Hunter, “Director-General's Report on Visit to New Zealand” “Spelling Upset at Festival Preview,” Guardian. A group called the Wellington Anglo Maori Society performed in Trafalgar Square without the official sponsorship of the New Zealand government.
Examining the diverse interests assembled through the festival is essential to understanding the legacies of imperial power for more seemingly democratic frameworks of difference.ħ5 Although Hunter reported of Maori dancing that the “standard was rather poor and the presentation naïve,” he did want some representation. Governments sponsored representative cultural forms in response to domestic political circumstances and international economic needs, and against the imperial aesthetic hierarchies of the past. As a postimperial phenomenon, Commonwealth multiculturalism depended on the legibility of distinct national cultures assembled through an equitable framework.
This article examines the investments of individual nations in participating in this festival to argue for the transnational production of multiculturalism at the end of empire. Over three weeks, Britain hosted visual artists, musicians, dancers, poets, and writers representing national cultures, who together presented a diverse Commonwealth assembled in terms of egalitarian multiculturalism. The Commonwealth Arts Festival of 1965 was an important moment of postimperial reengagement.
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