Copies of the DVD generated by the “Creativity in Exile” project are available (for the cost of international postage only) from me. The 100-minute disk contains performances of music and poetry, interviews, film extracts, and an audio installation, by writers and artists, forced out of their own countries by civil war, political repression, or ethnic and religious persecution.
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Creativity in Exile (Rodopi, 2004) is a volume of essays and creative work I edited from a conference that I convened at the University of Auckland in 2003. The conference brought together over 200 academics, writers and artists from a total of 47 countries, many of whom had experienced exile themselves, to present and discuss creative work by individuals who had been displaced from their homelands. The book brings together nineteen of the outstanding papers presented at the conference, on topics as diverse as: the visual arts in Colombia; fiction by displaced indigenous people; convicts and slaves as exiles; writings about the partition of Bengal; the culture of Palestinian Americans; and the significance of traditional cooking for refugee communities. These papers are interspersed with poems by contemporary writers in exile. The conference was greatly enriched by the participation of ‘local’ refugees and migrants – people from Burundi and Ethiopia, Iraq and former Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Argentina – who ensured that it remained anchored in the actual experiences of people in local communities. Accompanying the book is a 100-minute DVD presenting music, film, interviews with exiled poets and live readings of their work from a public performance during the conference.
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