The manifestations of folk carnival festivities represented the element of nonconformity in opposition to the authoritarianism of the official culture in
European medieval societies. The elements forming this folk tradition traveled with European colonisers to the Americas, where they were met by diverse African and
Indigenous traditions, giving birth to new forms of manifestation in the melting pot of cultures collateral to colonialism. This essay aims to discuss the elements of European folk carnival, analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His world (1965), which were crossed with African traditions and resignified into
hybridised strategies of cultural resistance, looking at the Brazilian cultural manifestations of Caretas do Acupe and Nego Fugido.