Friday, September 30, 2022

8.00–9.30 pm ET
[VIRTUAL]
Suap Lidah, or French Kiss
Festival Preview Performance by ila and bani haykal
Moderated by Jee Leong Koh
Free with RSVP
With ASL access provided by Pro Bono ASL

Suap lidah is a colloquial term in Malay for French kiss, where the word “suap” translates to feed or feeding, and “lidah” to tongue; to give a French kiss is literally to feed someone your tongue. Exploring translations, mistranslations, and the untranslatable, "suap lidah" is a video work that plays on the ambiguity and poetics of language and the act of translation. From the intimacies of gestures to the ambiguity of words, the work looks into the relationship between the Malay and English languages, and it thinks through what is absent, omitted, and preserved when our tongues struggle to express (and suppress) intentions, sensibilities, and habits.

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

7.00-9.00 pm ET
Opening Party
Reading by Laurie Stone and YZ Chin
Co-presented by The Evergreen Review
By Invitation
Note: Anthony Vahni Capildeo is unable to participate. YZ Chin is reading in their stead.

An evening with two brilliant writers. A Trinidadian-Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction, Anthony Vahni Capildeo FRSL is Writer-in-Residence and Professor at the University of York, an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford, and Charles Causley Trust Poet-in-Residence. Their most recent book Like a Tree, Walking was a Poetry Book Society choice and shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize. Laurie Stone is author of six books, most recently Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening (Dottir Press). Winner of the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle, she was a longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation, and critic-at-large on Fresh Air.

Thursday, October 6, 2022

3.00-5.00 pm ET
[VIRTUAL]
Translation as Archipelagic Thinking
Panel Discussion with Kristine Ong Muslim and Shelley Fairweather-Vega 
Moderated by Alta L. Price
Co-presented by Gaudy Boy
Free with RSVP
With ASL access provided by Pro Bono ASL

Committed to carrying over the sense in one language to another, translation may, in fact, replace one language with another. For instance, the translation of a Chinese-language novel into English eliminates the need to learn Chinese in order to read the work. How may translation practice what Édouard Glissant calls “archipelagic thinking,” which he defines as “one that opens, one that confirms diversity — one that is not made to obtain unity, but rather a new kind of Relation”? Translators Kristine Ong Muslim (Ulirát: Best Contemporary Short Stories in Translation from the Philippines) and Shelley Fairweather-Vega (Amanat: Women’s Writings from Kazakhstan) join moderator Alta L. Price, a fellow translator, to consider this question.

Program Change:
7.00-9.00 pm ET
Insular Fantasies, Capitalist Nightmare, Revolutionary Dreams
Opening Address by Gina Apostol
Moderated by Vivek Narayanan
Venue: The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, NY, NY
Free and open to everyone who provides proof of vaccination at the door

Program Canceled
7.00-9.00 pm ET
Islands on the Road
Opening Address by Anthony Vahni Capildeo
Moderated by Vivek Narayanan
Co-presented by PN Review
Venue: The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, NY, NY
Free and open to everyone who provides proof of vaccination at the door

Gina Apostol has written five novels. She won the 2022 Rome Prize to work on a novel-in-progress, The Treatment of Paz. Her forthcoming book, La Tercera, is out in May 2023. Publishers' Weekly named her last book, Insurrecto, one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Gun Dealers' Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Her first two books, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Philippine National Book Award. She grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines and lives in New York City and western Massachusetts. She teaches at the Fieldston School in NYC.

Trinidad and Tobago's Carnival famously is a time that the dead enjoy. They can dance among the living. But what transformations do the living manifest, on the common roads they are keeping open through fusion and conflict, commercialism and protest? Some islanders flee Carnival, even as those in the diaspora 'return' to the island. How to read the spaces in the dance? Capildeo draws on their experience of traditional masquerade (Fancy Sailor), to draw wisdom from the road, considering the archipelagic radiations from the figure of the masquerader, and inferring models for literary creativity.

