Fiction Contests
2010 LEAPFROG FICTION CONTEST ANNOUNCED
Click here to see information on winners of the 2009 contest
The 2010 contest for book-length works of fiction is now open for entries. This year, we have added a children's novel category.
The 2010 Leapfrog Fiction Contest will be open for submissions from January 15 to May 1, 2010.
Category 1: Adult fiction. Any novella- or novel-length work of literary fiction (this includes short-story collections) not previously published* is eligible. The minimum length is 22,000 words; there is no maximum length.
Judges include Leapfrog Press editors and author Marge Piercy.
Entry fee: $30
Category 2: Children's fiction. Middle-grade and young adult chapter novels will be considered. No picture books please. If illustrations are included, they must be black and white. Minimum length 20,000 words.
Judges include Leapfrog Press editors, Leapfrog children's book author B.B. Wurge, and author Alexandria LaFaye.
Entry fee: $20
We welcome submissions from both new and previously published authors. Previous publication credits will not be considered in the judges' decisions. Both unagented and agented manuscripts are eligible.
Judging and Announcements: Judging will take place on a rolling basis beginning in February. The judges will be announced shortly. While the contest is open, we will not be accepting fiction queries through our normal submission process. Those who wish to submit a fiction query without going through the contest are encouraged to do so before January 15 or after May 1, 2010. We will continue to consider queries on nonfiction works through our regular submission process.
The entry fee is $30 for adult fiction and $20 for children's fiction.
Multiple and Simultaneous Submissions:
Simultaneous submissions (to multiple presses) are accepted, but the entrant must inform Leapfrog Press immediately if a publication offer from another press is accepted. A manuscript contracted to another press may still be awarded as a finalist in the Leapfrog contest.
No more than two submissions per author will be accepted.
Contest winners will be announced in June 2010.
First Prize: publication contract offer from Leapfrog Press, with an advance payment, plus the finalist awards (see below).
Finalists: $150 and two short critiques of the manuscript from contest judges; permanent listing on the Leapfrog Press contest page as a contest finalist, along with short author bio and description of the book.
Adult fiction manuscripts will be critiqued by Marge Piercy.
Children's fiction manuscripts will be critiqued by Alexandria LaFaye and B.B. Wurge.
Honorable Mention: listing on the Leapfrog Press Web site.
We encourage winners of all contests to inform us of any publicity/ contracts/ reviews of your entry. We will be happy to post that information on our Web site.
* Previously self-published books that have no more than 200 copies in circulation will be considered "unpublished" and may be submitted.
There are three steps for manuscript entries.
1. E-mail fictioncontest@leapfrogpress.com
Subject line: Leapfrog Fiction Contest [manuscript title]
(note: please do not title your document "contest entry.doc" or "leapfrog.doc" etc. You get the idea. We will have much trouble distinguishing it from all the other files so named. Please use your manuscript's complete title as your file name, or as much as is possible.)
In the body of the message: give your complete contact information including name, mailing and email addresses, and phone number, and the complete title of your manuscript. Please do not include any other personal information.
2. Attach your complete manuscript as a Word, PDF, or text document.
Manuscript format: Do not include any personal information on your manuscript. This is very important. Please use double spacing and reasonable font size. If your work includes images and the file is more than a few MB in size, please email first for instructions.
Again: Please make sure that your name is not anywhere on the manuscript. Check page headers and title page. In fact, a title page is unnecessary and will almost always be deleted on our end. Judging is done "blind": the judges do not know anything about the author as they are reading a manuscript. This way of eliminating all potential bias is very important to us.
You will receive e-mail acknowledgment of receipt. If we have any problems opening your document, we will contact you.
3. Payment. Payment will be accepted through PayPal (see link below), and by personal check (US only), bank check, or money order.
To pay by PayPal, click here:
If paying by check/money order, make checks out to Leapfrog Press LLC. Please accompany your check with a note stating the manuscript title and your complete contact information, so that checks can be matched to submissions.
Mail to: Leapfrog Fiction Contest, Leapfrog Press, PO Box 2110, Teaticket, MA 02536
Please e-mail fictioncontest@leapfrogpress.com with any questions.
Leapfrog Press is delighted to announce this year's finalist judges.
Alexandria LaFaye is an associate professor of English at California State University in San Bernardino, and the author of eight novels for middle-grade readers. Her novels have received many awards, including a Notable Children's Book Award from the Smithsonian Institute (The Strength of Saints); the Scott O'Dell Award for historical fiction, a Nebraska Book Award, and a California Book Award (Worth); and Best Book listings for Band Street College of Education (The Year of the Sawdust Man and Edith Shay).
Marge Piercy is the author of 39 books, including 14 novels, many volumes of poetry, a memoir, and several works of nonfiction. Awards include, among many others, the Patterson Award for Literary Achievement, the Patterson Poetry Prize, an American Library Association Notable Book Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (UK).
SPRING 2009 FICTION CONTEST WINNER ANNOUNCED
posted July 9 2009
The first-prize winner is Vickie Weaver, for her novel Billie Girl (formerly The Mercy of Killing).
Our list of winners includes novels, novellas, and short-story collections; traditional tales and post-modern tales, some that are neither of those, and a few grand fairy tales. Some of our judges' comments are given below. Please scroll down to read more about the winners and their manuscripts.
Excerpts from each manuscript will be posted soon. Quotes given below are from the contest judges.
