International records / OpenAlex research

Nigerianess versus Foreigness in the Calabar Festival and Carnival Calabar

The forces of culture commodification, cultural synchronisation and modernisation have been shaping, nay, disfiguring traditional cultural events staged in Africa.In a bid to modernise and render local cultures more appealing to a western/westernised public of tourists, many African statesparticularly their tourism plannershave developed the tendency of copying and superimposing foreign/western concepts to local cultural displays.This paper illustrates this phenomenon using the Calabar Festival and Calabar Carnival (two popular cultural events staged in the Nigeria's South-eastern city of Cala…