Posts filed under 'free speech'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 15, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jiaoyang Li, José García Escobar, and Sofija Popovska

The latest in literary news from Central America, China, and North Macedonia!

This week, our editors-at-large take us around the world for updates on award-winning literature from Nicaragua and Guatemala; the blend of art and letters in recent events centering Chinese literature in translation; and a dedication to one of the most influential literary figures in Macedonia, the late Olivera Nikolova. 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, Reporting for Central America

Last month, Mexico’s FIL (Guadalajara International Book Fair) announced that the Guatemalan editor Raúl Figueroa Sarti will receive the inaugural Federico García Lorca Prize. The Premio Federico García Lorca a la Libertad de Expresión y Publicación is awarded to people or organizations that have promoted and protected freedom of speech across Latin America and Spain. Raúl Figueroa Sarti is the founder and director of F&G Editores, one of Guatemala’s and Central America’s most renowned publishing houses, and in 2021, he also won APP’s Freedom to Publish Award.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 7, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Charlie Ng, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in letters from Hong Kong, Palestine, and Kenya.

This week, our editors are reporting on the intersection between literature and social movements. In Hong Kong, writers reflect on the June 4 protests at Tiananmen Square, in light of  the continual tensions between China and the island. In Palestine, a new podcast features writers orienting their own work within the \ body of Palestinian literature. And in Kenya, the country mourns the loss of revolutionary playwright Micere Mugo. 

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Since the National Security Law in Hong Kong came into effect in June 2020, the annual candlelight vigil for commemorating the June Fourth Tiananmen Square protests have not been organized for four years; the event’s host, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, was also dissolved in September 2021. Additionally, the event’s traditional venue, the Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, was under renovation and not available to be booked this year.

Although public commemoration was forbidden, remembrance could still be possible through writing; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal called for short submissions of reflections written about June 4, 2023—which could be directly, indirectly, or even not related to the event. The project, “Just Another Day”, also welcomed written works accompanied with photos or artwork. Fifty-four submissions were published on Cha’s blog, presenting a wide range of reflections from local and overseas writers. Translator Lucas Klein contemplates on the protest culture in Hong Kong and what he witnessed outside of the Victoria Park in his post, while Hong Kong poet Jennifer Wong contributed a prose poem on the importance of memory. Asymptote’s assistant editor of fiction Michelle Suen interweaves childhood nostalgia and postcolonial politics in her reflection, and I also tell a brief story of my personal experience of June Fourth over the years. Varied as they are, the texts testify to the unstoppable impact of the historical event, in both people’s mind and reality.

Meanwhile, as issue 72 of local bilingual poetry magazine, Voice & Verse, was just published, the magazine is organizing a reading session in collaboration with Cha, a crossover that echoes the issue’s English section theme: “Crossings”. The reading session will take place on July 12, hosted by Tammy Ho and Matthew Cheng. Local and international contributors to both journals have been invited to read their works. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

September 30, 2016  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Beau Lowenstern, Nina Sparling, and Sohini Basak

The magazine was being “silenced not by direct attack or overt censorship but [by] the use of the arms of bureaucracy to paralyse its functioning.”

The first stop on our world tour takes us Down Under with Editor-at-Large Beau Lowenstern, who brings us the latest on book awards and the state of the arts industry in Australia. Switching hemispheres, we then join Blog Editor Nina Sparling in the US, where she has the update on must-see, Spanish-language author events and hot new publications. Then we’re off to Nepal where Social Media Manager Sohini Basak reports on everything from the shrinking freedom of the press to poetry slams.

Editor-at-Large Beau Lowenstern brings us the latest in lit from Australia:

Spring in Australia kicked off with the announcement of the winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award on the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival. The award, established in 1954, is Australia’s most prestigious literary honor and celebrates uniquely Australian works. A.S. Patrić won for his debut novel Black Rock White City, which explores the immigrant experience amidst the carnage of war and isolation.

The festival offered a full week of incredible events. Maxine Beneba Clarke, known as one of the boldest and most prolific literary voices in Australia today, opened the first night. Her forthcoming memoir, The Hate Race, frames topics like violence and racism in the Australia of her childhood and opens a dialogue much-needed today. The remainder of the festival saw contributions from such names as PJ Harvey, Geoff Dyer, Lionel Shriver, A.C. Grayling, Eimear McBride, and Lev Grossman, with special showcases on identity and feminist writing.

Literary festivals like those that take place each year in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide have increasingly become the backbone of the country’s literary community. Australian arts and literature have been the victims of significant budget cuts in recent years, with 2015 seeing a more than 20 percent reduction in funds to one of the nation’s leading arts organizations. Against this backdrop, it’s even more encouraging to see the positive response to such literary events and the vibrant cultural scene continuing to flourish in new ways.

Blog Editor Nina Sparling has the scoop from the United States:

This week in North America, as we stagger under the heavy weight of this contentious election season, writers, critics, and literary folks are celebrating Banned Books Week. It seems a fitting moment to focus on the voices of those courageous, innovative writers whose work has been censored, and to meditate on the political and cultural moments that produced their repression. In Washington, D.C., the public library system hid hundreds of copies of banned books in bookstores in a citywide scavenger hunt. The New York Public Library kept it digital with a multiple-choice quiz where readers can guess the reason for a book’s prohibition.

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The Belarus Free Theatre takes its highly politicized “Burning Doors” on the road

September 29, 2016  |  in Reviews  |  by Megan Bradshaw

In order to transmit the trauma experienced by Pavlensky, Sentsov, and Alyokhina, playwright Nicolai Khalezin also traumatizes the audience.

This hell-bent play by what The New York Times has called “[t]he world’s most visible and lionized underground theater” keeps finding ways to pull the rug from under the feet of astonished audiences. 

“It will not be his balls, but ours, behind the door,” a buffoonish technocrat rants to his doppelgänger, as the two leisurely defecate in their ministerial toilets, in unison. Moments later, the other one expounds on the evils of modern art: “Before Picasso, art was normal.” (As it turns out, he owns two of the deviant’s paintings.) When they finish shooting the shit, and shitting, they pull up their government-issued trousers to discover a lack of toilet paper. Following the pair’s exit, masked bandits inexplicably slip onto the stage to replenish the needed supplies in a sort of winking parenthetical—or, better still, a puckish middle finger.

These gag lines satirizing the absurdities and hypocrisies of dictatorships—specifically the Putin regime—are the sort of irreverent zingers that some of us relish: comedic relief with a reactionary backhand, using both shock and shtick to slice through inaction and fear. It’s a particular specialty of Burning Doors, performed by the UK-based Belarus Free Theatre, which celebrated its tenth anniversary last year despite being banned in its home country. Currently in the second staging of its UK tour at the Soho Theatre, one of London’s essential performing arts labs, the show is a wielding and warped montage of vignettes based on the testimonies of artists targeted by Putin. These include the Russian artist Petr Pavlensky, who nailed his own testicles, referenced above, to the cobblestones of Red Square; the Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is currently serving a twenty-year prison sentence in the Russian Far East; and the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina.

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