Kumina, CARIFESTA, and the Caribbean Art of Failure

When poet, historian, and cultural theorist Edward Kamau Braithwaite witnessed The National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica’s (NDTC) performance of Kumina at Carifesta ‘72 in Georgetown, Guyana, he praised the dance’s revolutionary potential to overturn colonial structures and embody collective liberation. But beyond lauding the Jamaican company’s virtuosic storytelling, Braithwaite saw the dance as an example of a broader regional style of participatory ritual performance and unruly spectatorship that overthrew European concert conventions. This paper focuses on Carifesta as an archive of developmental “failure” and upheaval, exploring how artists and audiences used moments when infrastructure failed or tradition was broken to enact Caribbean unity as a spectacle of chaos. I read the NDTC’s Kumina as such a moment that shifted the dynamics of the proscenium space by dancing a Caribbean pedagogy of erotic citizenship. I place my analysis of the Kumina's participatory structure and meaning alongside Carifesta theatergoers' everyday performances of rapture, disgruntlement, and frustration with the event's organizers, to configure the festival as a space where West Indians both critiqued and embodied otherwise Caribbean futures on and off the stage. Furthermore, I argue that the literary archive of the Caribbean festival evidences artists' commitments to transforming Carifesta’s failures into a metonym for regional dreams of freedom: a radical collectivity that transcended the Caribbean’s incomplete sovereignty.