3rd Caribbean Educative Arts Festival

October 14th to 17th 2016

Saint Lucia

Title: reparARTory

Call for presentations

There is arguably no major global discussion today that engages and emboldens the Caribbean as the Caribbean reparations movement. Not only does history remember the region as the dislocated home of the children of the victims of enslavement, native genocide, and colonialism – inevitably the basis for the call for reparatory justice – but the space from which the protagonists of the global conversation might emerge. Today we acknowledge these principals as the renowned academics, technocrats, and legal minds corralled by the CARICOM Reparations Commission. But they themselves, as the leads who currently occupy this moment, pregnant with possibility, are the offspring of movements that are seminal to where we find ourselves at this stage.

From the Haitian Revolution, ignited by a fateful Vodou ceremony at Bois Caiman – to Maroons claiming their space in Suriname, the Guyanas and Jamaica, to Garvey conscientizing the world through literature and oratory, to First Nations and Garifuna resistance, public transgressions in mas/querade and carnival and Hosay and other festivals, to reggae and Rastafari bearing the reparations banner to the world – every f/act of resistance to enslavement and colonial injustice, which un/consciously sought the restoration of family and community in the New World, was ‘epicentred’ by Art.

This Caribbean Educative Arts Festival (CEAF) therefore, takes cue from this moment, further inspirited by the UN declaration of 2015 to 2024 as the International Decade for People of African Descent. Themed, reparARTory, this CEAF’s title is a conscious misspelling of “reparatory”, that seeks to establish this year’s festival as one which will at once lend its voice to the reparations dialogue – the inescapable zeitgeist of our age – and at the same time explore the

ways in which Caribbean arts and culture have been used in service of the restitution of our lives, whether this is linked to the scars of enslavement itself – which the reparations research has made even more evident – or any of the other ruptures in our societies, which involve the arts and culture in/as a repairing process.

The CEAF is therefore inviting artists from all disciplines, traditional festival/cultural practitioners, community workers, arts educators, teachers, academics, and other interested persons, to submit proposals for exhibitions, performances, participatory workshops, and colloquia related to any of the following sub-themes, which demonstrate the ways in which the arts might engage reparations. These include (but are not restricted to):

• arts, culture and/in community memory;

• arts, culture and/in healing;

• arts, culture and/in revolution;

• arts, culture and/in activism;

• arts, culture and/in the repairing process;

• arts, culture and/in citizenship; and

• arts, culture and/in community regeneration.

Proposals should not exceed 250 words, and must be emailed to the CARIBNET Secretariat at caribnet@gmail.com. Submissions should include separately, the bio/s of the presenter/s, and any images or videos that may serve as supporting documents. The deadline for submissions is August 31st 2016.