Wu Ming at Duke University, Student Rebellions, Altai in English & an Update on Book Burning
We've been neglecting this blog for too long (over a month has passed since the last post). It's just that our main blog, Giap, requires a lot of work and takes pretty much all the time we're able to devote to work on the web. Moreover, we're writing the new collective novel on the French Revolution (with an eye on what's happening in North Africa); Wu Ming 1 is translating this book here (1,000 pages to be delivered on September 15th!) and doing research for a project on Africa, mountaneering and fascism; Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 4 are teaching a course at the University of Pesaro; Wu Ming 5 is on national tour with his Oi! band Nabat (click on the name to see them performing live). And we've got little children to boot! In plain words, we're juggling our way through life while riding a metaphorical bicycle like the one you can see in the pic, and translating stuff from Italian is out of question these days. This is unfortunate, for we've written a lot of pieces which, once slightly readapted, could be of some interest to non-Italians.
The difficulties we're experiencing with all these projects are even preventing us from doing the usual book tour to promote our latest book, Anatra all'arancia meccanica [Clockwork Orange Duck], a collection of the short stories we wrote from 2000 to 2010. We're very fond of this book, it's a look back upon ten years of activities, but if we hit the road now, we wouldn't be able to write :-(
The fact that the last post, back in February, was in Spanish might have puzzled some Anglophones. It's easy to explain: we decided to alternate posts in English and Spanish (when we've got good material, of course), because English and Spanish are respectively the 2nd and 3rd most spoken language among people who visit our blog(s) and follow us on Twitter.
Before communicating some news to you, let us brief you on the Veneto #rogodibri (book burning) affair, which we wrote about in January and February. It is now clear that we (we the writers and readers) have won the first round. Let's summarise the whole thing.
HOW WE STOPPED TWO RIGHT-WING CENSORSHIP PROJECTS
It seems likely that the first attempts at removing Roberto Saviano's books from some Veneto public libraries took place immediately after Saviano exposed ongoing "conversations" [he used the verb "interloquire"] between Calabrian organised crime and the xenophobic party Northern League. Saviano did it during a hugely popular prime-time program on national TV, on November 15th, 2010. In Preganziol, province of Treviso, the local librarian revealed that the town's Assessore for Culture (a member of the Northern League) asked her and her colleagues to make Saviano's books disappear from the shelves.
This happened "unofficially", in the shade, but other attempts were about to take place in broad daylight: in the third week of January, two important public officials at the level of both the Province of Venice and the Veneto Regional Administration, asked librarians and public schools to remove all books by authors who had signed a petition against the extradition from France of Italian ultra-leftist fugitive Cesare Battisti.
Both these public officials, Raffaele Speranzon (Assessore for Culture of Venice's provincial administration) and Elena Donazzan (Assessore for Education of Veneto's regional administration) are former members of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the neo-fascist party that was active in Italy from 1946 to 1993. Now they are both members of Berlusconi's party, the Popolo della Libertà.
Quite obviously, no law allows blacklisting or holding disobedient librarians responsible for ignoring a blacklist. In fact, this proposal blatantly violated the Constitution, but this happens frequently. Oftentimes Italy's Supreme Court [la Corte Costituzionale] abolished acts and decrees by Berlusconi's government, because they were against the Constitution. The problem is that, between the initiative and its being acknowledged as illegal, there is a period in which people may feel intimidated.
N.B. The "Battisti affair" is a weapon of mass distraction used by the Right whenever they need a scapegoat for their failures. Each time Berlusconi is in trouble, these people try to shift the public's attention on completely unrelated issues. Recently, Brazil refused to extradite Battisti to Italy, and our government took the opportunity to try to raise a wave of nationalism and mass hysteria: How dare those samba dancers say that Battisti would risk death in an Italian prison? How dare they imply that we are blood-thirsty torturers? The recent attempt at banning authors and intellectuals who don't share the government's "opinion" on the Battisti affair should be read in this context, the context of Berlusconism's state of crisis.
Speranzon's list features about fifty writers. The body of literary works involved amounts to several hundreds of books. Some of them are important works, because among these writers there are several famous authors, whose books are translated in dozens of countries, like Nanni Balestrini, Massimo Carlotto, Valerio Evangelisti and, er, us.
We took part in forming a huge committee of writers called "Scrittori contro il rogo" [Writers Against Book-Burning]. All of us wrote articles and gave interviews to all the media channels we had access to. We effectively blocked censorship by asking the public to mobilize as they pleased, avoiding the most usual and tiresome rituals of "clicktivism" if possible: no lazy on-line petitions, no ephemeral Facebook groups. We were immediately taken by surprise by the people's imaginative tactics and the multifariousness of their activism: flash-mobs in front of Speranzon's office, countless parodies and pieces of satire on the web, ad hoc solidarity widgets devised for blogs and social networks, citizens visiting libraries and donating copies of the "banned" books, performers disguised as firemen out of Fahrenheit 451 appearing all of a sudden at trade-union marches, demonstrations of all kinds in Venice and Preganziol. All together, we managed to make it a matter of democratic emergency in Veneto, and it ended up on the national TV newscasts (ie the TV newscasts that aren't controlled by Berlusconi), until Speranzon and Donazzan had to withdraw their proposals.
Please be aware that we're talking about a country whose prime minister is the owner of three national TV channels (Rete 4, Canale 5 and Italia 1) and can control a huge portion of the information broadcast by the public TV (RAI). Moreover, he's also the owner of the biggest publishing group in the country, of an important national daily paper and of one of the most read gossipy weekly mags. They're all weapons that he constantly uses to stay in power. Censorship-the-Italian way means that most crucial pieces of information can be found / read / heard only on the Internet or on the newspapers that Berlusconi doesn't control.
Italian society is living an extremely difficult situation. Racism, xenophobia and authoritarianism are everyday currency over here. Any attempt at restricting civil liberties may be yet another push forward, towards a dangerous, maybe irreversibile situation. We have to fight every move, every bill, every seemingly foolish proposal.
And now the pieces of news:
SPRINGTIME
Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon edited a book on student uprisings in Europe. It is entitled Springtime: The New Student Rebellions. The publisher is Verso. It includes a detailed genealogy of the "Book Bloc", which we wrote about a few months ago.
WU MING 1 AND WU MING 2 AT DUKE UNIVERSITY
In the early days of April 2011, two of us will be in North Carolina. We'll give two somewhat erratic talks in Durham and Chapel Hill on "how to tell (about) a revolution" and "how to tell a revolution from (something else)". In fact, the title of the whole thing may sound a little weird to native English speakers: "How to Tell (about) a Revolution (from)". All this from a novelist's point of view, it goes without saying. We enjoy reading philosophy, but we aren't philosophers ourselves. [And yet, it is likely that the notes we're taking while preparing the talks will become an essay included in an anthology on Jacques Rancière. How bizarre.]
On monday, April 4, we'll be hosted by Duke University's Department of Romance Studies. We'll give the talk(s) at 5:00 pm @ Franklin Humanities Institute Garage, Smith Warehouse. The event is also sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Program in Literature, the Marxism and Society Program, and the UNC Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.
The next day, we'll be at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Details will follow.
ALTAI
Most likely our novel Altai, which was published in Italy at the end of 2009, will be published in English by Verso in the springtime of 2012.
