Symposium

GCA 2022 Symposium

The Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts as Prism: 20th Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean

Fifty years ago, the first Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), held in Guyana from August to September 1972, marked a significant and deliberate postcolonial moment that embodied the aspirations of a unified Caribbean. A brochure for the inaugural multidisciplinary and transnational festival stated that Carifesta would “depict the life of the people of the region—their heroes, morale, myth, traditions, beliefs, creativeness, ways of expression” and “stimulate and unite the cultural movement throughout the region.” Carifesta ‘72 aspired to promote the cultural expressions of the multilingual region. The conceptualizers, who included celebrated poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, poet and activist Martin Carter, and artist Aubrey Williams, expected that the organizing body would craft a festival that embraced and celebrated the multiracial and multicultural heritage of the region despite the polarized national politics of the day. This meant, in theory, celebrating traditions rooted in the indigenous nations, West Africa, India, Indonesia, China, and Western Europe.

What transpired when the artists, dancers, musicians, writers, directors, filmmakers, and revelers from across the circum-Caribbean and beyond gathered to exchange ideas and idioms, ancestral stories, and contemporary engagements with tradition? What were the ripple effects of the Carifesta ‘72 event on the region’s (festival) culture, politics, and people? What legacies did it build upon or interrupt? As we approach the 50th anniversary of the first Carifesta, “The Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts as Prism: 20th Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean” will examine the first Carifesta, its significance, and its legacies. We will collectively explore its possibilities, achievements, and missteps. As our multilingual calls for participation (below) elaborated on, we will also use this seminal moment as a prism through which Caribbean culture, nationalism, transnationalism, and postcolonialism can be analyzed.

The symposium also marks the launch of the Digital Archive of Guyanese and Caribbean Festivals, a collaborative and crowd sourced archive at the Caribbean Research Library at the University of Guyana. After all, talking about Carifesta ‘72 and other festivals calls for thinking about how materials from them are preserved and shared. Festivals, by design, are ephemeral entities that take place at specific moments in time. The documents (such as pamphlets, brochures, performance guides, personal photographs) that are produced are often taken home by participants. We have begun collecting and will continue to gather such items—tucked away in scrap books and shoeboxes—alongside oral histories to build a Carifesta archive that will expand to embrace other regional festivals. It will be open to the public and researchers alike.

Symposium Organizers

Adrienne Rooney

Adrienne Rooney is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Rice University. She studies twentieth-century art and (visual) culture in the Americas, with a focus on the Circum-Caribbean. Her dissertation—for the time being titled “Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-1981” and to be completed in Spring 2023—is the first book-length academic study of Carifesta, an initiative that has embodied Caribbean integration more fully than political or economic efforts. Her dissertation attends to the conceptualization of the monumental, multilingual, ongoing festival and the (visual) culture foregrounded in its first four iterations in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados. With the support of extensive archival research and contemporaneous theories by, among others, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter, it weaves a story of the festival—a meeting place for artists from Brazil to Curaçao, from Saint Lucia to Suriname, from Venezuela to Haiti—in the heady, long 1970s.

She has shared her work in a variety of ways, including through presentations at the annual conferences of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) and College Art Association (CAA), talks at the Paul Mellon Centre, the Tate, and Oxford University, and published criticism and scholarship in caa.reviews and the Journal of African American Studies, among others. In October, she will present at the conference “Beyond Boundaries: Seeing Art History from the Caribbean” at The Clark.

She is part of the Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop Class of 2022, administered by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University. She is the recipient of the Donald C. Locke Award at Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University (2022). She is also currently a resident of “Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism” a two-year remote residency program by the journal British Art Studies and the Terra Foundation for American Art (2021-2023). She was a Junior Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, London (2019-2020), and her work has also received support from the Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship, the Rose Library Fellowship, the Brown Foundation, and Rice’s Department of Art History.

Adrienne has taught classes at Rice University and the University of Houston – Clear Lake’s Academics for Offenders Program. She is Co-organizer, with Dr. Fabiola López-Durán, of the Racial Geography Project, an initiative of the Rice University Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice. Prior to Rice, she was a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2012–2015), where she worked on the essay ”Defining American” in Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015) and exhibitions including Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight (2016-17), America Is Hard to See (2015), and Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective (2012-2013). She also conducted research for and programmed at Danspace Project (2012 and 2016). She was a Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) scholarship recipient in 2015–2016 and received her B.A. in art history from Barnard College (2012) and MA from Rice University (2019).

