Bakhtin at the Seaside

This article critically examines Bakhtinian interpretations of the English seaside resort. These suggest that resorts developed in England as sites of cultural resistance to the pressures of modernity; marginal spaces in which the utopian dynamics of traditional recreational practices were kept alive. The rise of the seaside ‘leisure industry’ is then interpreted as a hegemonic force, tearing the social practices of the people away from their traditional associations and rendering them complicit with the discourse of modernity. Taking the popular resort of Blackpool as a case study, the article offers a somewhat different argument. First, it suggests that the social relations of the 19th-century English seaside resort were anything but ‘carnivalesque’. Second, it claims that the leisure industry is open to interpretations other than those which focus on bourgeois hegemony and social control. These latter interpretations preclude the possibility that modern leisure practices possessed a utopian dimension of their own. In the case of Blackpool, however, it is argued that they did. The article concludes by highlighting the need for a more considered use of the concept of ‘the carnivalesque’, as the analytical frame it provides can serve to mask rather than illuminate the utopian dimensions of popular culture.