Trained to be producers and consumers in a marketplace of literature, most writers don’t know how to be citizens of a polity. In the concluding essay of the Polity of Literature series the editor, Matthew Stadler, proposes an experiment to help us: The GOAT PoL (The Geopolitical Open Atlas of The Polity of Literature).
Like the act of pruning a plant, we hurt to trigger growth. In the scarring processes we heal our wounds of memory, of thought, of soul.
In the midst of a lockdown, Simon(e) van Saarloos questions their relationship to time, to dreams, to public space, and to the sexuality of voles.
Travis Ray ComesLast committed a terrible crime, but what should happen next? Stories of injury and stories of repair involve us all. We must tell and receive these stories collectively.
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.