Afleveringen
-
Ainehi Edoro (Brittle Paper) and Bhakti Shringarpure (Radical Books Collective) discuss about the controversial New York Times' "100 Best Books of the Century list." A grandiose list claiming to represent the world and a diversity of voices, it happens to have 66 books by American and primarily white writers and only two African books, four Asian books and only 13 translated works. Ainehi and Bhakti explore what this means for the representation of the last 25 years of publishing in English. Originally streamed on Instagram Live
They ask:
Why are lists so captivating yet controversial?
How do lists shape our understanding of literary excellence?
Why do only two African books make the list, and what does this say about cultural bias?
How are culture and politics deeply entwined?
What harm does such cultural erasure produce?
What does it mean to leave out the entire Arab and Middle Eastern world of literature?
How can we highlight more diverse voices in literature?
Ainehi Edoro is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches and researches on African literature, political theory, and literature in social media. Edoro is the founder and Editor of Brittle Paper (https://brittlepaper.com/), a leading online platform dedicated to African writing and literary culture.
Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and the creative director of Radical Books Collective.
-
In Love and War: Collective Memory and the Self is our fifth conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Samina Najmi, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Beverly Parayno and Veruska Cantelli.
Writing about war is often synonymous with writing about memory. Erasing narratives, stories and collective memory is the explicit agenda and the inevitable outcome of any war. And thus, writers counter, resist and seize back memory and along the way, shape the historical accounts of places and people that have experienced violence and trauma. The discussion explores the task of writers retrieving memories from war but through the double focus on gender and colonial pasts. They ask: what is the role of the imagination in writing against forgetfulness? How does form, style and aesthetics enter into the writing of trauma and violence? Where does imagination take you within the memory frame of your stories? How can imagination be a place to resist annihilation, how can imagination be a tool for liberation?
Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic U.S. literatures at California State University, Fresno. A scholar of race, gender, and war in U.S. literature, she has edited or coedited four volumes and authored critical essays on works by Naomi Shihab Nye, Brian Turner, and Nora Okja Keller that consider their engagement with war from a feminist perspective. Her article, “Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics,” appears in the Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (2016). Samina has also published over thirty creative nonfiction essays, which often meld memoir with political commentary. These essays appear in Warscapes, The Margins, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir “One Summer in Gaza” was reprinted recently in Doubleback Review, and her essay on Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation is forthcoming in The Markaz Review. Samina spent her childhood in England and grew up in Pakistan.
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah was born in Verona to a Somali father and an Italian mother. She grew up in Mogadishu but fled to Europe at the outbreak of the civil war. She is a writer, an oral historian and performer, and a teacher. She has published stories and poems in several anthologies, and in 2006 she won the Lingua Madre National Literary Prize. Her novel Madre piccola (2007) was awarded a Vittorini Prize and has been translated into English as Little Mother (Indiana University Press, 2011). Il Comandante del fiume was published by 66thand2nd in 2014.
Beverly Parayno is a second-generation Filipina raised in San Jose, California. She is the author of the short story collection WILDFLOWERS (PAWA Press, 2023), a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist and winner of a 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal. Parayno is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts. She serves on the board of the San Francisco-based literary arts nonprofit Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA) and the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland. Parayno lives in Cameron Park, California, where she co-facilitates the Cameron Park Library Writers Workshop.
Veruska Cantelli is Associate Professor in the Core Division at Champlain College. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo and also taught Comparative Literature at Queens College, CUNY with a focus on literature of war and women's autobiographies, particularly on non-western narratives of the self. She is the translator of Lettere Rivoluzionarie by Diane di Prima (2021), and the author of "The Dance of Bones: Tomioka Taeko's Stage of Reprobates" in Otherness: Essays and Studies (2021), "The Maternal Lineage: Orality and Language in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings" for the Journal of International Women's Studies (2017) as well as several articles and interviews for Warscapes magazine. She is the...
-
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
Poetry of Witness is our fourth conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Jehan Bseiso and Meg Arenberg.
What is the poet’s role in the event of the erasure of an entire people? Even as we deem certain acts of violence as “unspeakable” and “indescribable”? As the refrain “no words left” rings in our ears, many of us find ourselves seeking solace or sense from poetic language. Poetry and poets have long been understood (and also wilfully misunderstood) for the ability to deploy resistance to silence and to complicity. More than ever, words matter and words provide witness. Meg Arenberg will speak with poets Jehan Bseiso and Otonya J. Okot Bitek about their respective writing practice, their sense of poetry’s role in a violent world, the value of poetry in the face of numbing horrors, and their specific work putting words to the unspeakable in Palestine and Rwanda.
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet. Her 100 Days (University of Alberta 2016) a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Otoniya’s poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the 2017 National Magazine Awards for Poetry in Canada. Her poem “Gauntlet” was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and is the title of her most recent work, a chapbook with the same title from Nomados Press (2019). She is an assistant professor of Black Creativity at Queen’s University in Kingston, which occupies the lands of the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee people. Otoniya’s work has been published widely online, in print and in literary magazines.
