Adrienne Rooney
Adrienne Rooney is Assistant Professor of Visual and Material Culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Before joining the VU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester in New York. She obtained her PhD in Art History, with certificates in African and African American Studies and Critical and Cultural Theory, at Rice University in Houston, Texas, after working for several years as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Most broadly put, her work focuses on relationships between (de)colonization and visual and material culture in the Americas, particularly in the wider Caribbean. Her writing primarily foregrounds Caribbean artistic and exhibition practices, counter-geographies, and intellectual thought while wrestling with the centuries-long story of cultural violence and defiance in contact zones established by colonization and the plantation economy. She also has interests in the politics of repatriation and the archive, social justice and visual culture, and connections between racial capitalism, ideas about art and aesthetics, and Western conceptions of modernity. Her work on these topics is indebted to Caribbean intellectual thought, Black Studies, and decolonial theory.
She is currently working on her first book project, based on her PhD dissertation, A Worldbuilding Moment: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts’ (Carifesta) Revolutionary Era, 1966-1981, the first academic monograph devoted to this sweeping cultural expression of the dream to unify a region divided by colonial empire. In addition to chapters and articles relating to Carifesta, she will soon publish an essay on a confluence of anticolonial protest, aesthetic theory, and artistic practice in Jamaica’s 1970.
Beyond her written scholarship, criticism, and public talks, she centers collaborative public history projects. Stemming from her research on Carifesta, she co-organized the three-day international symposium The Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts as Prism: 20th Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean (2022), which was held as part of the Guyana Cultural Association of New York, Inc.’s Annual Guyana Folk Festival. The symposium also launched the Digital Archive of Guyanese and Caribbean Festivals, Culture and Literature, an archival hub at the University of Guyana for materials from and oral histories of Carifesta and beyond. Rooney is also the co-founder and co-leader of the Racial Geography Project, a research collective of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice at Rice University.
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Most broadly put, her work focuses on relationships between (de)colonization and visual and material culture in the Americas, particularly in the wider Caribbean. Her writing primarily foregrounds Caribbean artistic and exhibition practices, counter-geographies, and intellectual thought while wrestling with the centuries-long story of cultural violence and defiance in contact zones established by colonization and the plantation economy. She also has interests in the politics of repatriation and the archive, social justice and visual culture, and connections between racial capitalism, ideas about art and aesthetics, and Western conceptions of modernity. Her work on these topics is indebted to Caribbean intellectual thought, Black Studies, and decolonial theory.
She is currently working on her first book project, based on her PhD dissertation, A Worldbuilding Moment: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts’ (Carifesta) Revolutionary Era, 1966-1981, the first academic monograph devoted to this sweeping cultural expression of the dream to unify a region divided by colonial empire. In addition to chapters and articles relating to Carifesta, she will soon publish an essay on a confluence of anticolonial protest, aesthetic theory, and artistic practice in Jamaica’s 1970.
Beyond her written scholarship, criticism, and public talks, she centers collaborative public history projects. Stemming from her research on Carifesta, she co-organized the three-day international symposium The Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts as Prism: 20th Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean (2022), which was held as part of the Guyana Cultural Association of New York, Inc.’s Annual Guyana Folk Festival. The symposium also launched the Digital Archive of Guyanese and Caribbean Festivals, Culture and Literature, an archival hub at the University of Guyana for materials from and oral histories of Carifesta and beyond. Rooney is also the co-founder and co-leader of the Racial Geography Project, a research collective of the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice at Rice University.
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Dissertation by Adrienne Rooney
Dissertation defended and submitted. Rice University, Houston, Texas, August 2023.
