Naslov
Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: words of salvation, words of resistance

Autori
Klepač, Tihana

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
Acting out and Thinking ahead: Art/Activism, Literary ProVocations and PerFORMativity in Literatures and Cultures in English / - , 2022, 35-35

Skup
Acting out and Thinking ahead: Art/Activism, Literary ProVocations and PerFORMativity in Literatures and Cultures in English

Mjesto i datum
Online ; Cosenza, Italija, 17.02.2022. - 18.02.2022

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains, ICTs, resistance

Sažetak
As Hannah Arendt wrote „a life without speech and without action, … is literally dead to the world ; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (1958). In acting and speaking we show who we are, we make our appearance in the world. Next, according to Arendt, education is a developmental process that instils in children a sense of the surrounding world whilst presenting them with the possibilities for action generative of ‘something new, something unforeseen by us’ (1977). Thus we can understand education as a shielded site of experimentation to learn what citizenship practices are in informal settings. And one such site are definitely social media and text messaging apps. In as much they hold the possibility of becoming transformative of citizenship. If we also take into account that over the past decade, there has been an expressive personalisation of politics (Tilly 1978 ; Bennett 2003 ; Bennett and Segerberg 2012) taking roots the activism of Boochani becomes a prime example of the connection between artivism and activism. In an attempt to escape political persecution in Iran, Berhouz Boochani ended up in Manus Island prison. In the course of his five-year imprisonment he began a remarkable career in journalism reporting in Farsi about what was happening there in the form of tweets, texts, phone videos, calls and emails, but mostly through Whatsapp messages sent to his friend and translator Omid Tofighian. It was through „his belief in words: their beauty, their necessity, their possibility, their liberating power” (Flannagan) that Boochani defied the century long Australian racist policies which culminated in off-shore prisons and the government going through extreme lengths to prevent refugee stories from being told. But words are enormously powerful and Boochani’s alerted the world to Australia’s crime. It was words that got him out of the prison and into the academia, a position he is now using to expose the challenge of authoritarian practices of different states (Diamond and Plattner, 2012) through his social media accounts, articles in the mainstream media, and most recently, film, through which he is able to stimulate sensitivity for the issue transnationally (Pickerill and Krinsky 2012).

Izvorni jezik
Hrvatski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija, Povijest, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti, Književnost

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