Every Day's a Festival!

Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, the academic study of arts
festivals has long been neglected. The burgeoning festivals industry is,
however, firmly embedded in both the arts funding and weekly calendar
of European cities, and there is no doubt that festivals are fast becoming a
defining feature of urban life in the twenty-first century. An assessment of
their nature and impact is more pressing than ever before.

The contributors to this volume explore the modern urban festival and
the difference it makes to the experience and management of diversity in
the city. Their research reveals an unsettling coupling of the celebration of
local diversity with institutional amnesia, in which the memory of a festival
hardly ever outlasts its funding. This book documents a key phenomenon
of our time, the supplanting of community-based remembering with the
repetitive structures of events whose historic and interpretative depth is
lost amid a spiraling velocity of 'festivalization'.