A ceremony was scheduled at Frankfurt Book Fair to honor Adania Shibli with the 2023 LiBeraturpreis award for her novel, Minor Detail. However, the award was cancelled soon after the Hamas attack on Israel. This revocation only reaffirms the need to explore the nuanced writing of writers like Shibli on the irrefutable ways through which violent and genocidal histories exert their power on the present. After all, the violence that is portrayed in her book speaks of the horrors of any genocidal machinery, whether Hamas or IDF, that violates the freedom and rights of any citizen across the world. My paper presentation is an essential argument on how genocidal narratives can’t be exclusionary. One cannot condemn the Hamas attack and then renounce award for a book like Minor Detail that denounces another genocidal narrative. This paper presentation explores the complexities of historical trauma, individual accountability and the enduring impact of violence on both victims and perpetrators.

Furthermore, this paper will emphasise on broadening the general meaning of the term “censorship”. In “Censorship and the Female Writer”, Luisa Valenzuela calls censorship as “a hydra with its many heads”. For Valenzuela, censorship could also suggest “a very strong Freudian negation—[for a reader] to avoid the pain of confronting a reality [beyond what one is conditioned to think]”. In essence, censorship then signifies the act of suppressing or stifling perspectives different from one’s own. Renouncing Shibli’s award is an attempt to suppress the Palestinian literary voices that materialise the pain and suffering of Palestinian people on global platforms and therefore a case of selectively censoring the genocidal narratives in general. It is significant to challenge this kind of censorship since it poses extreme dangers to build space for democratic and diverse discursive practices where no one genocidal narrative is bigger than the other and there is equitable space for all these narratives to coexist as a cautionary note that “Never Again for Anyone”.

This talk explores the legacy of protest and dissent in Belarus, highlighting how memories of these events are documented and preserved as forms of resistance. The talk presents the work on the recent publication Belarus—Faces of Resistance as an attempt to memorialize the experiences and stories of those who stood against authoritarianism in Belarus. In contrast to the narrative of collective memory shaped by state-sponsored interpretations, this work underscores the significance of personal and collective efforts to document dissent from below. The presentation demonstrates how these preserved memories contribute to a counter-history that both contests and complements official narratives, offering insights into the challenges of democratization in post-Soviet spaces. It also addresses the question how the methods of Comparative Literature can be applied in Public Humanities.

The long title is deemed necessary in trying to convey the multifaceted and extremely complex situation in Serbia, which began a few years ago with mostly localized protests against the mining giant Rio Tinto's plans to mine lithium in Serbia agricultural and fruit producing region. The Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, and his government have mainly acted as PRs for Rio Tinto, as have the US Embassy to Belgrade, and top echelons of the EU, during their recent visit to Belgrade, organized specifically for this purpose.

On November 1, 2024, with the fall of the roof of the Novi Sad train station under reconstruction, which killed 15 and severely maimed 2 more people, the protests against government's incompetence, secret contracts selling public goods and lands, and general corruption, have reached their peak. As I write this, tens of thousands of Serbian people continue to protest in the streets daily, exposed to government bullies' physical attacks, regime media targeting, and illegal Secret Service interrogations and detentions of dozens of students, even minors.

The symbol of the protest became the "bloody hand," from the accusation that the Serbian government, in attempts to hide its own incompetence and corruption in the case of the fall of the train station roof, but also to protect Chinese investors involved in the restoration, has blood on its hands.

On January 13, 2025, Efraim Zuroff wrote a column for the Jerusalem Times, accusing Serbian Theater actors, who end their performances by raising red hands to the audience, of using the "Hamas symbolism."

The final element in this story is the Serbian government public response to the "bloody hands" protest symbol, by drawing the red middle finger on its own posters and pamphlets.

For the sake of protecting Western economic interests (Rio Tinto excavating lithium in Serbia, rather than in much richer lithium beds in Germany), the Serbian protests have been either misunderstood or downright misrepresented in the, especially Western media, linking them to Russian interference and misinformation campaigns (New York Times, Aug. 18, 2024). The Efraim Zuroff opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post, on the other hand, has a slightly different history, and is linked to the Israeli advisors to the government of Aleksandar Vučić, in the business of discrediting the justifiable disatisfaction of the Serbian people.

By using documentary media evidence, video recordings, and media theories, this paper will explain the ramificiations of Serbian contemporary protests for European, and global politics.

Indigenous communities from the North East of India have been telling their stories to the world in the yarn of the region with endurance, resistance and resilience. Such traditions offer culture as a site of struggle and also account for the socio-cultural changes in the North East by locating trauma, the politics of tradition and continuity, the ecological space.

In his 2018 book, "Strangers No More", Sanjoy Hazarika writes of old and new struggles in the region: “The problems and alienation caused by the non-stop application of AFSPA and the Disturbed Areas Act along with other laws such as the Nagaland Security Regulations Act have created a huge gap of mistrust between individuals and communities in the states caught up in this trouble and the central government and its representatives.” (Hazarika 2018: 341) Situating the role of the protest within local, national, transnational contexts and temporalities in Karbi Anglong, this paper would focus on the turbulent history of conflict and fragmented selfhood in the Northeast of India with particular reference to the Karbi Youth Festival, an event organized by the indigenous communities of Karbi people from Karbi Anglong, Assam, India.

In 1974, Karbi Youth Festival (KYF) was first held in Karbi Club as a form of protest and resistant against the ongoing debates on language in the remote town of Diphu in January coinciding with New Year celebrations. It was a small affair lasting for three days and drew only a limited attendance. But it made a huge impact among the youth and students. Over the years, the KYF grew in strength and prestige as rural youth and students rallied solidly behind it in spite of state government’s apathy, refusing to give any financial assistance. The sustained impact of the festival initiated the possibility of moving beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization.

The Karbi Youth Festival provides newer opportunities to confront painful histories by ensuring that the festival ground transforms into a site of reclamation and resistance. In the cartographic imaginary, Karbi Anglong, as reiterated by the annual Karbi Youth Festival, has existed and survived over centuries through its myths, legends, songs, dances, artistic traditions as well as through its conflicting history and moribund politics. Most importantly, the Karbi Youth Festival takes cognizance of differentiation rather than assimilation, whereby language plays a mobilizing force in identity formation within the Indigenous Karbi community. The Festival is indicative of cognitive constructs that foster cohesive identity and a source of empowerment and agency. Through the vivid history of the Karbi Youth Festival, this paper would foreground conversations that must be heard, of art that must be seen, of photographs that must be envisioned, of dances that must be re-discovered and of stories that must be retold, again and again.