Opening the Pen Archive : 1921-2021. (avec Margaret Atwood, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Noo Saro-Wiwa, Perumal Murugan) Colloque international

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