The fourth edition of Ananke’s annual Women in Literature Festival 2024 will officially open its digital doors on April 23, unwrapping a plethora of conversations that spark impact and mobilize change. The festival aims to initiate conversations and dialogue that give rise to positive narratives. The digital festival is a flagship event of Ananke’s Women in Literature Foundation.
The Women in Literature Foundation is a collective launched by Ananke – a new media and development platform creating inclusive conversations in the virtual world. Under the umbrella of Ananke Labs, the Women in Literature Foundation is an acknowledgment of the literary genius, creative journeys, and diverse lived experiences of women and girls.
The organisation aims to spark conversations at the cusp of gender equality, intersectional feminism, women’s rights, human rights, technology, climate, migration, politics, and society in literature as well as other creative and art forms. Ananke WLF envisions to activate thought-provoking conversations about how literature, art and other forms of creativity produced by especially women, as well as other vulnerable groups can be highlighted, promoted, and celebrated globally via digital documentation, dialogue, and more.
Division, de-sensitisation, lack of compassion have become the benchmark of this decade. Both traditional and new media have played a pivotal role amplifying polarisation through propaganda, warped or divisive optics in messaging among other forms of media warfare. As a consequence, one man’s hero is another man’s villain, with no working middle ground, no room for dialogue.
All forms of art and creativity are not just noble pursuits, these are the fundamentals on which fair, equitable and tolerant societies are built and sustained. Artists, poets, writers, painters, filmmakers, journalists, photographers, musicians and more – each have a catalyzing role to play in sparking positive change. With this vision in mind, AnankeWLF sets forth to transcend language, politics, socio-cultural boundaries, bringing people together through its 2024 Festival.
With the main theme, Connecting Coloniality, Politics & the Culture of Language with Dehumanization in Modern Thought, Ananke’s WLF 2024 edition envisions to shed light on the coloniality of power and how it is funneled into linguistic expression. Language, and by extension communication, is largely suffused with the euro-centric ideology and perception of humanitas – the human being, excluding those on the ‘margins of modernity’ and those representing what is deemed the other or otherness. As a consequence, this also gives rise to the question how this oppressive, racialized exclusion creates pathways to dislocation, alienation, dehumanization and subsequently annihilation.
Has language gained too much power? Taking cue from Wa Thiong’o’s posit that the colonial being has been dis-membered through the erasure of their languages, Ananke’s WLF will delve into collective and individual experiences, narratives and historicity of erasure.
Similar to AnankeWLF’s past festival speakers that welcomed eminent names including Urvashi Butalia, Naveen Kishore, Arpita Das, Dr. Meena Kandasamy, Aanchal Malhotra, Anam Zakaria, Osman Hanif, Sabyn Javeri, Annie Zaidi, Safinah Danish Elahi, Suchitra Vijayan, Huda Fakhreddine, Dipankar Mukherjee, Myriam Tadasse, Nathalie Etoke, Leonora Miano, Lela Abulela, Mai Al Nakib, Dr. Zeba Mir-Hosseini, Jayson Iwen and more, the 2024 edition is set to unveil yet another stellar list of distinguished thinkers of modern time.