FIRST PRIZE
The Mercy of Killing by Vickie Weaver
(retitled "Billie Girl")
"[H]eart rending, funny, sentimental, nostalgic, sad, shocking, surprising, and brilliant. It tears at the heart string and presents vivid, down-to-earth images, and more vivid, down-to-earth human beings who struggle along with what they are given. The writer isn't afraid to slip-slide around in the mud of human relationships and emotions. Billie Girl is a tremendous character."
FINALIST
And Yet They Were Happy by Helen Phillips
"Off-the-charts creativity. Fluid abstractions provide glimpses of the complex dynamics of marriage...at times, the phrasing is heart-breakingly beautiful."
"Startling. Stunning. Magical...told in a language that surpasses itself, that goes well beyond the words on the page."
Big Horse Woman by Barbara Salvatore
"It is impossible to read this book without admiring it. Big Horse Woman is a character you're not likely to meet in other novels of this ilk, nor are you likely to forget her stunning portrayal."
Driftwood by Nicholas T. Brown
"Some powerful images and meta-fictional elements."
"A formidable grasp of language and a deliciously demented sense of humor."
The Talking Cure by Madeline Sonik
"[B]rilliant, twisted, poetic writing. Writing that encompasses vast creations and destruction, universes of the imagination."
"Virtually every piece in the collection is filled with a surprise, whether it be danger, humor, or something other-worldly."
HONORABLE MENTION
Black Crow White Lie by Candi Sary
Brother's Ghost by Stephen Spotte
In the Lap of the Gods by Li Miao Lovett
Longing to Love You by David Philip Mullins
Miracles of the Non-Real World by Ivan Faute
Patrice: A Poemella by Geri Gale
The Changeling: A Dream of Love and Loss by Rebecca Boroson
The Gossip's Crime by Mary Overton
What Remained of Katrina by Kelly Jameson
Congratulations to all the winners!
Here is some interesting information on the contest entries, for those who are curious.Number of entries: 480. Percent women authors: 44. Percent men authors: 48.5. (We realize that this does not add up to 100. The remainder are indeterminate from their names.) Countries represented: US, South Africa, Ireland, Japan, UK, Canada, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Australia. Date the most entries came in (30): April 30. Percent of titles beginning with "The": 23.Judges:
Judges include authors/writing instructors/book reviewers Michael Lee, Michael Mirolla, and Michael Graziano, as well as Leapfrog's editor-in-chief and editorial staff.
Awards:
First prize: Publication contract offer from Leapfrog Press, with an advance payment of $1,000, and permanent listing as a Leapfrog Fiction Contest winner on the Leapfrog Press Web site.
Finalist(s): $150 and two short critique of the manuscripts; permanent listing on the Leapfrog Press Web site as a Leapfrog Fiction Contest finalist.
Honorable mention(s): Listing on the Leapfrog Press Web site.
Information on the winners
Helen Phillips "And Yet They Were Happy"
A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world: a world haunted by monsters, plagued by natural disasters, a world that seems on the verge of collapse--but also a place of transformation, wonder, and delight.
Each piece in this book is exactly 340 words in length. The book hovers between autobiography and mythology, between reality and surreality, between elation and anxiety, whimsy and darkness, anticipation and dread.
Helen Phillips received the 2008 Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction for an excerpt from And Yet They Were Happy. Excerpts from the book have appeared in Salt Hill Journal, Faultline, Small Spiral Notebook, Hotel St. George Press Literary Magazine, TheyAreFlyingPlanes, and Canto XXVI, and have received finalist status in three contests. Helen won the 2009 Meridian Editors’ Award for her short story “The Eyeballs of Cecile.” Other short stories have appeared in The Mississippi Review, The Brooklyn Review, and L Magazine, and have received finalist status in several contests. She received her BA from Yale and her MFA from Brooklyn College, where she now teaches undergraduate creative writing.
Barbara Salvatore "Big Horse Woman"
A lone American Indian woman confronts her past and present as the white settlers take over the land.
In the mid-1800s, Big Horse Woman of the Ponca Tribe and Magghie, daughter of German immigrants, are Seed Savers, medicine carriers, from different cultures, but with the same purpose. They keep the food, medicines and poisons of their place and time – in the seeds that they carry. As irrevocable tides of change sweep through their lives and the country, they realize that together they must save the seeds of plants that they fear will be lost.
Barbara Salvatore is owner and president of Beyond Design Inc., a company that specializes in fabrication services for Broadway, film, museums, and the art market. As well as running a farm in upstate New York, she maintains a studio in Nebraska, where the cultural and language research for this book was done.
Driftwood is a collection of short stories ranging from psychological realism to absurdist comedy to fairy tale to postmodern experiment to unclassifiable.
Nick Brown is a recipient of the 2007 Donald Barthelme Fellowship. The short story "The New Toothbrush" (from Driftwood) is forthcoming in Matchbook. Nick has an MFA from the University of Houston, and is an adjunct in the University of Houston system and a lecturer at Rice University.
Vickie Weaver "The Mercy of Killing"
Written with dark humor, The Mercy of Killing tells the story of Billie Girl’s life, from her infant adoption by two women (who are, unknown to all, brothers), to her final years as a resident in a nursing home where she secretly practices euthanasia as a kindness.
Vickie Weaver is a 2006 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her unpublished novel Below the Heart was a semi-finalist in the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction in 2008, and placed in the top ten of The Parthenon Prize 2007. Her short stories have appeared in Timber Creek Review, Roanoke Review, Alligator Juniper, and the anthology Women.Period. Weaver earned an MFA from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and teaches at Indiana University East. More at www.vickieweaver.com/index.html.
Madeline Sonik "The Talking Cure"
The Talking Cure is a collection of stories that probe the psychological dimensions of voicelessness and victimhood.
Madeline Sonik is the author of the novel Arms, the story collection Drying the Bones, the children’s novel Belinda and the Dustbunnys, and the poetry collection Stone Sightings. She has won many awards for her nonfiction, including The Bellingham Review’s Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction for Cucarachas. Stories from The Talking Cure have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Broken Pencil, Prairie Fire, and The Dalhousie Review, among other magazines; the story “Slick” appeared in sub-TERRAIN magazine and was one of the 2004 Lush Triumphant fiction competition winners. Madeline earned her doctorate in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria.Candi Sary "Black Crow White Lie"
An eccentric Hollywood mother gives her deprived child a chance at a great life not by changing his circumstances, but by changing his story.
Candi Sary has written four other novels. Finding Grace made the short list for finals in the 2007 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition; Love Me Madly won second place in the 2007 Dahlonega Literary Festival Novel Contest; and The Sound That Red Makes and Thrown Away were finalists in the 2002 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.
Li Miao Lovett "In the Lap of the Gods"
A massive dam rises, a million lives are thrown in turmoil…and a widower saves an abandoned infant girl from the Yangtze.
Li Miao Lovett began her writing career after a 600-mile backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail where she encountered a stalker, a compulsive poet, and ten thousand mosquitoes. She has been a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED Perspectives. Her literary and environmental writing has also been published by Narrative Magazine, Earth Island Journal, Stanford Magazine, China Rights Forum, and Sierra Club Planet. In both fiction and nonfiction, Li’s work has won awards or finalist standing from Stanford Magazine, National League of American Pen Women, and Dana Award in fiction. In the Lap of the Gods was a top-four finalist in the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. More at http://www.limiaolovett.com/inthelapofthegods.html.
David Philip Mullins "Longing to Love You" (Sarabande Books, forthcoming)
The story of Nick Danze, a young sex addict who returns to his hometown of Las Vegas to care for his emotionally ailing mother after his father's death.
Longing to Love You, a collection of short stories, won the 2009 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and is now forthcoming by Sarabande Books. It was also named a finalist for Black Lawrence Press’s Hudson Prize (2009), and a finalist for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference’s Katharine Bakeless Nason Fiction Prize. David Philip Mullins is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Cimarron Review, Fiction, and North Dakota Quarterly, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has received awards from Yaddo and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches creative writing at Creighton University. More at mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/mullins.htm.
Ivan Faute "Miracles of the Non-Real World"
A collection of stories about people in peril who look for "miracles" to undo their knots of personal crisis, but, as in the fairy tales of old, the miraculous resolutions cause absurd, surreal, or unexpected consequences.
Ivan Faute has published short fiction in Other Voices, Buffalo Carp, The Louisville Review, Relief Journal, Driftwood, and The Orphan Leaf Review. Awards for his fiction include finalist for the Rannu Fund for Writers of Speculative Literature, second in the Crucible fiction prize, a finalist for The Southeast Review's World's Best Short Short Story Contest, and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize. Stories from Miracles have been published in a number of journals, including The Pinch, Karamu, The Mochila Review, The Abacot Journal, The Binnacle, and The Cerebral Catalyst, and in the anthology Touched by Wonder (Meadowhawk Press). Ivan is also a playwright, and has had plays performed in San Diego, Chicago, and New York. An excerpt from Miracles of the Non-Real World was named a finalist for the Calvino Prize and an honoree in The Binnacle Ultra-Short Competition. Ivan is in the final year of a PhD in writing at the University of Illinois.
Geri Gale "Patrice: A Poemella"
Patrice: A Poemella is about the myth of art and artist and how a woman and man in a wartime setting pull truth and art from pain and desire.
Geri Gale’s major works include She, a collection of prosepoems told in the voices of women who are faithful and loyal to something or someone or someday; and a screenplay, Swayed, a coming-of-age tale about the innocence and love of two young lesbians growing up in a small Jersey town in the ’60s. Her prosepoems and stories have appeared in Otoliths, Raven Chronicles, and the Canadian Jewish Outlook.
Rebecca Boroson "The Changeling: A Dream of Love and Loss"
The Changeling: A Dream of Love and Loss is a kind of magical explanation for a child's sudden onset of autistic behavior -- and the havoc it wreaks on his small family.
Rebecca Boroson is an editor and journalist who has won a number of journalism prizes for editorials, news, reviews, and headlines. The Changeling is the third novella in the “dream” series, in which fantasy and reality are entwined. Rebecca’s short story "The Roussalka" appeared in With Signs and Wonders: An Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), and has been told by storyteller Dan Yashinsky. He can be heard telling this story at http://tinyurl.com/pa5nwh.
>Mary Overton "The Gossip's Crime"
THE GOSSIP’S CRIME is a collection of fabulist stories populated by uncanny characters – an oracular talking head, a women who burns, a lost forest monster, a dead baby resurrected, an obsessed virgin – narrated by a story-telling felon known as the Gossip.
Mary Overton is the secret identity of a school teacher camouflaged to fit into a conventional life. Her publications include the short-story collection The Wine of Astonishment (La Questa Press, 1997); short fiction in the anthologies Grace and Gravity (Paycock Press, 2004), Haunted Voices, Haunting Places (Halcyon Press, 2008), Great Writers Great Stories (IM Press, 1999) , and Southern Fried Weirdness 2007 (Southern Fried Weirdness Press); and short fiction in magazines including Glimmer Train, Gargoyle, Zahir, and Potomac Review.
Kelly Jameson "What Remained of Katrina"
Katrina Williams Jones Thomas Jackson Miller is a failed hooker, hotel maid, magician’s assistant, and ice cream truck driver presumed dead (only her hand was found after the hurricane). In the post-Katrina ghost town that was once the Ninth Ward, she paints murals over the red Xs left on houses to indicate the number of dead found inside. But soon she learns she’s not the only ghost in town.
Kelly Jameson is the author of the suspense-thriller Dead On, named Runner-Up in the 2006 Do It Yourself (DIY) Los Angeles Book Festival. Her short stories have been published in various online/print journals and magazines including The Summerset Review, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 8, Amazon Shorts, Withersin Magazine, The Twisted Tongue, Barfing Frog Press, The Big Stupid Review, Ruthie's Club, and The American Drivel Review. More at www.DeadOnNovel.com.
The Princess Grace Awards Program
AWARDS PROGRAM / GRANTS OVERVIEW
Working in conjunction with nominating schools and non-profit companies, the Princess Grace Awards recognize the talent of individual artists in theater, dance, and film.
This unique collaborative process fills vast voids in the artistic community: scholarships, apprenticeships, and fellowships give emerging artists the financial assistance and moral encouragement to focus on artistic excellence; monetary support for the nominating organizations eases fund raising challenges, directing resources toward the creative process. All applicants must be US Citizens or have obtained permanent resident status, and each grant must be completed in the United States. All nominating organizations must have 501(c)(3) status. Each category has unique guidelines specific to the discipline. To read more about discipline-specific guidelines, please visit theApplications and Questions sections.
The Princess Grace Awards Program
AWARDS PROGRAM / GRANTS APPLICATION OVERVIEW
- Theater: Scholarships for students at non-profit schools; apprenticeships and fellowships for artists at non-profit theaters; postmark deadline: March 31, 2010
- Playwriting: One fellowship for an individual playwright, including residency at New Dramatists; postmark deadline: March 31, 2010
- Dance: Scholarships for students at non-profit schools; fellowships for dancers at non-profit companies; postmark deadline: April 30, 2010
- Choreography: Fellowships for collaborations with non-profit dance companies; postmark deadline: April 30, 2010
- Film: Scholarships for undergraduate or graduate thesis films (open to select film schools by invitation only); postmark deadline: June 1, 2010
All applicants must be U.S. citizens or have obtained permanent residency status. All applicants, except playwrights, must be nominated by a school department chair/dean or company artistic director. Scholarships, apprenticeships and fellowships must be completed in the United States. For more specific information, please refer to individual category guidelines.
2010 Applications and Guidelines are available now. Please contact Jelena Tadic, Program Manager, with any questions at grants@pgfusa.org.
2010 INFORMATION
2010 Theater Application and Guidelines • Click Here To View 2010 Playwriting Application and Guidelines • Click Here To View 2010 Dance Performance Application and Guidelines • Click Here To View 2010 Choreography Application and Guidelines • Click Here To View 2010 Film Application and Guidelines • Click Here To View
via pgfusa.org
Video dedicated to all the Americans who do not see that Haiti is in the state it is because of your government. Learn some history folks, pick up a book or watch a documentary once in a while.
via youtube.com
Congolese Women and Girls Suffering the Insufferable
by Emily Spence posted on Monday, 11 January 2010 2 Comments
While in the eastern Congo last summer, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated, “With respect to companies that are responsible for what are now being called conflict minerals, I think the international community must start looking at steps we can take to try to prevent the mineral wealth from the DRC ending up in the hands of those who fund the violence here.”
In relation, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s UN supported armed assault against rebels in the eastern Congo has promoted widespread death, rape and other forms of brutality. Indeed, the decade long war has claimed at least 5.4 million lives — the most in any conflict since WWII. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of women and girls, including babies, have suffered rapes and sexual mutilation, often with weapons and tools used in the process. Further, it is thought that, in eastern portions of the Congo, up to seventy percent of Congolese women, along with children of all ages, have been sexually attacked, according to the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, a research center at Harvard University.
Moreover, some relief workers have estimated that up to twenty percent of new rapes have been instigated by police and civilians in urban rather than rural areas in that a culture of violence has set into much of the nation due to the long, drawn out conflict. At the same time, the attacks are so extremely violent that they have been described as sexual terrorism by medical workers at the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu at which thousands of survivors have been treated each year.
Overall, it has emerged that all major groups involved in the warfare have committed these and other serious war crimes, including looting peasants, purposefully destroying homes and forcing the mass dislocations of more than a million terrorized people from their neighborhoods. On account, countless families and whole communities have been forced to live with constant fear, repeated migrations and insurmountable social turmoil.
In a country with an annual income of $110 per capita and a life expectancy rate of 54.4 years, life is difficult enough as it is. However, individuals on the run can’t even have the assurance of this modest sum to support existence. As a result, massive food, medical and displacement aid is needed in the country at the very time that it is most dangerous to be there as an aid worker. Simultaneously, a shortage of donations negatively impact the quality of care delivered by various assistance organizations, including U.N. sponsored relief programs.