Jehan Bseiso is a poet, researcher, and aid worker. Her poetry has been published on several online platforms. Her co-authored book I Remember My Name is the Palestine Book Awards winner in the creative category (2016). She is the co-editor of Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees (2019). Jehan has been working with Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders since 2008.
Meg Arenberg is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Humanities and the African Languages and Translation Program at the Africa Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University Bloomington in 2016. Prior to joining the Africa Institute, she completed postdoctoral research positions in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the African Humanities Colloquium at Princeton University. Arenberg is a scholar of 20th and 21st-century African literatures with particular research interests in intertextuality, Kiswahili poetics, translation studies, and digital media.
Buy the book: https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-feminism-writing-war
-
Wounds of War: Narrating Health and Healing is the third conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Zahra Moloo, Valerie Gruhn and Danielle Villasana.
War brings the experiences and stories of health, health workers and emergency medicine into sharp focus. When one speaks about the horrors of war, it is primarily a reference to the vulnerability of bodies that are being deliberately targeted for harm irrespective of whether these are civilians or military personnel. Legal frameworks exist to protect health workers and hospitals, and to prioritize the rights of the wounded and sick no matter what side of the hostilities they may be on. Yet, attacks on health workers and the destruction of hospitals make the practice of care incredibly difficult and only exacerbate precarity. Even outside of the space of the war zone, the practice of health and healing can be a fraught and embattled world where marginalized populations navigate hostile and unjust societal structures that are not designed to provide them with equitable care. This discussion explore the complex ways in which these experiences can be written about by addressing their own positionality as women and as insiders/outsiders, the challenges of bearing witness, and the traumas that arise from doing this work.
Zahra Moloo is a Kenyan investigative journalist, researcher, and documentary filmmaker. Her work focuses on biodiversity, the extractive industries and neoliberalism in Africa. She has published in Al Jazeera, BBC Focus on Africa, Jacobin, Africa is a Country, Project Syndicate, Warscapes magazine, IRIN News, and in the collection Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession (Zed Books, 2017). She currently works for the ETC Group and is directing a documentary on conservation in Central Africa. She holds a BA in History and Development Studies from McGill University and an MA in Broadcast Journalism from City University in London.
Valérie Gruhn is a clinician, humanitarian, public health specialist, and author with over a decade of experience in global health and humanitarian response. She began her career as a registered nurse. Valérie's humanitarian work spans continents, with significant contributions in the Middle East, East and Central Africa, and beyond. She has worked with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Iraq during the Mosul Battle, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the Ebola Outbreak, and in Chad, addressing nutrition and refugee emergencies, as well as in projects in Kenya and Yemen. Additionally, Valérie has contributed as an assistant researcher on projects investigating human rights violations during the Syrian War. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she played a pivotal role in the response in New York City. Her writings have been featured in various online magazines, and her piece "Mosul Journal" was notably selected for inclusion in the book compilation Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War. Her expertise and insights have been shared on platforms such as the Council on Foreign Relations and France-Atlanta. Valérie is dedicated to amplifying the voices of vulnerable populations through her advocacy and firsthand experiences.
Danielle Villasana is an independent photojournalist whose documentary work focuses on human rights, women, identity, displacement, and health around the world. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibits and has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, and The Washington Post, among others. She contributes to Redux and is a member of the groups Women Photograph and Diversify Photo. Her first photo book, A Light Inside, was published in 2018 by FotoEvidence. In 2019 she co-founded We, Women, an ongoing platform exploring crucial issues across the U.S. through photo-based community engagement projects by women, transgender, and
-
Gaslighting as Method and Ways to Resist It is the second conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Suzy Salamy, Suchitra Vijayan and Bhakti Shringarpure.
Gaslighting is a term used to describe the process by which a person is manipulated into questioning their own reality. Defined as a "conscious intent to brainwash," gaslighting is understood as occurring primarily in interpersonal situations of domestic abuse. Victims of gaslighting find themselves questioning their sense of reality as well as their memories; they experience high levels of anxiety and they may begin to lose trust and confidence in themselves. Gaslighting can happen in several different ways: denial, mockery, jokes and trivialization, withholding information, stereotyping, and repetitively countering observations and memories.
