Opening Ceremony
with a keynote by Annie Paul and a conversation with Marlon James
Speeches, Conversation
Fr., 25.8.2023
18:00–19:45
Forough Farrokhzad Garden
Free entry
Untitled (2023). Digital Photography by Amir Denzel Hall. Courtesy the artist.
Opening Speech by Dzekashu MacViban
Homespun Words/Worlds
Keynote by Annie Paul
The keynote lecture by founder and editor of PREE, Annie Paul, assesses the politics and poetics of articulating the creolescapes of the Caribbean. Drawing from discourse around creoles in literary histories and the publishing practices of PREE, Homespun Words/Worlds is a reflection on writing and publishing in and from post colonies in the twenty-first century. The keynote explores questions such as how can publishing practices be shaped to give authors international visibility far beyond the Caribbean? What does an engagement with colonial and postcolonial histories reveal about how to understand the urgency and discourse of creoles in relation to the accessibility of knowledge?
Reading and conversation with Marlon James and Annie Paul
In a discussion on Marlon James’s practice as a writer, the ways in which he continually reinvents his oeuvre, pushes the boundaries of genre expectations, and shifts his centre of gravity are brought into conversation. From John Crow’s Devil to Moon Witch, Spider King, James’s ambitious works explore worldbuilding, history, erasure, and languages through marginal characters, and offer a polyphony of voices through which we encounter familiar and strange worlds.