Meanwhile, a rape-friendly culture encourages leniency towards rapists and ostracism towards victims regardless of their ages. Indeed, wounded sufferers are generally shunned by their spouses, other family members and former friends, particularly so if they have any children that resulted from periods of long term bondage accompanied by repeated rapes.
Simultaneously, assailants rarely receive proper trials. Therefore, the lack of punishment has increasingly emboldened Congolese men to find pleasure through physically violating women and children on a routine basis. Consequently, the number of assaults on women and children are increasing and spreading into new regions so as to include ever new groups, such as the Pigmies.
Even as the International Criminal Tribunal recognizes rape as a crime of genocide under international law, there is little by way of meaningful deterrence to the escalating aggression. In relation, this “pandemic of sexual violence,” indicates Stephen Lewis, the former United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, is “obscene,” “insanely savage,” and is nothing short of “femicide.”
Despite that social stigma is prevalent, the abandoned women and girls, of whom some are pictured at Congo/Women, do sometimes receive substantial help. For example, it comes from groups like SOS AIDS, an organization that works with other relief agencies to get in touch with rural survivors so as to take them to treatment centers for psychological counseling and medical support.
The assistance often includes the successful repair of fistulas, debilitating ruptures of the urinary-genital tract that leave females incontinent and prone to infections for life. The helpers, also, try to provide housing, including for those in need of anti-retroviral and other drug treatments due to the attackers having infected their victims with assorted serious diseases. (The HIV prevalence includes approximately 4.2 percent of the population.) Meanwhile, the high number of injured women and girls makes it impossible to treat them all, aside from the fact that the majority of the assaults, apparently, go unreported.
Thankfully, there are a number of dedicated groups like SOS AIDS taking a stand for justice and human welfare even when it is dangerous for their staff to do so. Tragically, others try to increase the very same kinds of turmoil SOS AIDS is striving to remedy. They are doing so in order to gain control of four main minerals: tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold that garner an estimated $180 million in revenues each year.
The main reason that these minerals are in such high demand is because they are critical in the fabrication of digital cameras, laptops, cell phones, portable musical devices and video games. Yet, some of these battlefield minerals are not widely found over much of the world. Therefore, there is great competition for them in the Congo and some individuals will stop at nothing to get them.
All considered, people interested in supporting the necessary reforms in this war torn land can phone or write letters to Congressional representatives to urge them to ratify the Congo Conflict Minerals Act (S. 891) and the Conflict Minerals Trade Act (H.R. 4128), which are currently undergoing legislative review. They can, also, sign petitions directed to members of Congress (Senate bill, House bill). Additionally, they can contact their respective mobile phone manufacturers to indicate that they want the companies to ensure that cell phones are only made from certified conflict-free materials.
In relation, Brian McAfee, the co-author of this report, indicated, “The women and girls of the Congo are our sisters and daughters in the larger sense of our all being part of one human family. Therefore, our love and concern for them, as it would be for any other cherished human being, must be present. In relation, I sort of decided to adopt the rest of the world as my family due to my having been orphaned at an early age. Besides, Congolese people deserve unreserved justice and compassion as much as any other people do, as our common welfare is inexorably linked. In fact, only a huge outpouring of care from around the world will help to bring about the kind of changes so desperately needed in this tragically destroyed nation.”
Due to a shortage of funds and critical care supplies, the crisis in the Congo is inadequately addressed. Yet many charitable groups are striving their best to provide relief.
Thankfully, several of these agencies have excellent track records. A few of them that come highly recommended are the Women and Girls of the World, Stephen Lewis Foundation, SOS Medical Centres, and Women for Women International in the event that any support of their projects might like to be undertaken. As Margaret Mead suggested, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
By Emily Spence and Brian McAfee
Emily Spence and Brian McAfee are authors living respectively in Massachusetts and Michigan. They have spent many years involved in human rights, environmental and social services efforts. They can be contacted at brimac6@hotmail.com.
Texts Without Context
Harry Campbell
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Harry Campbell
Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.
THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
Even some outspoken cheerleaders of Internet technology have begun to grapple with some of its more vexing side effects. Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
WORRYING ABOUT the public’s growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload, of course, is hardly new. It’s been 25 years since Neil Postman warned in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that trivia and the entertainment values promoted by television were creating distractions that threatened to subvert public discourse, and more than a decade since writers like James Gleick (“Faster”) and David Shenk (“Data Smog”) described a culture addicted to speed, drowning in data and overstimulated to the point where only sensationalism and willful hyperbole grab people’s attention.
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”
TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has bestowed miracles of access and convenience upon millions of people, and it’s also proven to be a vital new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents; text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”
MSNBC’s new program “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which usually focuses on business and politics, has a “While you were working ...” segment in which viewers are asked to send in “some of the strangest and outrageous stories you’ve found on the Internet,” and the most e-mailed lists on popular news sites tend to feature articles about pets, food, celebrities and self-improvement. For instance, at one point on March 11, the top story on The Washington Post’s Web site was “Maintaining a Sex Life,” while the top story on Reddit.com, a user-generated news link site, was “(Funny) Sexy Girl? Do Not Trust Profile Pictures!”
Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.
Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.
Digital culture, he writes in “You Are Not a Gadget,” “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”
AT THE SAME time the Internet’s nurturing of niche cultures is contributing to what Cass Sunstein calls “cyberbalkanization.” Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.”
“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.
As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” Politicians and voters on the right and left not only hold different opinions from one another, but often can’t even agree over a shared set of facts, as clashes over climate change, health care and the Iraq war attest.
THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur.