Without doubt, gaslighting becomes an important concept to understand the feelings, stories and experiences of women, queer, transgender and racialized individuals. As the #MeToo movement grew with hashtags such as #BelieveHer trending, many of the narratives pointed to victims being told for years that they had misread a situation or were overthinking flirtatious advances. Victims of gaslighting found themselves feeling increasingly guilty and wondering if they were responsible for having caused their own abuse and trauma. Increasingly, the phrase "structural gaslighting" has also come into use to explain the effect of ingrained, harmful stereotypes that refuse engagement with marginalized people and continually dismiss their views, beliefs and ideas. Those that challenge the status quo are deemed abnormal, as exaggerating the problem, and often as imagining things. Women are told to "lighten up;" Black women are told they are "too angry;" individuals wishing to emphasize their pronouns are deemed as pushy and petty; migrants are often accused of not trying hard enough to assimilate; the list of such harms is long and the effects of these societal and political abuses is manifold. This is a timely topic because many of us who are deeply concerned about the unfolding horrors in Palestine are being gaslit constantly not only in our own domestic and work environments but also on a broader level by the media and by politicians. Panelists will unpack gaslighting on interpersonal levels but also something that disproportionately affects marginalized individuals and communities, and will try to come up with clear ways to resist these structures and preserve one's self-confidence, moral compass. and belief systems.
Suzy Salamy is a social worker and a filmmaker. She has an extensive history of working in the television and film world and has worked on several award-winning documentaries about the Middle East. Suzy has worked at the NYC Anti-Violence Project providing crisis intervention, counseling, and advocacy to LGBTQ and HIV affected survivors of violence. She received her B.A. in film from Bard College and Masters in Social Work from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, CUNY.
Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer and activist. She is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project. For her first book, The Midnight's Border: A People's History of India, Suchitra traveled across the 9000-mile Indian border. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is the co-author of How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (2023) which offers a lens into today's India through
-
Unlearning War in the Classroom is our first conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Sherry Zane, Veruska Cantelli and Bhakti Shringarpure.
Wars, conflict and histories of violence have been continually framed as binary narratives between winners and losers, nation and non-nations, and armies and non-armies. Additionally, in a saturated media landscape, violence and war is often represented as a form of entertainment and this generates a numbness about suffering, pain as well as the psychological and material costs of loss. Prevalent narratives of neutrality, both-sideism and objectivity can legitimize violence towards certain groups of people. Panelists with extensive teaching experience discuss ways in which war can be unlearned in the classroom and disrupt existing ways of producing knowledge about war.
Sherry Zane is a Professor in Residence and the Director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her main research interests include the history of gender, race, sexuality, and U.S. national security. She is the author of, “’I did it for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919-1921” in the New England Quarterly (2018). She is currently researching art activism in Belfast in Northern Ireland and also working on a feminist pedagogical project to make classroom experiences more inclusive.
Veruska Cantelli is Associate Professor in the Core Division at Champlain College. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo and also taught Comparative Literature at Queens College, CUNY with a focus on literature of war and women's autobiographies, particularly on non-western narratives of the self. She is the translator of Lettere Rivoluzionarie by Diane di Prima (2021), and the author of "The Dance of Bones: Tomioka Taeko's Stage of Reprobates" in Otherness: Essays and Studies (2021), "The Maternal Lineage: Orality and Language in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings" for the Journal of International Women's Studies (2017) as well as several articles and interviews for Warscapes magazine. She is the co-editor of Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (UpSet Press) and Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press).
Bhakti Shringarpure is an Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has taught at Hunter College (CUNY), Baruch College (CUNY), Stern College for Women, and the University of Nairobi. She is the co-founder of Warscapes magazine which transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, a multi-faceted community building project that creates an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. Bhakti is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017) Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018), Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023).
Buy the book here: https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-feminism-writing-war
-
Amrita Ghosh talks to Kashmiri scholar and academic Hafsa Kanjwal her new book Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (2023). The episode presents Kashmir and its long conflict in a new narrative. Kanjwal resets the usual ways of understanding Kashmir’s past and looks at the immediate postcolonial years of 1950s and 1960s in which Kashmir was slowly integrated into India with various nation-building strategies. Kanjwal questions binary terms like colonial and postcolonial, and offers a way of rethinking the Partition as the dominant trope for understanding the conflict in Kashmir. She talks about the ways through which an idea of Kashmir was presented within frameworks of statist integration politics through film, tourism, pamphlets, the use of emotionality and affect, and through racial connotations of a Kashmiri identity. Ghosh and Kanjwal discuss the representation of Kashmir within contemporary cultural productions and the recent slew of Bollywood films and online series that are once again deploying Kashmir to erase and reframe conflict in specific ways.
Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023)
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.
-
In our 12th episode of Radical Publishing Futures, Nadine El-Hadi, senior acquisitions editor at Hoopoe Fiction joins Meg Arenberg from her office near Tahrir Square in Cairo. The discussion focuses on the special position of Hoopoe and the American University in Cairo Press as a pioneering publisher of Arabic literature in English translation that is also located in the Middle East North Africa region itself. The speak about the particular opportunities and challenges of publishing primarily translations, and the burden of shifting narratives of Arab culture and Islam that predominate in the West. Nadine also talks about the growing worldwide audience for translated literary fiction that has buoyed Hoopoe in its early years as a separate imprint of AUC Press, literary culture in Egypt, and the various paths by which a novel in Arabic ends up as an English title on Hoopoe’s list. The two discuss the stunning new translation of Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni’s latest novel, The Night Will Have its Say, which retells the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa, among other recent titles published at Hoopoe.
