Posts filed under 'european'

The 2025 Turin International Book Fair: Going the Distance

May 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Veronica Gisondi

Turin’s International Book Fair made some tentative but promising progress to outline an expanded conception of Europe. . .

Now in its thirty-seventh edition, the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, or the Turin International Book Fair, continues to be a vital occasion for the literary community, gathering a diverse and lauded array of writers from around the globe to speak about their craft and its reflection of the world. This year, the theme “Le parole tra noi leggere/ Words fall lightly between us” gestured towards the need for literature to create connections and compassions; in the following dispatch, Veronica Gisondi reports on the illuminations to be found in this “between,” capturing the intersections and collisions that marked this year’s Fair.

This year, the Turin International Book Fair gathered a constellation of voices that, like a compass, revealed multiple paths to traverse the conflicts of the present and the complexities that await us, prefiguring a future expectant with the consequences of increasing inequality, oppression, and unbridled political violence. In these crossings, the fair also bridged a distance—the one that separates Europe from the rest of the Mediterranean, its ancient cradle—which has, for too long, appeared bigger than it actually is.

Some of the speakers that enlivened the fair’s thirty-seventh edition—held on May 15 to 19 in Lingotto, a former Fiat car factory—dissected the impact of being subjected to settler-colonial violence and the potential of literature in resistance. A dialogue between the Palestinian short-story writer Ziad Khaddash and Palestinian-Syrian writer and journalist Raed Wahesh took place on the anniversary of the Nakba (a day that signals the start of a long process of occupation and expropriation); in observance, Grazia Dell’Oro, Wahesh’s Italian publisher, remarked that “for us Westerners, anniversaries are often a way to clean our conscience. But we believe that the lively literary life of the Palestinian world needs to be remembered and promoted here at the fair,” and further stressed the risks of “the victimization that comes with an Orientalist gaze.” READ MORE…

An Inventory of Resistance: Notes on Catalan Language Politics in Literature

January 17, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Manel Mula Ferrer

Perhaps part of the uniqueness of Catalan comes from this awareness of its influence on and disconnection from Castilian and European traditions.

Part I: The Nineteenth Century

At first, I was hesitant to write an article on the uses of the Catalan language in literature throughout recent history. After the referendum for Catalan independence held this past October 1, which was deemed illegal by the Spanish government, and the subsequent episodes of violence that occurred in the region, the topic has come to be a sensitive matter for any national. However, where there is a language, there is a literature, and the history of Catalan is one of stubborn resistance. It is my contention that the history of a language is somehow lived out in those who speak it, insofar as a sentiment of ambiguity still informs contemporary critical debates on the usefulness and adaptability of Catalan literature. “Is Catalan literature diverse enough? Can it cultivate all genres? Is it economically viable?” are questions that have resonated among critics and the public alike. Catalan literature inherits a sense of shame from its own fruition, and it is this feeling that I want to explore with this genealogy of usages.

This is not a history of Catalan literature and the texts featured here have not been selected according to an aesthetic canon. This is an archive of perceptions of Catalan language and literature as experienced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the literary resurgence known as La Renaixença in Catalan literary history (parallel to which political Catalan nationalism as we know it unfolds) to the relatively normalized literary field in existence today. While certainly not the only appropriate approach, in what follows I present a succession of events from the nineteenth century that Catalan historiography has employed to explain the evolution of the uses of the language.

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