At home? Discoursing on the Commonwealth at the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival  

Oleh:

Low, Gail

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 48 no. 1 (Mar. 2013), page 97-111.
Topik: British imperialism; Commonwealth; Commonwealth Arts Festival; Derek Walcott; Empire; geo-politics of space; immigration; Martin Carter; poetry; postwar Britain
Fulltext: At home- Discoursing on the Commonwealth.pdf (581.47KB)

Isi artikel

The Commonwealth Arts Festival was staged in Britain in 1965. With the working title of “The Commonwealth At Home”, the Festival was designed, ostensibly, to bring together far flung lands, connected by the legacy of empire, to establish goodwill through culture and the arts. This paper explores the cultural work to which the 1965 Festival was put by advocates and detractors. Looking at archival sources from proposed plans for the London events, committee minutes, festival programmes, and letters, to the staging of the “Verse and Voice” festival of Commonwealth Poetry at the Royal Court Theatre in London, the paper fleshes out some of the rationales and motivations for the event, examines tropes and metaphors used, and also situates the events within the context of recently passed British anti-immigration laws. The paper argues that who the Commonwealth was for — its locus and its meaning — can be excavated from the geo-political tropic deployment of space in its discoursing. In particular, the depiction of what was imagined as being at home and what was represented as distant lands tells revealing stories of disavowal for an empire (and a colonial legacy) that occurred somewhere else and to someone else; in this manner, Britain’s “fit of absence of mind” also became a way of disposing of unwanted histories.

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