Nadine El-Hadi is senior acquisitions editor at American University in Cairo Press. She runs both the press’s Arabic Language Learning List as well as its fiction imprint, Hoopoe Press.
-
Novelist, essayist and master trilogist Nuruddin Farah is one of the most important contemporary authors working today. In a writing career that spans more than five decades, Farah has published thirteen novels, dozens of essays and plays, all of which critically engage various dimensions of Somali history, culture and politics. Farah wrote his first novel From a Crooked Rib in 1970 and has not looked back since and has since penned three trilogies: Variations on the Theme of African Dictatorship, the Blood in the Sun trilogy and then the Past Imperfect trilogy. He has famously declared that he writes about Somalia to “keep it alive” because, he says, “I live Somalia, I eat it, smell the death of it, the dust, daily.”
Farah is the winner of the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, Lettre Ulysses Award, Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Premio Cavour and St. Malo Literature Festival Prize, among others. In this conversation, writer and editor Bhakti Shringarpure of the Radical Books collective speaks with Farah about his life, his prolific writing career, his penchant for stylistic experimentation and what it means to be a writer whose works become representative of a country and its people, both in Somalia and abroad.
This conversation was hosted by Melahuset in Oslo (Norway) on September 28, 2023 to a live audience.
-
Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano joins guest host Greg Pierrot for the 10th episode of our Trailblazing African Feminists series. Miano was born in Doula, Cameroon and lived in France from 1991. She studied American literature at Nanterre university and this led her to African American and Caribbean writers that considerably influenced her work. She is the author of 16 books and the winner of prestigious awards such as as the Goncourt des Lycéens, Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique Noire, Femina Prize, Grand Prix du Roman Métis, the latter both for Season of the Shadow, translated into English by Seagull Books (India).
Miano is an important literary and media figure in Cameroon and France, and is known for her provocative feminist and anticolonial ideas and for her exploration and embrace of the concept of the Afropean identity. In this podcast, Miano tells the story of how she became a writer and speaks of her interest in the question of African origins for black communities in the Americas and Europe. She also touches upon the issue of belonging for Africans abroad, all of which are recurrent topics in her fiction and essays. Pierrot and Miano discuss the freedoms and limits of terms such as Afropean, Francophonie and contending with a glossary of Black identities.
Greg Pierrot is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut (Stamford) and the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture and Decolonize Hipsters.
-
Radical Publishing Futures returns with a conversation between Meg Arenberg and director of Feminist Press Margot Atwell. Margot offers some perspective on the pioneering role of the Feminist press and its interdisciplinary journal WSQ, not only for radical independent publishing in the US but for women and gender studies as an academic field, as well as its ongoing relationship with the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Meg and Margot also discuss the affinities between roller derby and feminist publishing, the special joys of working collaboratively with a small staff where everyone is involved in the acquisitions and editing processes, accessibility tools, and the work of building community with readers and indie bookstores alike.
Margot Atwell is a writer, editor, publisher, and community funding expert and before taking on the executive director role at Feminist Press just over a year ago, she directed publishing at Kickstarter and also worked previously at the independent publisher Beaufort Books, and founded and ran the micropress Gutpunch. Margot is the coauthor of The Insider’s Guide to Book Publishing Success (from Beaufort Books) and Derby Life: A Crash Course in the Incredible Sport of Roller Derby (from Gutpunch Press).
Meg Arenberg is the managing editor for the Radical Books Collective.
-
In the third episode of Color of Publishing, we focus on publishing perspectives from the United Kingdom with two prolific editors and writers, Margaret Busby and Ellah P. Wakatama. Host Bhakti Shringarpure engages the two experts in a wide-ranging conversation about the history of publishing in the UK, questions of diversity and representation, book acquisitions, taste and culture-making, and structural racism. Busby and Wakatama have been witness to the long arc of how publishing has evolved and they speak about the transformations they have witnessed in the business over the years but they also recall the times when diversity was almost non-existent. They are keen to celebrate the successes and the changes taking place in UK publishing as there are more opportunities now for Black, Asian and international writers. However, even as prizes, festivals and book advances grow, they worry whether the shift can be sustained. Busby and Wakatama also acknowledge the importance of camaraderie and shared mission between each other as Black women in publishing over the years .
Margaret Busby is a Ghanaian born writer, editor and broadcaster. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she co-founded the publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She has edited the Daughters of Africa anthology and the second New Daughters of Africa anthology. She was awarded the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement award in 2021 and the CBE, and she is a member of The Royal Society of Literature. She was appointed the president of English PEN in 2023.
Ellah P. Wakatama was born in Zimbabwe, educated in the US and has been a London-based writer and editor for the past many years. She is editor-at-large at Canongate Books and chair of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She has edited several anthologies and has contributed to several of them as well. She was given an OBE for services to the publishing industry in 2011, and New African Magazine also named her one of “100 Most Influential Africans” in 2016.
