ABSTRACT
The soviet social theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin developed the theory of the carnivalesque as a logic of exaggeration, inversion and irony. Beyond carnival events themselves, Bakhtin proposed this logic as a creative instance to foresee openings within an assumed normality. The conceptual gaze of the ‘carnivalesque' helps to rethink the reconfiguration of actors and practices around mobility, borders and migration during the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. This impasse worked as a corona-carnival in the midst of the current mobility regime. The use of ‘carnivalesque' in this article is not related to the playful aspects of carnival as a parade, but to the potential of the carnivalesque impasse for envisioning alternatives, which are not necessarily emancipatory but deeply ambivalent, grotesque and unfinished. That carnivalesque momentum, marked by social norms placed on pause, is captured in artistic and linguistic production, acting as a collective legacy for imagining futures otherwise. This paper compiles some keywords which emerged during the corona-carnival impasse, each holding hopeful and dystopian glimpses of possible alterations to the status-quo. These linguistic productions question assumed notions and practices of migration management, opening the social imagination to other ways of engaging with human mobilities. © The Author(s) 2023.
ABSTRACT
On 14 March 2020, in the face of the health crisis caused by COVID-19, the Spanish government declared a state of alarm in the whole of Spain, which, in different phases and degrees, entailed the confinement of the population and the suspension of economic activity not considered essential. This decision has been analysed from multiple perspectives, including the territorial one, but perhaps the one that has remained most invisible has been the rural perspective. This paper aims to analyse the impact of the pandemic and the first confinement in rural areas, by comparison with urban and semi-urban areas. In order to achieve this aim, the results of a survey of 2,920 interviews, carried out throughout Spain in May 2020, will be analysed. As we will see, contrary to what was initially expected, rural areas did not behave significantly differently from urban areas. What the statistical analysis shows is that it is the semi-urban environment that was worst affected by the initial impact of the pandemic.