Chapter 2 begins with the Edinburgh Festival, traditionally understood to be the progenitor of the revival of festivals in the mid twentieth century. It examines the Edinburgh, Avignon, Adelaide, Luminato (Toronto) and other destination festivals and the international trade routes they constitute as having largely outlived their usefulness for anything other than city branding, and as consistently problematic in terms of their use and representation of 'otherness'. It also considers negative and positive examples of the types of show typically featured on the festival circuit (productions/adaptations of canonical work, dance, and international collaborations). The chapter then proposes alternative and evolving destination festival models as represented by the Festival TransAmérique, the 2020 New Zealand Festival of the Arts, the 2009 Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, the Interferences Theatre Festival, and the twenty-first-century iterations of Germany’s Theater der Welt. These festivals have more successfully served as sites for intercultural negotiation and exchange.

This chapter theorizes francophone international theatre festivals as sites of cultural struggle where aesthetic judgements are negotiated alongside political agendas via notions of human universalism and cultural difference. It explores how artists from France’s former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean navigate the festival circuit: how they are categorized and how they resist, subvert, benefit from, and transform festival structures. The first part focuses on the precarious positioning of post-colonial artists on Avignon’s mainstages. The second examines the festivals, in Limoges and New York, that played major roles in constructing an image of ‘Francophone theatre’, a term associated with non-French, often post-colonial, French-language playwrights. Lastly, a brief history of Aimé Césaire’s Festival of Fort-de-France, positioned in opposition to the presumed centrality of France, illuminates how this Caribbean-based festival repurposes French notions of republican universalism. It concludes by gesturing towards recent festivals as new models for cultural exchange that circumvent France to support works by African writers and foster civic participation.