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.

No abstract

Drawing on the work of Simon Gikandi and Peter Kalliney, this article addresses the imbrication of cultural diplomacy, language and politics, and cultural capital that facilitated the rise of Commonwealth Literature at the University of Leeds. It offers a brief account of the disciplinary gestation of "Commonwealth Literature" at Leeds, addressing some of the foundational arguments in this campaign; revisits the Leeds conference of 1964 and the aid it garnered from governmental agencies; and examines the cultural work that the field is made to perform in documentation and lectures. The paper also addresses the creation of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature in the light of the Arthur Ravenscroft papers at the University of Leeds, sieving the surviving papers for interventions on the spread of English language and literary studies, and the cultural capital that they are said to help cultivate.

No abstract

No abstract