival after the Emancipation of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834 They were just two of the countless costumes on show over Carnival weekend, but they were a reminder of how deeply the histories of the African diaspora are woven into London life, if you open your eyes to see them   Alvaro Barrington, who was born in Venezuela and grew up in Grenada and New York, designed a mas float with the United Colours of Mas collective for this years London Carnival, as part of his first solo London show Garvey: Sex Love Nurturing Famalay (2019) On a hot Monday, a float covered in massive canvases depicting Barrington’s signature motifs – close ups of yellow and white tropical flowers against red and pink backgrounds – slowly wound its way through Notting Hill The same motifs appear in the paintings on show in Sadie Coles HQ Barrington wanted to take part in Carnival to extend the audience for the show – the first of four planned exhibitions about the life of the Jamaican activist and political theorist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Garvey, who spent the last five years of his life in London, was committed to building cross-class solidarity across the Black diaspora, reaching out, like Barrington,