Ramaesh J. Bhagirat-Rivera, Ph.D.

Ramaesh J. Bhagirat-Rivera is a Caribbean historian and Assistant Professor of Critical Mixed Race Studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. His research focuses on the intersection of Asian and African diasporas in the Americas, race and racism, transnationalism, and cultural history. He is completing his book manuscript – Inventing Indigeneity: Performing Race and Nation in the Modern Caribbean, c. 1950-1980 – which analyzes how contested festivals were used to create national cohesion in racially divided Caribbean countries. His manuscript argues that the multiracial societies of Guyana and Trinidad looked to each other to construct shared visions of nationhood by inventing indigeneity through festival culture.

Stemming from this monograph, he has published an article on Carifesta – “Between Pan-Africanism and a Multiracial Nation: Race, Regionalism, and Guyanese Nation-Building Through the Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA), 1972.” In analyzing a festival that was embraced as “emancipation day come true” by Afro-Caribbean artists and intellectuals, this article shows the contested ways in which Caribbean people utilized ideals of Pan-Africanism to facilitate cultural exchange between Guyanese, Jamaicans, Haitians, Cubans, Surinamese, and others in the region. Simultaneously, it shows how festivals responded to and were shaped by multiracial realities of the Caribbean, specifically regarding Indo-Caribbean peoples in the region.

Bhagirat-Rivera received his Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Comparative American Studies, Africana Studies, and Latin American Studies from Oberlin College. His research has been supported by Fulbright IIE and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. He has taught at Boston College, Kenyon College, and the University of Chicago.

Vibert C. Cambridge, A.A., Ph.D.

Vibert Compton Cambridge (M.A., Communication and Development Studies, Ohio University, 1988; Ph.D., Mass Communication, Ohio University, 1989) is professor emeritus in the School of Media Arts and Studies, Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University. He was awarded Guyana’s Golden Arrow of Achievement (A.A.) for his contributions to the study of Guyana’s social and cultural history. In 2013, he received the Award for Excellence in Global Engagement from Ohio University.

Dr. Cambridge has dedicated his work and academic research to the study of Guyanese cultural expressions that emerged from the encounters, interactions, and exchanges among its root cultures over the past 15,000 years, especially the period since Europe’s 15th century encounter with the Caribbean and South America. This orientation stemmed from his participation in the field research conducted by Jarai Productions (Peter Kempadoo and Marc Matthews) on Guyanese folk culture for the radio series Our Kind of Folk in the months leading up to Carifesta ’72.

Dr. Cambridge’s teaching, research, and scholarship have focused on the intersection of culture, mass communication, and social change in the post-colonial Caribbean and the Global South. His Musical Life in Guyana: History and Politics of Control, the first in-depth study of Guyanese musical life, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in June 2015 as part of its Caribbean Studies Series. Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States, 1990–2001 was published by the Ohio University Press in January 2005.

Dr. Cambridge’s current research and practice focus on decolonization in the post-independence Caribbean, the social and cultural history of “sweet drinks” in Guyana, cultural preservation through diaspora engagement, and citizen engagement in the emerging 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) in the context of Guyana’s emerging oil- and gas-fueled economy.

Excuse Me, May I Offer Some Interpretations (WACACRO, Toronto, 1975), Dr. Cambridge’s collection of poems, continued the exploration of the life of post-World War II West Indian immigrants launched by Edward Kamau Braithwaite in his Rites of Passage (ARGO, UK, ca. 1967). Dr. Cambridge’s poems have been anthologized in Canada in Us Now (Harold Head, editor, 1976) and Guyanese Writing 1966–1976 (A. J. Seymour, editor, 1976).

