Laïcité and the Gap of Cultural Assimilation

The situation felt primal, imminently violent; distant epigenetic memories of war and bloodlust shivered in my veins. Turn the music off, I shouted, the lyrics are misogynistic. The truth was, there was no time to even consider what they might have been about in any larger sense; the music was sudden-onslaught deafening, terms for female genitals were thundering throughout a public space occupied mostly by excited, electrified young men: to be a woman in this scenario was to feel under threat in a way that was simple and visceral. 

Read an essay on cultural assimilation in Europe, the appropriation of American Black subculture by minorities, and gaps in understanding on Three Quarks Daily.

Berlin Between: Parataxe Symposium

From Gesa Stedman’s beautiful Berlin keynote to Donna Stonecipher, Lucy Jones, Ben Ferguson, Crista Siglin, Ann Cotten and many more, the entire Parataxe Symposium at the Literarisches Colloquium is now online in digital form.

I read from my novel Like Lips, Like Skins (German edition: Kreisläufe) in German and English, and before that had a talk with our brilliant moderator Shane Anderson about Berlin, about going from being a visual artist to becoming a writer, about the difficulties of translation, about what Berlin was like in the ’80s and what it’s like for young people facing the housing market in Berlin today.

From 39:10.

Check out the Stadtsprachen website for videos of all the panels.