CARIFESTA and the Practice of a Decolonizing Public Education

Carifesta and the Practice of a Decolonizing Public Education

In an early 1979 interview, Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite noted that there had been “a movement” since the late 1960s and early 1970s in which Caribbean “people are themselves discovering their own culture quite naturally,” despite its absence from formal education. Among the points he cited establishing the change was the inaugural, multilingual Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), which took Guyana by storm in 1972. At the time, on the heels of Anglophone Caribbean independence, revolutionary public education and “unlearning” were top of mind for many who grasped the fact that the existing education system had been a critical technology of racialized colonial rule after emancipation. After independence, plans emerged to decolonize formal education, and Carifesta evolved in relative lockstep with them as it moved from Guyana to Jamaica (1976), Cuba (1979), and Barbados (1981). From its start, the state-sponsored mass event— gathering artworks and artists of all sorts from the Caribbean islands, mainland Central and South American countries washed by the Caribbean Sea, and beyond—was to be “inspirational” and “educational” and to “relate to the people.” Projecting state-crafted pedagogies as well as those dreamed up by performers, intellectuals, and artists—catalysts of and intimately involved in the festival’s creation—these Carifestas held myriad visions of what should be learned and how within its post-colonial moment. Arguing that Carifesta became a space to effect new pedagogy and introduce wide publics to what was not yet taught in school as plans to decolonize official education percolated, this presentation suggests that the festivals temporarily forged a praxis of radical public education that challenged the colonially-rooted a) norms of how to learn and b) terms of Caribbean culture, art, and history.