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

Abstract

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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“…Like Craggs’ position of the establishment of the Commonwealth Institute, the re-reading of the festival highlights several criticisms. Low (2013), for example, noted that the initial working title of the festival was “The Commonwealth At Home”, which can be read as the intention to bring together various forms of art planned for this festival and still connected by the legacy of the empire (106–109).…”

“…The 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival is significant in the context of British history as it was organised in the wake of the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 and the 1965 white paper on immigration from the Commonwealth (Hansen 2000: 110). The idea for the festival had already been circulated through leaflets produced in 1957 that proposed a triennial festival of the arts across the Commonwealth tentatively titled “The British Commonwealth at Home” (Low 2013: 98). Low (2013) argues that the new immigration laws were widely seen as racializing immigration, especially from the new Commonwealth.…”

“…The idea for the festival had already been circulated through leaflets produced in 1957 that proposed a triennial festival of the arts across the Commonwealth tentatively titled “The British Commonwealth at Home” (Low 2013: 98). Low (2013) argues that the new immigration laws were widely seen as racializing immigration, especially from the new Commonwealth. By doing so, Britain denied accountability for her colonial legacy by excluding any migrant who did not have a British (or British-born) parent or grandparent (Low 2013: 106).…”

“…Low (2013) argues that the new immigration laws were widely seen as racializing immigration, especially from the new Commonwealth. By doing so, Britain denied accountability for her colonial legacy by excluding any migrant who did not have a British (or British-born) parent or grandparent (Low 2013: 106).…”

“…Due to the festival, many contemporary local and national magazine publications were dedicated to Commonwealth literature, including the New Statesman , English , the Times Literary Supplement , the London Magazine and Young Commonwealth Poets ’65, as well as the inaugural publication of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature in 1965. Low (2013) noted that despite the opportunism driving such publications, the festival's staging, significance and content offered useful insights on how Britain imagined and managed its colonial past and legacy (99).…”