Carifesta: The Promise of Pan-Caribbeanism

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

Fradinger, Moira

Abstract

In 1972, the inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta) gathered around 30,000 people for a flag parade of the 30 participating Caribbean nations and territories to open the region’s most important arts festival. Thousands of the region’s artists traveled to Georgetown, Guyana, to take part in the three-week celebration. Carifesta has remained a major cultural event in the region to this day, but the full story remains untold. I recover this story in three chapters, each drawing on case studies from the festival’s editions in Guyana, Jamaica (1976), Cuba (1979), and Barbados (1981). Aligned with Pan-Africanist festivals of the late 1960s and 70s—such as the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal and the 1969 Pan-African Festival in Algiers—Carifesta brought what I call Pan-Caribbeanism to artistic, literary, and cultural life. This is the idea that decolonization and cultural autonomy in the Caribbean cannot be achieved without regional integration. My introduction defines Pan-Caribbeanism and explores the context of contemporary political movements in the Caribbean. I argue that through Pan-Caribbeanism, Carifesta models a newly comparative and interdisciplinary Caribbean Studies whose methods and archives are grounded in the region itself. Chapter 1, “Festival Poetry and Festival Poetics,” examines the role of poetry at Carifesta through close readings of live performances and lesser-known occasional works by poets such as Louise Bennett, Arthur J. Seymour, Shake Keane, and Nicolas Guillén. These poems, ranging from amateur verse and song lyrics to minor poems by distinguished writers, reveal the festival's utopian aspirations. I link specific festival practices—like inauguration, hospitality, and translation—to poetic devices such as acrostic, anaphora, and call-and-response, reading these poems as impressions of Carifesta’s ephemeral Pan-Caribbean world. Chapter 2, “Assembling the Archipelago: Diplomatic Capital in Print” explores how Carifesta’s print culture functioned as cultural diplomacy, facilitating encounters between writers as national and regional representatives. It includes close readings of the 1972 anthology New Writing in the Caribbean, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s 1976 bibliography Our Ancestral Heritage, and Cuba’s 1979 Carifesta coffee-table book, as well as unpublished Carifesta ’79 symposium notes by Édouard Glissant. The chapter theorizes the concept of diplomatic capital, showing how print culture contributed to integrating the Caribbean and Latin America. Chapter 3, “The Carifesta Conjuncture: Film at the Caribbean Festival of Arts,” explores how filmmakers from a range of backgrounds used documentary film genres to interpret and broadcast Carifesta, both at home and in diaspora. Drawing on forgotten writings in the archives of Stuart Hall, who pitched a documentary about Carifesta ’76 for the BBC, I analyze forms and tropes used in films from Guyana, Cuba, the U.S. and the U.K. Deploying genres from “ciné-vérité” to Third Cinema and the concert film, each filmmaker claimed special access to the region’s Pan-Caribbean culture, presenting the festival within a coherent historical narrative and interpretation of live events. These films produced new Caribbean identities while claiming to merely represent them.

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