Organisation : Laetitia Zecchini , Rachel Potter, Peter D. McDonald

One in a series of events marking the centenary of the world’s oldest and most prominent writers’ organisation, this two-day workshop reflects on PEN’s role in the history of literary activism, internationalism, and human rights. Bringing together researchers and writers, archival evidence and lived experience, it aims to address a range of questions about PEN’s past, present, and future. How has it worked to define legal, political, and cultural understandings of rights, particularly the right to free expression? What were, and are, the tensions between national centres and the universalist aspirations informing its international charters? What kind of literary activism did and does PEN practise and how has it intervened in debates about censorship, free expression, and linguistic rights within and beyond state structures? And, not least, what significance has it had for writers facing terror, repression, and worse

Enregistrement obligatoire. Voir lien suivant, avec le programme complet:

https://torch.ox.ac.uk/event/opening-the-pen-archive-1921-2021-0

Friday, 4 February 2022, 2pm to 6.30pm (UK time)

2pm: Welcome from Professor Rachel Potter (UEA)

2.10pm: Materials and Methods:

Rachel Potter: Literary Organisations/Literary Histories

Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS, Paris): Postcolonial/World Studies

Peter McDonald (St Hugh’s College, Oxford): Literature/Politics

3pm: Break

3.30pm: Notes from the centenary archive:

Katie Cooper (UEA): A Spiritual Centre: PEN, Refugees and Writers in Exile.

Kate Highman (University of Cape Town, South Africa): The Sticky Question of What is a Writer: PEN in South Africa.

Hyei Jin Kim (Oxford): The Literature of Peoples Whose Language Restricts Wide Recognition: PEN’s Collaboration with UNESCO in the 1950s.

Michelle Kelly (Oxford): Lists, Letters, and Empty Chairs: The Presence of the Imprisoned Writer in PEN.

Chinmay Sharma (Shiv Nadar University, India): Decolonisation, writers’ organizations, and world literature: All-India PEN, cultural bureaucracies, and the conceptualisation of world literature.

5pm: Break

5.30pm: Tsitsi Dangarembga in conversation with Elleke Boehmer (Oxford).

6pm: End

Saturday, 5 February 2022, 2pm to 6pm (UK time)

2pm: Laetitia Zecchini in conversation with Perumal Murugan (translation by Nandini Krishnan).

3pm: Peter McDonald in conversation with Noo Saro-Wiwa.

4pm: Break

4.30pm: Rachel Potter in conversation with Margaret Atwood.

6pm: End

Axes thématiques : Approches historiques des modernités littéraires et artistiques, Dynamiques interculturelles, Politiques des littératures et des arts : enjeux et situations

Programmes de recherche : AHRC (2017-2021) "The Impact of non-governmental writers’ organisations on free expression"

Mots-clés : Littérature, Littératures et terrains, Études indiennes, Études postcoloniales