by Peter Kahl, 2025-08-26; v2: 2025-10-25
This reflective essay explores the Notting Hill Carnival as a living expression of epistemic justice and political aesthetics. Drawing on personal observation and philosophical analysis, it examines how Carnival transforms Britain’s social margins into its centre, granting visibility and voice to those historically unseen. The essay traces the event’s roots in post-war resistance, its inversion of racial and gender hierarchies, and its contemporary tensions between celebration and commodification. Integrating insights from Fricker, Fanon, Rancière, and Kahl (2025), it argues that Carnival enacts a fiduciary form of recognition—a collective moment of trust, dignity, and belonging. Through feathers, music, and movement, the streets become a stage for democracy itself: loud, plural, and imperfect, yet profoundly alive.
Notting Hill Carnival, race, visibility, epistemic justice, fiduciary openness, epistemic clientelism, political aesthetics, diaspora, belonging, cultural recognition, Fricker, Fanon, Rancière, Kahl, feminism, liberation, hybridity, multicultural Britain, democratic trust, embodiment, performance
- Version 2 ✅ latest
Kahl, P. (2025). The carnival of the invisible: When the marginalised take centre stage at Notting Hill (v2). Lex et Ratio Ltd. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17444159
v1 published in Great Britain by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-08-26.
v2 published in Great Britain by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-10-25.
© 2025 Lex et Ratio Ltd. The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work and to object to its derogatory treatment. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes with attribution and without modification.
Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .