Global IssuesNight of A Thousand and One Texts
The legendary Scheherazade has exchanged her enthralling tales of 'One Thousand and One Nights' for a compact disc with 1,001 academic articles, essays and books, giving Cubans access to materials that would otherwise be very difficult to obtain.
The initiative of the Criterios Theoretical-Cultural Centre is to provide 'the greatest amount of international information that for economic or cultural- political reasons does not circulate, and is not in the bookstores or libraries' of Cuba, director Desiderio Navarro, organiser of 'One Thousand and One Texts in One Night,' told IPS.
After several months of preparation and mass e-mailings of lists of materials, organised by topic, Criterios distributed CDs, free of charge, containing texts on literature, art, cinema, theatre, music, dance, television, architecture, anthropology, race, religion, semiotics, sports, the Caribbean, and more. Of particular interest in this edition are materials on gender and lesbian and gay studies, as well as theoretical approaches to the cultural impacts of communication and information technologies.
With the CDs that came out in 2007 and 2009, Criterios has so far made 3,003 texts available that would have been nearly impossible to find in Cuba. The articles appear in languages including Spanish, French and English. Among the authors represented on the CD are French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Indian Homi K. Bhabha, a leading theorist of post-colonial studies.
In the words of the project's mastermind, the CDs are 'massive injections' of contemporary international cultural thought. 'I don't aspire to fill all of the existing gaps: that is utopian. I just want people to have a bit of an idea of how much they don't know,' said Navarro, who is also an art critic. Most of the works included in the initiative are sent directly to the editor by their authors, and the value of each ranges from six to 28 dollars, he said.
'One Thousand and One Texts in One Night' has been advertised since September as one of the activities leading up to the 40th anniversary of Criterios in 2012. What started as a section in La Gaceta de Cuba magazine over the years turned into a project that is considered unique in Latin America.
Navarro, who translates 15 languages, has weathered economic crises and lack of funding to publish more than 350 groundbreaking essays on culture, literature, and the arts, by more than 200 authors from some 30 countries, including from the former socialist bloc. In 2007, arising from an e-mail debate about Cuba's political culture in the 1960s and 70s, Criterios organised a series of conferences about the cultural impacts of what is known as the 'quinquenio gris' (five-year gray period), the effects of which are still being felt today.
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service