the young people's professor

As a performance studies scholar, im always fascinated with the roles that ethnic parades and festivals play in the retention of cultural identities. Whether it be the annual West Indian Day Carnival in Brooklyn or Haitian Rara, parades are a great way of examining the values and taboos of a given culture, and a way of examining how history lives on through specific performance traditions.

This weekend marked the official onset of the Lunar New Year festivals in Chinatown. What a gorgeous set of sites. Lunar New Year (often referred to as "The Chinese New Year") is a two week celebration that begins on the first day of the first month of the Lunar calendar (typically in late January/mid-February) and ends on the full moon 15 days later. There will be various parades taking place in Chinatown over the course of the next week, ending February 24th.


The Lunar New Year celebrates the family, the earth coming back to life and the start of a new beginning and possibilities. Regarded as a major holiday in Asia, Lunar New Year is celebrated internationally in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and in Asian communities all around the world.

Preparations for Lunar New Year start during the last few days of the last moon. Houses are thoroughly cleaned, debts repaid, hair cut and new clothes bought. Doors are decorated with vertical scrolls of characters on red paper whose texts seek good luck and praise nature. During the two-week Lunar New Year period, numerous ancient traditions are observed, ranging from flower giving to the preparation of special foods. Perhaps the most popular Lunar New Year customs in the West are lion dances and firecrackers (to ward off evil spirits) and the giving of "lucky money" in colorful red envelopes.

Find more about some of the events going on in Chinatown this week around the Lunar New Year by visiting the website of MoCa, the Museum of Chinese in the Americas

And if you happened to be interested on thinking a little more about the relationships between parades, festivals, and the performance of ethnic identities, there are few excellent recent dissertations here in the department of performance studies at NYU that i'd recommend. Off the top my head I can think of three:

Choreographing Chineseness: Global Cities and the Performance of Ethnicity
By SanSan Kwan

Doing the Desi Thing: Performing Indianness in New York City
By Sunita S. Mukhi

Emancipative Bodies: Women, Trauma, and a Corporeal Theory of Healing in Jamaican Dancehall Culture
By Beth-Sarah Wright