Friday, October 7, 2022

3.00-5.00 pm ET
Diasporic Poetics
Panel Discussion with Timothy Yu, Chris Campanioni, and Nazry Bahrawi
Moderated by Jhani Randhawa
Co-presented by the Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
Venue: New York University, 244 Greene Street, NY, NY
Free and open to everyone who provides proof of vaccination at the door
Note: Anthony Vahni Capildeo is unable to participate.

In Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia, poetry scholar Timothy Yu argues that “racialized and nationally bounded "Asian" identities often emerge from transnational political solidarities, from "Third World" struggles against colonialism to the global influence of the American civil rights movement.” As such, Asian diasporic writers develop and maintain a critical stance towards the idea of the nation-state. Joining Yu in this discussion are three poets and scholars from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, Trinidadian-Scottish poet and non-fiction writer Anthony Vahni Capildeo from the UK, Latin American poet and scholar Chris Campanioni from the US, and Malay Singaporean literary scholar Nazry Bahrawi from Singapore.

7.00-9.00 pm ET
Re-envisioning the Epic for Our Time
Jay Gao, Hamid Roslan, and Vivek Narayanan
Moderated by: Dorothy Wang
Co-presented by Ethos Books
Venue: The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, NY, NY
Free and open to everyone who provides proof of vaccination at the door

A dramatization of the exploits and sorrows of royalty and aristocrats, the epic seems too outdated to speak to our current realities. And yet contemporary poets find themselves drawn to it. In Imperium, Jay Gao reimagines radically episodes from Homer’s The Odyssey to explore forms of absolute and intimate power, whereas in After, Vivek Narayanan fractures and recomposes Valmiki’s Ramayana to show the epic’s lasting relevance. Hamid Roslan proposes in parsetreeforestfire yet another take on a long and sustained poetic work: a constant interrogation of the reader’s own subject position.

Saturday, October 8, 2022

3.00–5.00 pm ET
Archipelagic Constellations Gaiutra Bahadur, Krystal A. Sital, and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
Moderator: Lily Philpott
Co-presented by Asian American Writers’ Workshop
Venue: The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, NY, NY
Free and open to everyone who provides proof of vaccination at the door

7.00-9.00 pm ET
Free Speech in an Unequal World
Closing Address by Cherian George
Moderated by Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
Venue: The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, NY, NY
Free and open to everyone who provides proof of vaccination at the door

[POSTPONED TO 2023]
10.00–12.00 midnight ET
Two Venues One Open Mic (New York and Singapore)
Hosted by Advocate of Wordz and Stephanie Dogfoot
Co-presented by Nuyorican Poets Café
Venues: Nuyorican Poets Café (236 E 3rd Street, New York, NY) and Crane Arab Street (148 Arab Street, Singapore)

The history of forced and voluntary migration of South Asians to the Caribbean and Malay archipelagos is marked by gaps and erasures in the official record. In Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, Gauitra Bahadur pursues the traces of her great-grandmother who left India for Guyana as an indentured laborer, whereas in Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad, Krystal A. Sital discovers her grandmother’s and mother’s secrets only when her grandfather lapses into a coma. Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, the co-author of Singapore: A Biography, has not attempted a family history but offers some reflections on the challenges around this in Singapore’s neocolonial, Chinese-dominated society, in relation to the politics of language, race, class, and skin color.

Human beings are better able today than ever before to create and access knowledge and ideas. Yet societies remain mired in ignorance and intolerance, causing harm to themselves and ideas. Cherian George considers why developing norms of public discourse for a diverse planet has proven so difficult.

For the first time, Singapore and New York are joined by the simultaneous, live Zoom-cast of exciting spoken-word performers from both countries. Coming at you from the famous Nuyorican Poets Café in NYC and the preeminent Singaporean open-mic series Spoke & Bird, this event is not to be missed.