“Resurrect these images”: Envisioning the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-70

Research output: Contribution to ConferencePaperProfessional

Abstract

Presentation for "consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean," a conference marking the opening of the exhibition "Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now" at Tate Britain and as part of the project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation.

According to poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, the inaugural Carifesta—a 1972 gathering in Georgetown, Guyana, of hundreds of artists celebrating their multiple cultural heritages without precedent and without “foreign magistrates of taste or art”—was one of the most crucial events to have occurred in the region since Emancipation. A council of artists and writers envisioned the shape of the event and aimed to promote art standards based in myriad aesthetic traditions from, their report reads, the “multi-lingual Caribbean plantation culture.” This paper argues that Carifesta was envisaged as a decolonizing praxis, as a process to redraw—for a mass, regional and diasporic audience—racialized cultural and architectural canons transplanted to and informed by the region during the reign of the colonial plantation. Through engaging contemporaneous theories by Sylvia Wynter and Brathwaite regarding the cultural lives of the enslaved and those of the New World Group, the paper reads the council’s report as a call to “resurrect” unrecorded images and cultural production systemically omitted from stories of (Euro-)Caribbean aesthetics by those upholding what Wynter terms “plantation ideology.” By attending to the intertwined power of art and architecture, it makes a case that, at its start, Carifesta was a key technology to unmake a colonized Caribbean and build the region, together, anew.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusUnpublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Eventconsent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean - Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom
Duration: 1 Dec 20213 Dec 2021
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/life-between-islands/worlding-through-caribbean

Conference

Conferenceconsent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period1/12/213/12/21
Internet address

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