Between Pan-Africanism and a Multiracial Nation: Race, Regionalism, and Guyanese Nation-Building Through the Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA), 1972

Abstract

The first Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts (CARIFESTA), held in the Caribbean nation of Guyana in 1972, was a significant and deliberate postcolonial moment that embodied the aspirations of a culturally unified Caribbean grounded in its common African ancestry. Through CARIFESTA, Guyana offered the symbolic and physical space through which to realize the dreams of Caribbean artists and intellectuals to erase Eurocentric cultural prejudices against African-derived cultural forms and embrace a Pan-African cultural heritage that could form the basis of regional unity. Over 1,200 intellectuals and cultural producers from across the Caribbean and Latin America – including Jamaica, Haiti, Surinam, Cuba, and Brazil – participated in this elaborate festival to meet their brethren and forge bonds within the African diaspora in the Caribbean. But this utopian vision and articulation of unity was never divorced from the on-the-ground politics and realities of racial divisions. The abundance, vibrancy, and warm reception of Pan-African cultural performances contrasted sharply with the politicized scarcity of Indo-Caribbean cultural offerings, especially from the host nation of Guyana. Forging an African diaspora in the Caribbean did not only occur within a binary African–European framework, but also centred on the racial and cultural politics experienced by Afro- and Indo-Caribbean peoples.

• CARIFESTA
• Caribbean
• Latin America
• Guyana
• nationalism
• Pan-Africanism

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Martin Munro, Tsitsi Jaji, and David Murphy for organizing the conference The Performance of Pan-Africanism that allowed me to present and reflect on this essay. I am also grateful to Thomas C. Holt and Dain Borges for feedback on an early draft of this essay, as well as to Vernicia Elie for detailed comments on a later draft.

Notes

1 1972 in Guyana; 1976 in Jamaica; 1979 in Cuba; 1981 in Barbados; 1992 and 1995 in Trinidad & Tobago; 2000 in St. Kitts & Nevis; 2003 in Suriname; 2006 in Trinidad & Tobago; 2008 in Guyana; 2013 in Suriname; 2015 in Haiti; 2017 in Barbados.