Joy and Resistance in Carnival From the Ground Up

This piece draws on images and interviews featured in a 2024 outdoor photography exhibit, Carnival from the Ground Up, to explore how the joy of carnival in New Orleans can be read as resistance to the dominant social, political, and economic order. Although the creators of this exhibit and this piece have heard people speak of their carnival experiences with the word joy ever since they started documenting them, in 2025, they observed much more explicit connections of carnival joy to politics. Specifically, people felt carnival to be a crucial kind of collective resistance to the new far-right Republican regime in the United States.