Transformational Festivals and the Enchantment Economy: Performance and Race in Neoliberal Times

Abstract

This dissertation examines the phenomenal global growth of music festival culture over the last two decades, with particular emphasis on “Transformational Festivals,” a genre of participatory, for-profit event influenced by New Age ideology and aesthetics. I use ethnographic examination of these festivals in the United States and Costa Rica as a basis for understanding the role that participatory culture and event economies play in territorialization and racialization. I historicize this analysis as a component of liberal and neoliberal culture by examining the lineage of repertoires and event structures in US temporary outdoor communities, which utilized the natural landscape as a basis for creating a White-dominated participatory culture. These communities were crucial to furthering a settler colonial project by creating deeply affective forms of social connectivity among White liberals, while also iteratively and imaginatively overwriting the landscape’s history of conquest so as to render native claims to colonized land pliable and, ultimately, dismissible. Turning to the aesthetics of contemporary festival culture, I trouble the scholarly tendency to examine the festival event as a social interstice that exists “outside” of quotidian time and space. I build a concept of “enchanting performance” that allows the production of event space, and the performance of idiosyncratic festival repertoires to appear as activities self-consciously connected to political and social commitments. This offers an alternative to structural interpretations of festivals as “counter-spaces,” allowing us to consider the complicated role such events play in ongoing movements for social change—especially those that pertain to race. I then outline how festival aesthetics tie in to a wider “enchantment economy” that operates at local and transnational levels. With an examination of the Harmony Park Music Garden in Minnesota, I articulate how struggles over symbolic and material control of the festival space create a fraught politics of Whiteness that manifest through claims of autochtony vis-à-vis the festival grounds. I then examine Envision Festival in Costa Rica to discuss the phenomenon of “Destination Festivals,” with attentiveness to transnational symbolic and material exchange. I outline how Envision utilizes an erotics of the Other to capitalize on the libidinal economy that attends festivalgoing in order to generate identity capital for White tourists. I also discuss the economic and social consequences of this culture mining, which offer up heritage as an object of mass consumption in the service of White identity formation.