Carifesta Geographies: Mapping Colonial Afterlives and the Caribbean Festival of Arts’ “Phenomenal Dreaming”, 1966–1976

From its early official sparks in the late 1960s, the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta) has taken shape as a profoundly geographic meditation on how the region had been and could be imagined, lived in, and seen. It materialized a vast cultural expression of dreams of sovereignty and of uniting a region fragmented by Danish, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial empires. This article examines its geographic imagination at its founding and in its two earliest iterations, in Guyana and Jamaica, alongside colonial conceptions of the region, arguing that the juxtaposition accentuates the stakes, dreams, and revolutionary nature of the Carifesta project from its early days. Further, through an interactive, diachronic map of the two iterations of the festival, it visualizes their spatial relations with colonial histories via three case studies, analyzing colonial legacies that haunted the festival.

This article is part of the series “Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism” in British Art Studies, which is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Projects in the series consider the dispersed and difficult histories of Atlantic worlds, focusing on any aspect of visual and material culture that intersects broadly with the United Kingdom and the United States. The aim is to encourage transhistorical thinking by posing questions about histories and legacies of empire, networks of trade, transatlantic slavery, and creolisation. “Atlantic Worlds” initiated a virtual residency programme at the journal that ran from 2021 to 2022, where awardees shared ideas with each other and were supported by expert interlocutors. Awardees were Adrian Anagnost, Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Mia L. Bagneris, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Christopher Maxwell, and Adrienne Rooney. Invited interlocutors were Gaiutra Bahadur, Pamela Fletcher, Aaron Kamugisha, Catherine Molineux, José Lingna Nafafé, and Kerry Sinanan.