Dr. Cambridge has organized many events, such as conferences, symposiums, colloquia, and other initiatives aimed at making the knowledge of the Guyanese experience, especially the nation’s cultural commonalities, accessible to all citizens. These events include:

Inaugural Guyana Folk Festival (Guyana Broadcasting Corporation, Guyana, 1983)
International Conference to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Anglophone Caribbean (Guyana Commemoration Commission, Guyana, 1984)
Second International Conference on Entertainment-Education (Communication and Development Studies, Ohio University, Athens, OH, 1995)
“Celebrating Our Musical Heritage” (Guyana Cultural Association of New York symposium, New York, 2003)
“Celebrating Mac: Folk, Identity, and National Cohesiveness” (Guyana Cultural Association of New York symposium, Guyana, 2008)
“Masquerade Lives” (Guyana Cultural Association of New York symposium, Guyana, 2012)
“Guyana at 50: Understanding Our Independence Journey” (50th Anniversary of Independence Committee, Guyana, 2016)

From 2012 to 2022, Dr. Cambridge served as president of the Guyana Cultural Association of New York, Inc.

GROUP AND ARTIST PRESENTATIONS

PANEL

Art@Carifesta ‘72

Derek Browne, Dudley Charles, Errol Doris, Sr., Carl Hazlewood, David Lanyi

This panel includes artists who organized exhibitions and/or showed their work at Carifesta ’72 as well as artists influenced by the festival.

PANEL
Artistry in Furious Storms: Personal Reflections of Past Creative Administrators of Carifesta

Dr. Hilary Brown, Dr. Paloma Mohamed Martin, Dr. Efebo Wilkinson

This panel of administrators of Carifesta explores the operational considerations and perceived impacts of Carifestas in the 1990s and mid-2000s. In a reflexive voice, these panelists discuss the administration of the festival, the most invisible but hugely significant aspect of the production of a Carifesta.

MULTIMEDIA PROGRAM

CAM (Caribbean Artists Movement-1966-1972) -The Embryo of Carifesta

Rod Westmaas, with contributions by Carmen Monroe, Ram John Holder, Doris Harper-Wills, Joyce Trotman, Ann Walmsley, Ian Hall, Ken Corsbie, Eric Huntley, Ansel Wong, Stewart Brown, John Stephenson, Peter Fraser, Alex Pascall and Marc Matthews, among others.

The Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) was founded in London in 1966 by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose and Andrew Salkey. The burgeoning West Indian diaspora from the newly independent Caribbean nations that had settled in the capital, along with those nations yet to seek independence, were eager to explore their history, society and culture. The founders were determined to create a forum by which talent from the Caribbean was not suppressed but given the exposure they rightly deserved.

Braithwaite, a poet from Barbados, Salkey a novelist and radio journalist from Jamaica and La Rose a book publisher and poet from Trinidad, providing the perfect synergy needed for CAM to exist.

This presentation will seek to show, by way of videos, statements and reflections from the London diaspora, how CAM was fed and nourished by the prevailing conditions in London, how it grew by the contributions, enthusiasm and brilliance of the talents that had chosen to call London their home and finally how it gave birth to charismatic heroes, explored myths, re-energised traditions and beliefs, heralded creativity and eventually making way for a new platform in the form of Carifesta.

SCREENING AND DISCUSSION

Carifesta 1972: Fragments

Jasper Adams, Simone Dowding, Stanley Greaves, Margaret Lawrence | Moderator: Russel Lancaster

The Moray House Trust will premiere a video prepared for this symposium featuring fragments from Guyana’s contribution to the inaugural Carifesta programme as well as reminiscences. These fragments will include: An Extract from Couvade, a play by Michael Gilkes (read by Russel Lancaster, Simone Dowding, Jasper Adams and the late Ron Bobb-Semple); seminal artist Stanley Greaves’ memories of his exhibition and a look at some of the work he displayed; and The Legend of Kaieteur, a poem by AJ Seymour (read by Russel Lancaster & Margaret Lawrence).

MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION AND EXHIBITION

CARIFESTA IZ AH BIG TING and A COMMEMORATION OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF CARIFESTA ’72

Errol Ross Brewster

Artist Errol Ross Brewster will comment on the nature and orientation of contemporary Carifesta practice in this multimedia presentation. While working on commissioned films of Carifesta in 1979, 2003, and 2006, Brewster interviewed regional cultural luminaries and compiled remarks by festival organizers—these sources inform his narrative. Alongside his presentation, Brewster’s info module A COMMEMORATION OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF CARIFESTA ’72 is featured in this symposium. To view the work and learn more about the artist, please visit the symposium’s Virtual Gallery.