As the world slowly reopens to possibilities made anew by the subsiding of pandemic restrictions, our editors are bringing you the latest from a summer of potentialities. In Argentina, bookstores are spotlit for their role in creating cultural spaces and dialogues, and virtual stages take full opportunity of their wide reach. In Europe, a Belgian festival dedicated to avant-garde poetry is proceeding at full speed, and new and noteworthy publications are hitting the shelves. In Sri Lanka, annual literary forum New Ink debates the definitions and reach of their national literature. Our editors are here with the full scoop!
Allison Braden, assistant blog editor, reporting from Argentina
The Feria de Editores is now accepting entries for its Bookstore of the Year award; the organization, which will host its annual festival of independent publishers on October 1-3, seeks to recognize the work of booksellers throughout Argentina, acknowledging that their cultural and curatorial role goes far beyond merely selling books. The prize, open to all bookstores that have been open at least one year, will honor a shop whose leaders and employees have worked tirelessly to promote intercultural exchange both inside and outside its physical space. “Bookstores,” says the invitation to enter, “are a focal point for fostering local culture and connection to international thought.”
Bookstores in Argentina and beyond will soon stock commemorative editions of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, a book of profound influence on international thought about the legacy of exploitation in the region. Galeano, a journalist and novelist who hailed from across the Río de la Plata in Montevideo, Uruguay, published the work in 1971, when authoritarian regimes on the continent still held sway. The book was banned by some, and even Galeano eventually came to think of it as poorly researched and written, but it nevertheless became a leftist classic with enduring appeal: It’s been translated into more than a dozen languages and shot to number six on Amazon’s best-sellers list after Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a copy to U.S. President Barack Obama. In Argentina, the book’s fiftieth anniversary has provoked reflection on the relevance of Galeano’s thesis today.
Fundación Andreani, an organization that promotes cultural and educational programs to improve quality of life, and Universidad Nacional de las Artes joined forces this month to launch Paraísos Artificiales. Antología de poesía en la web (Artificial Paradises. Online poetry anthology). The series celebrates the web’s potential for creative freedom and brings attention to digital poetry and “technopoetics.” The first season, released this month and inaugurated with a virtual presentation, consists of three episodes, which focus on artists with various approaches to visual poetry: Rafaël Rozendaal, Ana María Uribe, and Belén Gache. The series is fuel for the Feria de Editores claim that cultural influence, especially in the age of Zoom, goes far beyond bookstore walls.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Europe
The potential (if debatable) upsides of the lockdown are starting to emerge as Europe—alongside its writers and artists—wakes up from the nightmare of this past year to both refreshing multicultural diversity and the ongoing threats of the Anthropocene. Past Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau released a three hundred and sixty-page collection of essays entitled The Nuclear History of Culture. Hermeneutic Quanta early this week concerning European and world literatures, cultures, and politics. In the book, the Sweden-based Romanian writer and academic travels with erudition and ingenuity across the “perils of Greek literature,” the “slang, pretentiousness, and merciless imagination” of French literature, while also putting together a “Spanish literary dictionary of improbabilities.”
As reflected by the inventiveness and more than a few formulations in the book, Nicolau is also an original performance poet, as is past contributor Iulia Militaru, who is recently featured (under her stage name Maia Șerbănescu) on an album titled Beyond the Static, authored simply by Various Artists which reunites—as the disc sleeve announces—writers and musicians from “Romania, Japan, the UK, the US, and the Ukraine.” In Europe’s capital, Brussels, where performance poets are also getting ready to take center stage soon at the Brussels Planetarium Poetry Fest—”fully devoted to contemporary avant-garde, in conversation with the mainstream”—the community is getting more and more involved in promoting books and reading. The 1 City 19 Books initiative, running from mid-June to mid-September highlights nineteen Flemish-speaking residents as “book ambassadors,” each of them recommending one book to the readers. Among them, British-Belgian Digital Humanities academic and Royal Library researcher Sally Chambers introduces De witte weduwe (The White Widow) by academic and writer Michael Kestemont, who explores the use of artificial intelligence in studying and even writing literature. Reading a scene taking place in a shisha bar (that actually exists) in Brussels made Chambers think of “the need people have for hugs and how in Belgium we may have one hugging contact [the “cuddly Moroccan” in the novel] to help us through this difficult time.” The reading ambassadors initiative is already so popular that a weekly show—featuring one ambassador at a time—began airing on BRUZZ TV last week.
Thirangie Jayatilake, Asymptote Journal Educational Arm, reporting from Sri Lanka
New Ink is a new forum that was created to engage in discussions regarding Sri Lankan literatur; in addition to panels on literature in Sri Lanka, New Ink pays a special interest to books published within the last year. In its second year, New Ink went online, running from June 4 to 6.
On a panel entitled “My vision for Sri Lankan writing,” three panellists were in attendance: Ameena Hussein, a Gratiaen Prize nominee and a publisher (of Perera-Hussein Publishing House); Mahesh Hapugoda, a professor at the Sabaragamuwa University in Sri Lanka; and Thakshala Tissera, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Tissera began with an open-ended question of what constitutes as Sri Lankan writing—does it refer to a particular dialect? To Sri Lanka as a national identity? To a broader reference to texts that are from Sri Lanka? To texts written by non-Sri Lankans like European historians that are based in Sri Lanka? To novels based in Sri Lanka that have been adapted into Sinhalese cinema? To writers based in Sri Lanka? To writer who write about Sri Lanka from abroad?
Tissera included Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient as an example of a novel that may be hard to define. The book, based in Italy, is the only novel written by a Sri Lankan to win the Booker Prize; with the prize money, Ondaatje established the Gratiaen Prize in 1992. This award is given annually to Sri Lankan writers, and has contributed significantly to Sri Lankan literature.
Tissera and Hapugoda touched on the theme of exoticism related to texts based in Sri Lanka, and that exoticism being used as a selling point to appeal to a global audience. Hussein and Tissera also discussed Sri Lankan writing from a publisher’s point of view; both highlighted that Sri Lanka has very few publishing houses and even few editorial services. As a publisher, Hussein noted that there were writers who were not willing to be edited. Tissera noted that there is an inequality of resources for local writers compared to writers abroad. She stated that writers abroad had access to wider audiences, bigger publishing houses, more prestigious MFA programs, residences, publicity, and exposure.
Hapugoda expressed his delight at students from rural communities showing more interest in writing and become writers over the last few years. However, Hussein also pointed out the lack of interest, funding, and encouragement from the government who has recently decided to cut down the intake of Advanced Level (high school diploma equivalent) humanities to 25%.
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