As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.
As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups. Should the writers of television shows listen to fan feedback or a network’s audience testing? Does the desire to get an article on a “most e-mailed” list consciously or unconsciously influence how reporters and editors go about their assignments and approaches to stories? Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?
As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. In a recent Newsweek cover story pegged to the Tiger Woods scandal, Neal Gabler, the author of “Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” absurdly asserts that celebrity is “the great new art form of the 21st century.”
Celebrity, Mr. Gabler argues, “competes with — and often supersedes — more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays and TV shows,” and it performs, he says, “in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community.”
However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television, and memoir writing has become a rite of passage for actors, politicians and celebrities of every ilk. At the same time our cultural landscape is brimming over with parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of “appropriation art” — much of it facilitated by new technology that makes remixing, and cutting-and-pasting easy enough for a child.
It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.
All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.” Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna; many jukebox or tribute musicals like “Good Vibrations” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” do an embarrassing disservice to the artists who inspired them; and the rote remaking of old television shows into films (from “The Brady Bunch” to “Charlie’s Angels” to “Get Smart”), not to mention the recycling of video games into movies (like “Tomb Raider” and “Resident Evil”) often seem as pointless as they are now predictable.
Writing in a 2005 Wired article that “new technologies redefine us,” William Gibson hailed audience participation and argued that “an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product.” Indeed, he said, “audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”
To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
via nytimes.com
Paul Robeson: Black America’s Greatest Combination of Entertainer and Activist
By Robert James Taylor
When Black America thinks of entertainers who were also great social activists, the names Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis and even Bill Cosby perhaps come most readily to mind. But the greatest combination of entertainer and social activist ever produced by the African American struggle for justice in this country is seldom mentioned today. His name is Paul Leroy Bustill Robeson.
Born in Princeton, New Jersey on April 9, 1898 and the product of a father who was a strict disciplinarian (his mother died when he was only six), Robeson was the epitome of excellence: a superb student; an exceptional athlete, a powerful entertainer and a dedicated activist against racism and social injustice.
Robeson graduated from high school with honors in 1915. He was so academically impressive that he won a full academic scholarship to Rutgers University becoming only the third Black student accepted to the prestigious predominantly white institution. As would become his legacy throughout life, Robeson excelled at Rutgers. He was one of only three members of his class accepted into Phi Beta Kappa in his third year.
In the “Class Prophecy,” members of his graduating class were so impressed by his intelligence and bearing that they predicted he would “become leader of the colored race in America.” After graduating from Rutgers, Robeson moved to the then “Capitol of Black America” – Harlem, New York – and entered the Columbia University Law School (1920-1923). Again, he excelled while working his way through school as an athlete and performer.
He later became a star for the Akron Pros and the Milwaukee Badgers of the American Professional Football Association. This is the Association which would later become today’s National Football League.
His next arena of conquest was entertainment. He would become a world renowned bass-baritone concert performer as well as stage and movie actor. He was able to avoid the stereotypical and often demeaning roles which Black performers were limited to in the 1930s and 1940s. Instead, he was the first major performer to popularize Black gospel music and the first 20th Century Black actor to portray William Shakespeare’s Othello on Broadway and across Europe.
But as Roberson traveled the world, he saw and experienced a lot which angered him. He was most outraged by the racism and fascism (government dictatorships and the lack of democracy) of the period. It was this anger and a personal sense of social justice which led to his political activism. But his speeches, protests and organizing went beyond issues of race.
He began to feel that much of the problems facing the world, especially the poor and working classes, resulted from capitalism. While America and Europe referred to the capitalist economic system as “free enterprise.” Robeson saw mounting evidence that the system was actually predatory in nature and tended to produce the super-rich at one end and the extremely poor at the other. Thus, he turned to socialism and began a political love affair with the early Soviet Union which was promising workers of the world liberation from capitalist exploitation.
But being Black and socialist were perhaps the two most dangerous states of being in America in the 1940s and 1950s, especially with a man known as J. Edgar Hoover heading the FBI. Hoover and other right-wingers began a campaign against Robeson which was clearly designed to portray him in the worse possible light, deny him work and if possible culminate in his death.
Hoover succeeded! Broadway and Hollywood turned against Robeson. Ever NBC television refused to allow Robeson to appear on a talk program to discuss his views. In the “Red Scare” periods of the 1950s when the nation was on a witch hunt against suspected communists, the FBI was even successful in getting NAACP head Roy Wilkins to take part in a slander campaign against Robeson alleging that he was un-American. Finally, in the early 1950s, the State Department succeeded in revoking Robeson’s passport. This prevented him from earning a living by traveling to Europe where he was hugely popular.
Finally, there is highly suggestive evidence that the U.S. government, via Hoover’s FBI, engaged in efforts to undermine Robeson mentally and get him to commit suicide. By the mid-1950s his health began to deteriorate dramatically. Paul Roberson, Jr. has said his father feared what may be “done to” him by the U.S. government. Robeson, Jr. remains convinced that a 1961 suicide attempt in Moscow (the travel ban was lifted in 1958) resulted from an agent working for the FBI placing an hallucinogenic drug in Robeson’s drink while he was at a party.
Regardless, despite a brief period of recovery after treatment in then communist-ruled East Germany, Robeson spent his last years on this earth a sick and broken man. He would die in Philadelphia on January 23, 1976. His funeral was held in New York City and drew thousands of supporters.
