Masquerading Toronto Through Caribana: Transnational Carnival Meets the Sign "Music Ends Here"

The title of this article aims to stage an engagement between what I am calling "Caribana's Toronto" (a masked Toronto, defined in opposition to a stereotyped Toronto the Good) and "Toronto's Caribana," for which the sign posted at the parade's finishing point (Music Ends here) is a fitting emblem. They keep each other in check, I argue, but not in stasis. I will bring these formulations together by way of a theory of "cultural remittance," and what I have found to be a useful distinction between two modes of desire, nostalgia, and yearning. I mean cultural remittance to encompass gestures to an elsewhere (home, often), but also to a beyond, a new set of possibilities for the place of diasporic residence.