Looking Regionally: Carifesta and the Reimagining of Caribbean Culture

According to historian Kamau Brathwaite, the inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta) was “one of the most important events to have happened in the Caribbean since Emancipation.” Born out of discussions between artists and writers from the English-speaking Caribbean about how Guyana might build a decolonial national identity after its independence from the United Kingdom in 1966, the interdisciplinary festival of art lives on today. This paper focuses on Carifesta’s early phase, comprised of four festivals taking place in Guyana (1972), Jamaica (1976), Cuba (1979), and Barbados (1981). In addition to music, dance, drama, spoken word poetry, and “folk performances,” they presented visual art and/or “handicrafts,” from, despite the festival’s name, the insular-Caribbean, South, and Central America (and, to a much lesser extent, the United States). Actively decentering the “Western” art canon—including its rigid medium specificity—the festivals celebrated the multi-cultural, and especially the African diasporic, nature of art in the region. Founded during a period marked by a push for Caribbean economic integration, Carifesta rooted pan-Caribbean exchange in visual art and performance and was arguably, as economist Norman Girvan notes, more “integrated” than the coevolving Pan-Caribbean governmental bodies CARIFTA and CARICOM. This paper posits that renewed efforts to decenter the U.S. and Europe economically and prioritize regional exchange provided a productive environment to confront art circuits and conceptions of culture based in nationalism, language barriers, or dichotomies of center/periphery and colonizer/colonized in favor of regional—as, moreover, opposed to supposedly “universal”—art and cultural narratives.