Regardless, available records now show that the FBI campaign against Robeson ran from 1947 to 1974. Nevertheless, the Robeson legacy is one of excellence in virtually everything he ever attempted. It was an excellence accompanied by a dedication to the struggles against racism, oppressive government and for the political and economic rights of the average person. It was a struggle, however, which ran against vested interests in this country. And for that he suffered.
[The Black History Feature is compiled by Robert Taylor. He welcomes comments at his website: http://BlackHistoryClub.ning.com or you can leave a brief message at 202-657.8872.]
LATIN AMERICA: Still a Long Way to Go for Black Women
By Patricia Grogg*
Meybelin Bernárdez next to the Honduran flag.Credit:Patricia Grogg/IPS
HAVANA, Mar 19, 2010 (IPS) - At the age of 17, Meybelin Bernárdez is clear about the future: "When I finish my studies, I'll return to help my community get on its feet," the young Garifuna woman from Honduras, who is studying medicine in Cuba, says without hesitation.With her head held high, she adds: "I want to be an example for future generations of women. The conditions we live in are really bad, we have a lot to do for our people."
Her mother, whose skin is as dark as hers, taught her that the most important thing in life is to study.
"But a poor black girl like me couldn't even dream of being a doctor without this scholarship," she tells IPS.
Bernárdez belongs to the Garifuna ethnic group, descendants of African slaves who survived the sinking of two Spanish galleons off the coast of the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in 1635, where they intermarried with members of the local Carib tribe.
The Garifuna are estimated to number around 600,000 in Central America, the Caribbean, Mexico and the United States today.
Bernárdez's words summed up the reality faced by the large majority of black women and girls in Latin America - although there are more and more who are actively rebelling against the role of victim of racial discrimination.
In Colombia, Rosmira Valencia, director of the Network of Women from Chocó says it is women who worry about the education of their children, even at the cost of great sacrifice. "Today, at the University of Chocó, women make up a majority of the students, who are studying and training for a better future," she says.
Although it is rich in natural resources, the northwest Colombian Pacific coastal region of Chocó, where nearly all of the population is black, is the country's poorest region.
"Women are strong, and we are sure that we will achieve our big challenges: to influence the development of our region, strengthen the sense of belonging and continue moving forward in the search for equality and respect," Valencia said.
In 2001, the declaration adopted by the third World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa stated that "racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance reveal themselves in a differentiated manner for women and girls, and can be among the factors leading to a deterioration in their living conditions, poverty, violence, multiple forms of discrimination, and the limitation or denial of their human rights."
The declaration also recognised the need to adopt a gender perspective in policies, strategies and programmes of action against racism; protect women suffering aggravated discrimination on the grounds of racism and gender discrimination; and develop a more systematic and consistent approach to evaluating and monitoring racial discrimination against women.
But nine years later, little to nothing has changed for women of African descent in the region, according to activists and leaders who spoke to IPS in different countries ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, observed on Mar. 21.
On that day, in 1960, the police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration by black protesters in Sharpeville, South Africa against apartheid "pass laws", which restricted the movements of blacks in the country. Sixty-nine people were killed and some 200 wounded in the massacre, which marked a turning-point in the history of South Africa and the start of growing international isolation of the segregationist regime, which finally collapsed 30 years later.
Thanks to the Colombian constitution of 1991,"we began to be noticed as part of society. But we are still quite invisible, even after Durban 2001," said Valencia.
Statistics provided by Nicaraguan activist Dorotea Wilson, head of the Network of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean Women (RMAA), indicate that 80 percent of the more than 150 million people of African descent in the region are still living in poverty and have few opportunities to improve their situation, because of racial discrimination.
Blacks in Latin America also suffer forced displacement at higher than average rates, and young black males are treated as criminals and often killed "in a kind of genocide in the guise" of fighting crime, said Wilson, whose movement is active in 24 countries.
"Life has not changed for black people in the Americas," the activist said. "Public policies aimed at overcoming the problems are lacking, and we are still exploited and denied the right to land, credit, special education and health care. Things have changed very little."
To illustrate, she cited the case of Nicaragua, where according to official data the highest maternal mortality rate is found in two Caribbean coastal regions where most of the population is indigenous or black.
In these regions, maternal mortality is 373 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 63 per 100,000 live births in 2009 according to the Health Ministry (or 170 per 100,000 live births according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch).
Wilson said the limited progress made in terms of making the movement for the rights of blacks more visible and putting the issue on the public policy agenda is basically due to the work of civil society organisations, particularly the women's movement and human rights groups.
Cuban writer, theater critic, and cultural historian Inés María Martiatu emphasised the ground gained by black women in the region in terms of organising, with a view to "full insertion into society in order to achieve economic independence.
"Afro-Latin American women rebelled against slavery; they lived as escaped slaves and took part in the struggles for independence. They did not remain stuck in the role of victim; what happened is that history was written by others, and now this is coming to light little by little," said the Afro-Cuban writer.
In her view, black women in Cuba took advantage of the opportunities offered by the 1959 revolution, as shown by their presence in areas like education, health, science and culture, although they have not escaped discrimination based on the colour of their skin.
The difference with other countries, she said, is that in Cuba, discrimination is "more subtle."
"For years the official line maintained that there was no racism or racial discrimination (in Cuba). But now it has been acknowledged that black women have lost time," Martiatu said.
"The reality is that prejudice, racism and discrimination exist…and are expressed even within families, whether black or white," she said.
The issue of race is currently the focus of a debate in Cuban society, but Martiatu and other Cuban intellectuals agree that a gender focus is missing.
