First, some introductory information: in 1703, French settlers on the Gulf Coast celebrated Shrove Tuesday in Mobile, Louisiana, with a carnival later named “Mardi Gras,” fifteen years before New Orleans could make a similar claim. Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day in the Christian calendar of the Lenten season. Lent is a forty-day period of abstinence and penance during which Christians prepare spiritually for the celebration of Easter, the resurrection of Christ. Mardi Gras is a carnival, but most carnivals are neither held on Shrove Tuesday, nor derive from or emulate Mardi Gras. Christians in other parts of the world celebrate on Shrove Tuesday in different ways. Some call their celebration “Carnival,” usually with a capital “C,” which distinguishes this one-day-per-year event from other small-c carnivals that may occur during the year outside the Christian calendar.
I have never attended any Shrove Tuesday Carnival, or Mardi Gras, in person. The one carnival I've witnessed also occurred once a year, on a Friday night, Saturday afternoon, and Saturday night in July. This carnival took place in a parking lot behind the church my family attended in Canton, Ohio. Activities included games of chance and skill, live music, food, and adults-only gambling in the school cafeteria. On almost every other weekend during the summer each of the other five Catholic churches in Canton held a virtually identical carnival of its own. It should be obvious that excepting live music, this carnival had almost nothing in common with Mardi Gras: no parades, no costumes, no balls, no beads. Isabel Machado’s ambitious and excellent book is similarly light on the accoutrements of Mardi Gras, because Carnival in Alabama is focused upon more substantive, less fleeting matters.
Carnival in Alabama is a 175-page study in two distinct but connected parts of a capital-C, Mardi Gras-style Carnival in Mobile, Alabama, investigated by Machado over a four-year period. Machado's study provides a detailed history of Mobile’s Carnival stretching from the early eighteenth century to the present day, as well as close observation of the evolving human chemistry that informs the Carnival's contemporary character.
This approach helps to clarify what Machado means by the unusual subtitle of her book. In the introduction she writes, “what I refer to as marked bodies here are the people who deviated from the (white, male, straight-identified) norm of Mardi Gras’s invented tradition" (7). Just about every other book about Carnival/Mardi Gras in the Southeast United States tells the story of a tradition invented by and expressing the values of white, straight-identifying men. Not surprisingly, these “official" accounts (the author lists more than thirty of them in the bibliography) consistently fail to acknowledge that the experiences and viewpoints of women, people of color, and queer cultures may differ from their own.
Carnival in Alabama represents a powerful correction for that oversight. It is the saga of the Mobile Colored Carnival Association, which in 1938 took initial steps to create a separate but equal “colored" ball and parade. In 1982, the first Order of Osiris Ball created a “separate safe space” in which gay and lesbian Mobile residents could participate semi-openly in Mobile’s Carnival. How these two breakthroughs occurred, and how their constituencies have fared since then, are meticulously and authoritatively documented in Carnival in Alabama. Machado underscores how important it was for people of color and for queer Mobilians to express their identities as part of an event that stubbornly resisted their inclusion. It is no small irony that this Carnival, like many others, is historically an occasion for white men to appear in blackface and women’s clothing.
In addition to the text of Carnival in Alabama, the book’s notes and bibliography are exceptional. Both contain valuable resources for folklorists and others who study celebrations in the public realm. Machado augments published and documentary sources from Mobile with biographical information on twenty-seven key individuals interviewed for the book. One complaint: the seventy-four photographs, maps, and illustrations poorly reproduced within the text provide less of a contribution to the book than they might have, much of their detail lost. The author took many of the photographs herself; she deserved a better printing job.
Carnival in Alabama is an academic rarity—a modest study with very wide application. The testimony of the marked bodies with which it is concerned—women, people of color, and queer cultures—reverberates not only through Mobile’s public spaces but also throughout American society. At this moment in time, Carnival in Alabama is required reading.
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[Review length: 749 words * Review posted on January 24, 2026]