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

The Commonwealth Arts Festival was staged in Britain in 1965. With
the working title of `The Commonwealth At Home' , the Fesitval 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 to 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 tell 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.