-
In the second episode of Color of Publishing, we focus on publishing perspectives from and about the United States with Elizabeth Méndez Berry (One World Books) and Porscha Burke (Random House). Host Bhakti Shringarpure engages the two experts in a wide-ranging conversation about book acquisitions, editorial processes, taste and culture-making, equity, and structural racism as it impacts the publishing industry and the book market. Méndez Berry and Burke speak openly about what brought them to publishing and the challenges they encountered in the industry with regards to race as well as gender. PEN America’s scathing report Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing has “found deep and persistent obstacles to bringing more titles by authors of color to commercial success” and that 95% of books published in the United States from 1950 to 2018 were written by white authors. Employees as well as senior level positions in the publishing industry remain disproportionately white. Méndez Berry and Burke take listeners through the many invisible stages of book production (acquisitions, book deals, editorial, cover design, promotions, distribution and marketing) and the obstacles encountered by writers of color at every stage. Méndez Berry cautions that when “we primarily publish books by white authors, the number of stories that we’re avoiding or suppressing is significant.” Burke speaks about her career as service-oriented in order to transform publishing and create space for diverse authors and diverse stories.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry is Vice President and Executive Editor of One World, an imprint of Random House in New York. She is an award-winning writer and editor who writes about culture, gender, criminal justice and politics, and has also co-founded several philanthropic institutes.
Porscha Burke has revolutionized publishing in her fifteen years at Random House. She has worked with authors such as Maya Angelou and Reverend Amy Butler, and has led the publication of new editions of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Black Book that were originally edited by Toni Morrison. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College, where she currently teaches book proposal writing.
-
On October 17th 2022, PEN America published a report titled “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity and Book Publishing” with the goal to expose and explore the fact that the publishing industry has “entered a moment of moral urgency about the persistent lack of racial and ethnic diversity among employees and authors.” In our three-part series focused on this crisis in publishing, we debrief listeners on this report and gather perspectives from publishing professionals in the United States (Elizabeth Méndez Berry & Porsche Burke) and the United Kingdom (Margaret Busby & Ellah P. Wakatama). In this episode, Bhakti Shringarpure and Suchitra Vijayan break down the PEN America report section by section while also revealing the industry’s problematic practices and bad habits through their own experiences.
The report is divided into 5 parts. The first section offers a snapshot of the transitions taking place in the industry, and the crisis around racism and diversity exposed and expressed due to the uprisings for Black lives that began in 2020. The second section addresses the lack of diversity among the staff, editors and executives in the publishing world which then limits the types of books being acquired, produced and sold. In this long section, there are shocking revelations about hostile work environments, reported micro-aggressions, and the practice of typecasting editors and authors of color. The third section tackles pervasive prejudices such as “diverse books don’t sell” or that certain communities of color “don’t read” or the notion that one book per community of color is “enough.” Writers of color are trapped because they “are not only damned if they tell stories that white gatekeepers wrongly believe they've already read—they're also damned if they don't tell stereotypical stories that white publishers actually have already read and expect.” The fourth and fifth sections deal with questions of sales, marketing and promotion practices that continually disadvantage authors of color.
Bhakti Shringarpure and Suchitra Vijayan are both writers and co-founded the Radical Books Collective.
Read the PEN America report: https://pen.org/report/race-equity-and-book-publishing/
Other links:
#PublishingPaidMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PublishingPaidMe
#WeNeedDiverseBooks https://diversebooks.org/
Archive Editor Erin Overby's thread on racism at the New Yorker: https://twitter.com/erinoverbey/status/1437767832159277058
-
A quirky episode on ghosts, hauntings and horror on this week’s Mehfil. Two women writers from India and Pakistan interrogate ghostly encounters and how to write about them. Host Amrita Ghosh welcomes Jessica Faleiro from Goa (India) and Sehyr Mirza from Lahore (Pakistan) to explore the writing of ghosts, hauntings and horror on a personal level as well as with regards to collective traumas such as the Partition or colonial histories. The writers speak of childhood experiences with haunted houses, ghostly sightings and collective psychosomatic experiences. They reflect on whether stories of paranormal afterlives create narratives of resistance in the present. Faleiro speaks about her “real” ghostly experience in her grandmother’s ancestral house that sent her off on a journey to write about these topics. Mirza also recalls her grandmother's poignant and moving tales from before the Partition as well as horrifying stories during the period of Partition that inspired Mirza to write. Both writers discuss the rich repertoire of the horror genre within the South Asian context starting with the simple traditions of families and friends gathering around to narrate spooky stories.