Book chapters by Adrienne Rooney
Talks by Adrienne Rooney
According to poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, the inaugural Carifesta—a 1972 gathering in Georgetown, Guyana, of hundreds of artists celebrating their multiple cultural heritages without precedent and without “foreign magistrates of taste or art”—was one of the most crucial events to have occurred in the region since Emancipation. A council of artists and writers envisioned the shape of the event and aimed to promote art standards based in myriad aesthetic traditions from, their report reads, the “multi-lingual Caribbean plantation culture.” This paper argues that Carifesta was envisaged as a process to redraw—for a mass, regional and diasporic audience—racialized cultural and architectural canons transplanted to and informed by the region during the reign of the colonial plantation. Through engaging contemporaneous theories by Sylvia Wynter and Brathwaite regarding the cultural lives of the enslaved and those of the New World Group and Tapia Group, the paper reads the council’s report as a call to “resurrect” unrecorded images and cultural production systemically omitted from stories of (Euro-)Caribbean aesthetics by those upholding what Wynter terms “plantation ideology.” By attending to the intertwined power of art and architecture, it makes a case that, at its start, Carifesta was a key technology to unmake a colonized Caribbean and build the region, together, anew.
When artists and writers who envisioned what became Carifesta recommended inviting creative workers from the “multi-lingual Caribbean plantation culture” to partake, they identified, I posit, the shared matrix of the plantation system and the kinships it created as a logic for uniting the region across imperial language boundaries. By spotlighting Afrodiasporic and neo-slave (visual) narratives, the early festivals crucially turned an eye to the plantation as a site of not only racialized, oppressive economic production but also cultural vitality. Working with Brathwaite and fellow Carifesta participant Sylvia Wynter’s coevolving eco-cultural theories locating (often through gardening/plant metaphors) the roots of Caribbean culture in the provision ground and innerplantation, this paper suggests that Carifesta’s early iterations bared and celebrated a thoroughly regional cultural groundwork whitewashed by colonial aesthetics and epistemology. I put forth that the festival’s roving (re)presentation, nurturing, and dissemination of cultural traditions that flourished out of and in spite of the plantation system formed a geography of repair grown from the racialized geography of the region.
Such was the discursive environment grounding my presentation which, informed by a circle of anticolonial thinkers grappling with the persistence of colonial-era racialized class and cultural norms after Independence, studies British colonial depictions of Jamaica and its inhabitants alongside paintings and sculptures by Jamaican “self-taught” artists including Everald Brown and Ras Dizzy. Working from early writings of anticolonial authors Wynter and (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite – who both reference, though do not fully theoretically engage, contemporaneous Rastafarian and Revivalist artists working in and around Kingston – I will read these artworks as foils to (neo)colonial modes of viewing under fire in the CAC protests and represented in colonial imagery. This presentation, based upon ongoing research for my doctoral dissertation, moreover, argues that their artwork contravened attendant ideologies that challenged the validity of certain ways of being and art-making.
Conference Presentations by Adrienne Rooney
Articles by Adrienne Rooney
Dissertation defended and submitted. Rice University, Houston, Texas, August 2023.
According to poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, the inaugural Carifesta—a 1972 gathering in Georgetown, Guyana, of hundreds of artists celebrating their multiple cultural heritages without precedent and without “foreign magistrates of taste or art”—was one of the most crucial events to have occurred in the region since Emancipation. A council of artists and writers envisioned the shape of the event and aimed to promote art standards based in myriad aesthetic traditions from, their report reads, the “multi-lingual Caribbean plantation culture.” This paper argues that Carifesta was envisaged as a process to redraw—for a mass, regional and diasporic audience—racialized cultural and architectural canons transplanted to and informed by the region during the reign of the colonial plantation. Through engaging contemporaneous theories by Sylvia Wynter and Brathwaite regarding the cultural lives of the enslaved and those of the New World Group and Tapia Group, the paper reads the council’s report as a call to “resurrect” unrecorded images and cultural production systemically omitted from stories of (Euro-)Caribbean aesthetics by those upholding what Wynter terms “plantation ideology.” By attending to the intertwined power of art and architecture, it makes a case that, at its start, Carifesta was a key technology to unmake a colonized Caribbean and build the region, together, anew.
