Festac '77: 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture

"This book presents a staggering amount of information, vital to any researcher of African and diasporic cultures, as well as any interested in international art, music, and politics of the 1970s.” –Autumn Diaz, ARLIS/NA Reviews Early in 1977, thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the Black diaspora assembled in Lagos for FESTAC ’77, the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. The event came 11 years after the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar, and 8 years after the First Pan-African Cultural Festival was held in Tangiers. With a radically ambitious agenda underwritten by Nigeria’s newfound oil wealth, FESTAC ’77 would unfold as a complex, glorious and excessive culmination of a half-century of transatlantic and pan-Africanist cultural-political gatherings. Devised by Chimurenga magazine, this is the first publication to consider FESTAC in all its cultural-historic complexity, addressing the planetary scale of