"There is still a long way to go. The solution, which lies in education and awareness-raising, is a long-term goal," Martiatu said, although she expressed her confidence in the new generations.
"Racism isn't solved by socialism or capitalism; it's more complex and profound than that," she stated.
"Some academics have been working on these issues, and have managed to spark debate on them, running counter to arguments that the discussion and analysis should be postponed," she said.
As Tato Quiñones, a Cuban academic who specialises in Afro-Cuban culture and religion, told IPS last year, "It must be understood that in Cuba, the question of racism was considered taboo for decades, because public exposure of it could give rise to 'fissures' in the sense of unity that was indispensable for facing the aggression from outside."
*With additional reporting by Helda Martínez (Bogotá) and José Adán Silva (Managua). (END)
via ipsnews.net
"To Stay Illegally or To Die"
March 19, 2010 · 3 Comments
I am not sure about the ethics involved in making this film or how truthful the experiences of British journalist Sorious Samura are, but “Living with Illegals,” his 50 minute documentary (made for British television) is depressing viewing. To investigate undocumented migration from Africa to the European Union, Samura (who is originally from Sierra Leone and made films about the civil war there) decides to become an undocumented migrant.
He freely mixes with migrants in Morocco, Spain, France and the UK (the final destination for most of them) and puts his life at risk: He sleeps rough, begs, trusts smugglers, and hides in trucks to cross borders. Samura is definitely pro-immigration. And after a while you root for these men. (He does not interview women migrants although you some women migrants once in the film.) In the end, you root for the migrants.At times he can’t get his head around why these migrants risk their lives for menial jobs and loneliness. One tells him: “I am ready to do any kind of job. If I have to I’ll wash the toilets, bathrooms or train stations and I’ll be very happy. Forget I am a graduate.”
Later a Sudanese migrant who has been deported three times from the UK and who Samura grows close to, tells the filmmaker: “I have no choice. What do you prefer? To stay illegally or to die?”
– Sean Jacobs
2
0Rate This
Categories: film
Tagged: documentary film, European Union, immigration, Living with Illegals, Morocco, Sorious Samura, United Kingdom
Preview “In The Land Of The Free…” (Documentary On The Angola 3)
Screening at the upcoming Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, which runs from March 17 through the 26th… a documentary called In The Land Of The Free…
Synopsis: Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King spent almost a century between them in solitary confinement in Angola, the Louisiana State penitentiary. They are known as the Angola 3.
Herman and Albert are still in solitary confinement after thirty seven years.
In the Land of the Free… is a documentary feature narrated by Samuel L Jackson that examines the story of these extraordinary men who appear to have been targeted by the prison authorities for being members of the Black Panther party and because they fought against the terrible conditions and systematic sexual slavery that was rife in the prison.
For a history on the Angola 3 and the legal cases, CLICK HERE.
Here’s the trailer (h/t E Forde):
via shadowandact.com
Smories.com is an exciting, independent and free website for kids to watch
great new stories being read by other kids.
Click here to start watching.It is also a place for children's story writers (published and unpublished, professionals & amateurs)
to get their work published online, whilst retaining all rights.We are offering a £1,000 (US$1,500) prize for the best story submitted each month.
Entries accepted from anywhere in the world. Submission is free.
The current competition closes 31 March 2010.
Click here for details and to submit your story.If you have an unpublished children's story, you can submit it here.
We are offering a £1,000 (US$1,500) prize for the best story submitted each month.
The current competition closes 31 March 2010.
You can submit it from anywhere in the world.
Submission is free. SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Not be longer than 1,000 (one thousand) words.
Text only, in English.
Must be fiction for children from 3 to 8 years old.
Poetry & rhyming stories may also be submitted.
You must be the writer or owner of the copyright.
A maximum of two stories per writer per month can be submitted.
Typos, syntax and grammatical errors will prejudice your chances of selection.
No redrafts accepted. Final versions only. SELECTION PROCESS 05 Apr 2010: We will announce a list of the 50 stories we like best. These 50 stories will then be filmed being read aloud by children.
01 May 2010: The completed films will be posted online simultaneously.
31 May 2010: The story receiving the highest number of views over the preceding 30 days will win the prize. RIGHTS AND COPYRIGHT Stories will be published online on youtube.com and on smories.com.
Full credit and copyright will be attributed to the writer.
All rights will remain with the writer.
Stories can be removed from the web at any time at the behest of the writer.
Smories.com will hold no claim to the story in any form. CLICK HERE TO BEGIN SUBMISSION PROCESS
via smories.com
ekapa // March 19, 2010 at 5:23 pm |
You are right Sean: no matter how much Samura cut corners, ethical and otherwise, it’s still very depressing. I had the same feeling about the civil war documentaries he made – questions about accuracy but conviction about the overall picture. I recently watched a documentary on Zimbabwean illegal immigrants in South Africa that raised similar questions of ethics and accuracy but was still on the whole right about the overall picture.
Justin Kraus // March 21, 2010 at 12:19 am |
Rather than depressing I found this documentary inspiring. These brave men are sacrificing everything in order to pursue their dream. The hardships that they are willing to endure put the rest of us to shame. In many ways I am envious of their passion.
ekapa // March 21, 2010 at 11:30 am |
It’s depressing that all that people with all that bravery and passion are forced by circumstances to leave their homelands to eke out a marginal existence in other countries. The effects of the loss of all that drive and talent to their home countries is incalculable.