When artists and writers who envisioned what became Carifesta recommended inviting creative workers from the “multi-lingual Caribbean plantation culture” to partake, they identified, I posit, the shared matrix of the plantation system and the kinships it created as a logic for uniting the region across imperial language boundaries. By spotlighting Afrodiasporic and neo-slave (visual) narratives, the early festivals crucially turned an eye to the plantation as a site of not only racialized, oppressive economic production but also cultural vitality. Working with Brathwaite and fellow Carifesta participant Sylvia Wynter’s coevolving eco-cultural theories locating (often through gardening/plant metaphors) the roots of Caribbean culture in the provision ground and innerplantation, this paper suggests that Carifesta’s early iterations bared and celebrated a thoroughly regional cultural groundwork whitewashed by colonial aesthetics and epistemology. I put forth that the festival’s roving (re)presentation, nurturing, and dissemination of cultural traditions that flourished out of and in spite of the plantation system formed a geography of repair grown from the racialized geography of the region.
Such was the discursive environment grounding my presentation which, informed by a circle of anticolonial thinkers grappling with the persistence of colonial-era racialized class and cultural norms after Independence, studies British colonial depictions of Jamaica and its inhabitants alongside paintings and sculptures by Jamaican “self-taught” artists including Everald Brown and Ras Dizzy. Working from early writings of anticolonial authors Wynter and (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite – who both reference, though do not fully theoretically engage, contemporaneous Rastafarian and Revivalist artists working in and around Kingston – I will read these artworks as foils to (neo)colonial modes of viewing under fire in the CAC protests and represented in colonial imagery. This presentation, based upon ongoing research for my doctoral dissertation, moreover, argues that their artwork contravened attendant ideologies that challenged the validity of certain ways of being and art-making.
Led by Fabiola López-Durán, Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History, and Adrienne Rooney, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, the collective of graduate and undergraduate activists and scholars research topics ranging from W.M. Rice’s relationship to the plantation economy, to the forest in southwest Louisiana owned by Rice-Land Lumber Company as covered in Cite 103, to the experiences of the first Black students, faculty, and staff at Rice. The collective’s ongoing efforts connect and make visible the ways in which the exclusionary practices and policies of the past and the resistance are embedded in our built environment, the very space where we continue to learn and work today. López-Durán and Rooney spoke with Cite’s former Editor Jack Murphy earlier this year.
Fifty years ago, the first Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), held in Guyana from August to September 1972, marked a significant and deliberate postcolonial moment that embodied the aspirations of a unified Caribbean. A brochure for the inaugural multidisciplinary and transnational festival stated that Carifesta would “depict the life of the people of the region—their heroes, morale, myth, traditions, beliefs, creativeness, ways of expression” and “stimulate and unite the cultural movement throughout the region.”
Carifesta ‘72 aspired to promote the cultural expressions of the multilingual region. The conceptualizers, who included celebrated poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, poet and activist Martin Carter, and artist Aubrey Williams, expected that the organizing body would craft a festival that embraced and celebrated the multiracial and multicultural heritage of the region despite the polarized national politics of the day. This meant, in theory, celebrating traditions rooted in the indigenous nations, West Africa, India, Indonesia, China, and Western Europe.
What transpired when the artists, dancers, musicians, writers, directors, filmmakers, and revelers from across the circum-Caribbean and beyond gathered to exchange ideas and idioms, ancestral stories, and contemporary engagements with tradition? What were the ripple effects of the Carifesta ‘72 event on the region’s (festival) culture, politics, and people? What legacies did it build upon or interrupt?
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the first Carifesta (as well as Carifesta XV in Antigua & Barbuda in 2022), we invite scholars, artists, Carifesta ‘72 participants, and the Guyanese and Caribbean diaspora to participate in a three-day virtual symposium organized in association with the Guyana Cultural Association of New York, Inc. as part of the 2022 Guyana Folk Festival...
A goal of this symposium is to bring scholars and Carifesta ‘72 participants together to exchange knowledge and to document this festival, which remains in personal and collective memories. We aim to collect physical materials and oral histories to facilitate the creation of a digital archive that could expand to embrace other regional festivals.