Adrienne Rooney, Ph.D. candidate, selected for Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop at Hutchins Center

Adrienne Rooney, a PhD Candidate in Art History at Rice University, has been selected to take part in the fifth edition of the Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop on Afro-Latin American Studies at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She will be workshopping “Cartographies of Kinship in the Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts,” a chapter of her dissertation. ​

Tentatively titled "Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-1981," her dissertation is the first extended academic study of Carifesta, an initiative that has embodied Caribbean integration more fully than political or economic efforts. Her dissertation attends to the conceptualization of the monumental, multi-lingual, ongoing festival and the (visual) culture foregrounded in its first four iterations in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados. With the support of extensive archival research and contemporaneous theories by, among others, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter, it weaves a story of the festival—a meeting place for artists from Brazil to Curaçao, from Venezuela to Haiti—in the heady, long 1970s. Building on scholarship that demonstrates that the visual and definitions of culture are centrally important in racialization and subjugation, it argues that Carifesta coalesced as a critical technology in a tripartite push against the plantation economy and its legacies of (supposed) cultural, as well as epistemic and economic, dependency on Europe and the US.