This panel brings together scholars whose work spans Latin America and the Caribbean to analyze how cultural production was not only central to imagining communities, but also building them across racial, ideological, and linguistic boundaries. Aiala Levy examines how anarchists used theater to educate the public, legitimize their radical politics, and make claims to a rapidly urbanizing São Paulo in early twentieth-century Brazil. Ramaesh J. Bhagirat-Rivera interrogates how Trinidadian politicians and cultural producers attempted to ameliorate racial tensions by redefining Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian culture as “indigenous” through the Prime Minister's Best Village Trophy Competition from the 1960s-1970s. Amanda Reid analyzes how the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica’s performance of Kumina used dance and movement to enact Caribbean unity at Carifesta ‘72. Adrienne Rooney shows how postcolonial artists and intellectuals used successive Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta) during the long 1970s in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados as sites for public education to challenge colonial pedagogies. By using cultural forms that were central to local identity, diverse actors legitimized claims of belonging while advocating for a radical reimagination of history, the contemporary present, and possible futures.

The commentator of the panel, Sibylle Fischer, is an expert on Latin American and Caribbean cultural history, and will bring these diverse contexts and cultural forms in conversation with each other. We expect the audience to include those interested in Latin American and Caribbean history, race and racism, histories of culture and performance, the relationship between art and pedagogy, the creation of publics, and postcolonialism.