Ghosh asks the writers about their books. Faleiro’s book Afterlife: Ghost Stories from Goa excavates Goa’s rich history by weaving in the Spanish Inquisition and Portuguese colonialism through paranormal encounters set within the present. Mirza talks about her edited anthology titled The Other in the Mirror: Stories from India and Pakistan in which she takes on the ghost of the Partition that continues to haunt people and that still creates fear of the “other" by continuing to maintain borders and divisions. She also speaks of her own story within that collection, one that instrumentalizes haunting for political symbolism. Faleiro and Mirza also point to new trends in literature and films within the horror genre in India and Pakistan and the possibilities opened up by the rise of digital media. Lastly, the conversations moves to ask if scary stories set us free from our fears or whether they simply serve to make us more afraid.
Jessica Faleiro’s fiction, poetry, essays and travel pieces have been published in Asia Literary Review, Forbes, Indian Quarterly, IndiaCurrents, Coldnoon, Joao Roque Literary Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Muse India and the Times of India as well as in various anthologies. Her first book Afterlife: Ghost stories from Goa (2012) is about a Goan family and their ‘ghostly’ encounters and her second book The Delicate Balance of Little Lives (2018) is a collection of interlinked stories about five middle-class Goan women trying to cope with loss. She won the Joao Roque Literary Award ‘Best in Fiction 2017 for her short story ‘Unmatched.’ Faleiro is currently the Commissioning Editor for the Joao Roque Literary Journal. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Kingston University, UK, talks about creativity, and runs creative writing workshops.
Sehyr Mirza is a journalist and creative writer based in Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in The BBC, Deutsche Welle, Dawn, The News International, Outlook India, Huffington Post, The Wire, Pakistan Today and other outlets. She is the editor of an anthology titled The Other in the Mirror: Stories from India and Pakistan published by Yoda Press in India and Folio Books in Pakistan. Mirza has also received fellowships at Atlantic Council, Washington DC, The Swedish Institute and she has been a visiting fellow at Rajeev Circle Fellowship, San Francisco. She was the recipient of Women Waging Peace Award by Kroc Institute for International Peace and Justice in 2019 and holds a degree in English Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore
-
This Mehfil explores the exciting world of South Asian translation especially the regional and vernacular literature that has lately been garnering international attention and winning prestigious awards. In Translating South Asia, host Amrita Ghosh talks to two renowned translators from the neighboring countries of India and Bangladesh. The conversation is not only about translations from Bengali to English but also the reverse, and how it plays out in the publishing world in the subcontinent. Arunava Sinha and Shabnam Nadiya take us on their journey into how they began translating and how it became a vocation. They speak about their first books of translation and their initial experiences and challenges in the process. They also discuss how the translation scene has changed writing, publishing and readership on the Subcontinent, spaces that were initially reserved for Anglophone works. Nadiya talks about her latest translation of Shaheen Akhtar’s rich novel, Shokhi Rongomela into Beloved Rongomela and the challenges she faced, along with some of the decisions she made during the intricate process of creating a Bengali worldview for the Anglophone readership. Ghosh talks to Sinha about his translation of the epic novel Dozakhnama by Rabisankar Bal and the challenges of translating an original consisting of multiple language presences such as Urdu and Bengali. In a rich conversation, the writers also discuss the space of politics within translation, the publishing industry and the importance and the limits of adhering to a political position within a work. The episode ends with Ghosh putting both writers to a quick translation test of the word and concept of “Mehfil!”
Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator based in California. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was awarded the Steinbeck Fellowship (2019); a PEN/Heim Translation Grant (2020); and the 2019 Himal Southasian Short Story Prize. Her work has been published in Joyland, Asymptote, Flash Fiction International, Al Jazeera Online, Pank, Amazon’s Day One, Chicago Quarterly Review, Wasafiri, Words Without Borders, and Gulf Coast. Nadiya’s translations include Leesa Gazi’s novel Hellfire (Eka/Westland, September, 2020), Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary (Bengal Lights Books, 2016; Seagull Books, 2018) and Shaheen Akhtar’s novel Beloved Rongomala, 2022).
Arunava Sinha is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. He translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English, and from English into Bengali. Over fifty of his translations have been published so far. He has conducted translation workshops at the British Centre for Literary Translation, UEA; University of Chicago; Dhaka Translation Centre; and Jadavpur University. Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation. His research interests are focused on the translation of fiction, non-fiction and poetry between the languages of India, including English.
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.
To inaugurate our Mehfil which means a celebratory gathering in Urdu, we asked Uday Bansal to compose a small poem for us. It was read out by Amrita Ghosh at the start of the program.
