Festac ´77: The 2nd World Festival of Black Arts and Culture

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. 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 and edited by Ntone Edjabe and Akin Adesokan, this is the first publication to consider FESTAC in all its cultural-historic complexity, addressing the planetary scale of the event alongside the personal and artistic encounters it made possible. As the tenth title in Afterall's Exhibition Histories series and the third in Chimurenga's Chimurenga Library series, the book features a bespoke expanded format and design scheme, and gathers extensive unseen photographic and archival materials, interviews and new commissions. Text: Allioune Diop, Barkley Hendricks, Audrey Lorde, Dominique Malaquais, Marilyn Nance, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Betye Saar, Wole Soyinka (among others).