The fourth edition of Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival is set to take place on April 23rd, 2024. Happening in the month of World Book Day, the three-day event strives to create a space, a collective, where a diverse set of voices – especially from the Global South – can come together to share their thoughts, vision, and lived experiences with agency.
Taking cue from the current global status quo, events, rhetoric and narratives emerging from across the world, Language and Erasure has been selected as the main theme of the festival. This decision was finalized after conversations with the festival team as well as other stakeholders involved.
Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival 2024 aims to mobilize change by initiating dialogue across language, politics, and socio-cultural boundaries. Over the past decade, humankind has seen the world grapple with increasing division, de-sensitization, and lack of compassion. Traditional and new media has played a pivotal role in amplifying such polarization through its use of propaganda, warped and divisive optics, and manipulative messaging.
Ananke believes in creating space for imagination, creativity, and dialogue as fundamental values upon which just, and equitable societies are built and sustained. Artists, poets, writers, painters, filmmakers, journalists, photographers, musicians, and audiences– all have a role to play as catalysts of change.
Modern uses of language, and by extension communication, are suffused with euro-centric ideologies and perceptions of the ‘human,’ inevitably excluding those on the ‘margins of modernity’ and deemed ‘other’. How have such oppressive exclusions, built through language, created pathways to dislocation, alienation, dehumanization, and subsequently, annihilation?
The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o reminds us that the colonized have been dis-membered through the erasure of their language.
At this year’s literary festival, Ananke invites participants to share collective and individual experiences, narratives, and histories through conversations, art, and literature that grapple with the dilemmas of language, violence, and erasure.
Together at the festival, questions will be asked as to what we mean by ‘human’. With this vision in mind, AnankeWLF’s 2024 invites individuals, communities and peoples of the world to attend the digital festival to imagine change.
A collective endeavor, Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival is produced in partnership with (in alphabetical order) Ala Books and Authors, BookBot, eShe, Kitaab, Keemiya Creatives, Neem Tree Press, Readomania, Reverie Publishers, Seagull Books, Trace Magazine, Yoda Press, Zubaan Books, and Zuka Books. Ananke’s Women in Literature Foundation’s advisors include Zubaan Books’ Urvashi Butalia, Seagull Books’ Naveen Kishore, Yoda Press’s Arpita Das, Neem Tree Press’s Archna Sharma, author, poet, translator Naima Rashid and Perera Hussein’s Ameena Hussein.
Get in touch for more information: Media@anankemag.com