Tumhaari taal se betaal / Duniya tumhaari shaunq se ghafil
-
An exploration of the ways in which caste structures are rigidly enforced when it comes to food, water, eating and drinking in India. Food is usually seen as celebratory, as a source of cultural pride and as a symbol of nostalgia but today's Mehfil cuts through these ideas to foreground the pain that food, eating rituals, and culinary and gastronomic traditions can wreak upon Dalit communities. The oppressive caste system in India is one of the most enduring, violent and pervasive forms of apartheid and segregation, and food is a potent instrument for furthering this violence and discrimination
Our guests Rajyashri Goody and Ari Gautier discuss this tenuous and complex relationship between caste and cuisine. Goody reminds us of the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha in Maharashtra when B.R Ambedkar led a resistance movement to initiate Dalit people to exercise a basic gesture– drink water from the Mahad water tank that was barred for usage for those who did not belong to upper castes. Gautier speaks from personal experience and shares memories of living along caste lines in the city of Pondicherry, where it was neither possible to drink water in the upper caste neighbor's house nor drink their water. Goody talks about her art, family stories, and her creation of Dalit recipe books, and argues that we must think about the act of writing and access to technology as necessities for documenting recipes, a right that has been historically denied to the Dalit community. Gautier brings up the specifics of religion and how this shapes Dalit cuisine, his mixed heritage, and constructing fiction that can go beyond essentialized and exoticized understandings of Dalit cuisine. Goody and Gautier reflect on how food and water also create formations of haptic and mnemonic codes, prejudices and sharing of public spaces that dangerously enable ideas of tainting and purity within the nation-state. Host Amrita Ghosh asks the guests about the historical trajectories of Dalit cuisine and also urges the guests to share moments of joy around food or certain beloved foods.
Rajyashri Goody is an artist from Pune, India and based in Holland. Her art and installations explore everyday and historic instances of Dalit resistance. She is interested in creating space and time for thinking through these themes, and incorporates reading, writing, ceramics, photography, printmaking, and installation in the hope that these mediums enable further conversations about caste and hierarchies. Goody is currently an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.
Ari Gautier is a French writer and poet of Indo-Malagasy origin. Carnet Secret de Lakshmi and The Thinnai are his two first works on the history of Pondicherry where he spent his childhood. His most recent publication is Nocturne Pondichéry, a collection of short stories on postcolonial Pondicherry. He currently lives in Oslo.
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.
To inaugurate our Mehfil which means a celebratory gathering in Urdu, we asked Uday Bansal to compose a small poem for us. It was read out...
-
Indian popular cinema known as Bollywood has always been a dominant symbol of the nation. It constructs and legitimizes ideas of traditions, cultures and ethos, and most importantly, solidifies who gets to be Indian and who does not. In this episode, Amrita Ghosh welcomes Hussain Haidry and Alka Kurian to her mehfil to talk about a different India, one that we see represented in small, alternative and subversive cinema, and one that demands that we dismantle the politics of inclusion and exclusion that dominates Bollywood blockbusters today. Hussain Haidry, a screenwriter and film scholar Alka Kurian talk about our current moment as Bollywood and Indian cultural productions are having a huge resurgence in the West and what it means for Indian entertainment, hegemonic politics within India, and in the diaspora. The discussion focuses on the popularity of films like RRR and Pathaan, two huge blockbusters, as well as questions of spectatorship and the timing of such films in our post-pandemic landscape. Both introduce us to exciting new films that might be under the radar but are edgier in content, have very different kinds of protagonists, and showcase stories that depart from the usual style and content of populist films. These include fits such as Kayo Kayo Colour by Shahrukhkhan Chavada, Sir by Rohena Gera, Fandry by Nagraj Manjule and women-centric films by Alankrita Shrivastava. This is an in-depth conversation about the politics of marginalization in Bollywood today as well as the growing risks involved in filmmaking in India.
Hussain Haidry is a poet, lyricist, and screenwriter. He worked as a Head of Finance in a healthcare company in Kolkata, and moved to Mumbai to become a full-time writer. He started his career by performing spoken word poetry, and has written lyrics for the films Qarib Qarib Single, Mukkabaaz, Taish, Kadak, Sherni, Dobaara; and web series like Yeh Meri Family, and Tripling. As a screenwriter, he has co-written the Amazon web series, Laakhon Mein Ek (Season Two), and a short film on Netflix, titled Madhyaantar in the anthology series Ankahi Kahaaniyaan. Originally from Indore, he was catapulted to fame with his poem “Hindustani Musalmaan” (Indian Muslim) that went viral on the Internet.
Alka Kurian is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of Washington Bothell, where she teaches gender studies, literature, film and human rights. She is the author of Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas and a co-editor of New Feminisms in South Asia: Disrupting the Discourse Through Social Media, Film and Literature. She is a recipient of the 2020-2021 Fulbright US Scholar award to Morocco for research on fourth wave feminism. She hosts the South Asian Films And Books podcast.
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.
To inaugurate our Mehfil which means a celebratory gathering in Urdu, we asked Uday Bansal to compose a small poem for us. It was read out by Amrita Ghosh at the start of the program.
Tumhaari taal se betaal / Duniya tumhaari shaunq se ghafil hai / Taqaluf Chhod bhi do / Aao yeh tumhaari hi mehfil hai
This roughly translates as "cast off your inhibitions and come join our celebrations."
We want to thank Bansal who writes poetry in Hindustani, the confluence of Hindi and Urdu. Bansal has performed at the world's largest Urdu...
