A Rotterdam activist tells the story of his neighbourhood’s recent effort to make its own reading room after the local library branch closed.
In Berlin, writer and philosopher Fred Dewey created a functioning polity of literature by inviting small groups of strangers to meet, discuss, and read out loud from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.
With examples from his award-winning book, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, Polity of Literature illustrator Ken Krimstein tells us how graphic novels and comics can strengthen literature’s capacity to host politics.
The great polyglot writer, Sybille Bedford, was a mid-20th-century fanboy of court trials. This chapter from her underrated 1961 book The Faces of Justice recalls the drama of court proceedings in Munich, Germany.
When refugees arrive in Europe they must tell their stories to state bureaucrats who control their fate. But is the state capable of hearing what they have to say?
In the Terezín ghetto, near Prague, Jewish children later murdered by the Nazis created and shared their own secret “zines,” acting politically in the face of terror and impending death.
In the 1970s American prisons began to allow in-prison writing programs. In the 21st century, with the prison population booming, the American Prison Writing Archive went online to connect incarcerated writers to readers outside.
![“Reading <em>1984</em> [in prison] was a big mistake…”](https://www.artseverywhere.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PoL04-banner.jpeg)
Prisoners can be voracious readers. Journalist Marta Bausells asked several about their favorite prison reads and the ways that reading grants them agency or belonging.
Turkish courts staged the trial of activist and philanthropist Osman Kavala several times, always returning him to prison despite a variety of outcomes. Simon(e) van Sarloos attended once, and tells us what it’s like when the state scripts our destinies.
While writing and reading, even an imprisoned man can be free. Turkish novelist Ahmet Altan wrote this text during the first of almost five years he spent unlawfully detained in a Turkish prison.
The first piece in the Polity of Literature series examines the ways that literature—the political space of writing and reading—can host the gathering of equals that Aristotle called a “polity,” and grant agency and belonging to the stateless, incarcerated, or displaced.
In the world’s most secure prison, ADX Supermax, an artist-turned-chaplain and a local muralist set out to bring art to some of some of the world’s most notorious federal inmates as a means of transformation and, hopefully, redemption.