-
Themes of food in literature inspire questions of resistance, cultural memory, gender and identity. This episode titled Khayali Pulao: On Food Writing touches upon food and food politics in Indian writing. Here, it is not merely a marker of identity, but can be a source of joy as well as pain and alienation. Writers Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Sumana Roy discuss the ways in which food operates to construct nostalgia and to evoke historical and individual memory. Along the way, it can also expose class, caste and gender divides in society. It may mean coming together as family and sharing bonds of sisterhood but fictions about food can also express hunger, poverty, displacement and subsequent marginalization. Roy reads the poem "The Astonishing Smell of Rice" by Birendra Chattopadhyayon which is about hunger and how the refrain is a reminder of circadian rhythms broken by hunger pangs. Divakaruni’s writings use food as symbols of diasporic identity and even feminist solidarity. She argues that food can bring about an ethos of feminist empowerment and sisterhood beyond the stereotypes of gender. Both writers come together to engage food in Indian writing across various registers. They highlight the significance of “eating cultures” and also reveal their favorite foods and what they like to cook!
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program. Divakaruni started out as a poet and her poetry collections include Black Candle and Leaving Yuba City. Her first collection of stories Arranged Marriage won an American Book Award and a PEN Josephine Miles Award. Her novels include The Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Queen of Dreams, One Amazing Thing, Palace of Illusions, Oleander Girl and Before We Visit the Goddess. She has also written a young adult fantasy series called The Brotherhood of the Conch which is located in India and draws on the culture and folklore of that region. Divakaruni's work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in anthologies including the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her fiction has been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Indonesian, Bengali, Turkish and Japanese. Divakaruni's novel The Mistress of Spices was made into film of the same name in 2005 starring Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai. and her novel Sister of my Heart was made into a television series by Suhasini Maniratnam in Tamil and aired in India, as Anbulla Snegithiye (Loving Friend).
Sumana Roy is an Indian writer and poet. Her works include How I Became a Tree (2017), a work of non-fiction; Missing (2019), a novel; Out of Syllabus (2019), a collection of poems; and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories (2019), a short story collection. Her unpublished novel Love in the Chicken's Neck was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize (2008). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal On Eating : A Multilingual Journal of Food and Eating. Her first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, was shortlisted for the 2017 Shakti Bhatt Prize. Roy is from Siliguri, a city in Darjeeling district of West Bengal. She writes a monthly column, Treelogy, in The Hindu about plant life. Her poems and essays are published in Granta, The Caravan, Guernica Himal Southasian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, American Book Review, The White Review, Journal of South Asian Studies, and Journal of Life Writing. She is currently an Associate Professor at Ashoka University.
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing
-
India’s borders and borderlands have been marked by conflict since its independence from the British in 1947. Kashmir and the Northeast regions of India along with many forgotten enclave areas have been witness to relentless violence that have upended lives for several decades. How does literature from these war zones represent the conflict and people’s experiences? More specifically, how do writers narrativize the conflict and write about violence? Mirza Waheed from the world’s most militarized zone of Kashmir and Aruni Kashyap from Assam in Northeast India have lived through conflicts, and their work has been deeply shaped by these experiences. Their writings in the form of fiction, essay and poetry present a glimpse of life under duress and military occupation. In this episode, they discuss the imperative to write about Kashmir and Assam, the problems and challenges they have faced while writing about these difficult topics as well as their experiences in the publishing industry. Mirza and Kashyap speak about pressing questions about how to write violence and the limits of such writing. They discuss questions of representation that are vital literary and visual discourses of these two volatile regions. In the case of Kashmir, the representational pitfalls have always been associated with exoticizing the space in films and statist discourses. The Northeast is doubly vilified, first as a conflict space and then as a subject of heavily discriminatory narratives about its people. How do writers write to subvert nationalist and statist narratives that have saturated the discussions on such conflictual spaces? Amrita Ghosh talks to Waheed and Kashyap on this Mehfil as they reflect the anguish and pain of people caught in a cycle of violence.
Mirza Waheed is a writer and journalist from Kashmir and based in the UK. His debut novel The Collaborator was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Collaborator is about life in Kashmir under militarization and violence and it was also the book of the year awarded by The Telegraph, Telegraph India, Financial Times and New Statesman. Waheed is also the author of Book of Gold Leaves and Tell her Everything. The Book of Gold Leaves was shortlisted for the DSC prize for South Asian Literature. Waheed has published articles in the New York Times, Guardian, BBC and Al Jazeera English, among others.
Aruni Kashyap is a writer and translator from Assam, India and Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Georgia. His recent works include a story collection, His Father’s Disease and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he has also translated two novels from Assamese to English, published by Zubaan Books and Penguin Random House. His poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. Kashyap’s short stories have appeared in many journals and literary magazines.
Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.
To inaugurate our Mehfil which means a celebratory gathering in Urdu, we asked Uday Bansal to compose a small poem for us. It was read out by...
- Laat meer zien
