SOURCE: THE PRINT
A SHORT NOTE BEFORE THE READ
This article is unique in capturing the genre that had gone unrecognised till now. Writing for the sake of peace! The number of awards and writings has been growing in this category instead of the efforts made in recognition.
The first Nobel Peace Prize was conferred in 1901. There are a host of civil societies, leaders, and activists - who have been awarded for their spectacular works; but there is also a literary manner of harbingering peace.
The literary kind! The printed words by far have been the most impactful. When wars began in minds, why not efforts to muzzle war start from the mind too? People who craft peace through words deserve as much recognition as activists.
The Dayton Literary Prize introduced in 2006 in the United States ‘ recognises the power of the written word to promote peace.’
Academically, how do you define peace? What peace means to you? How is peace defined differently in war-torn and urban living? Read further to familiarise yourself with the parameters that define peace.
THE ARTICLE: AN EXCERPT
How do you recognise ‘peace literature’? It is the new boom in South Asia
The number of peace prizes and literary awards in other categories keeps growing, but what stops civil society from recognising those writing for the sake of peace?
Ever since the Nobel Peace Prize was first conferred in 1901, the list of peace prizes has only grown, with honours being instituted each year to recognise the efforts of people. That was a century that saw much war. A host of humanitarian workers, social leaders, faith actors, and human rights activists have been conferred these awards for their work. However, there is a manner of peace work that warrants more recognition — the literary kind.
After World War II, the printed word has become the most popular weapon for the fascists and liberals alike. Ideological wars must be fought on literary grounds. This proposition perhaps finds its strongest endorsement in the powerful opening line of the UNESCO Constitution: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”
Those who craft these visions of peace and put them on paper deserve recognition and reward just like activists do. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only annual literary award that “recognises the power of the written word to promote peace”. Some of its renowned recipients include Margaret Atwood, John Irving, and Gloria Steinem. Introduced in 2006 in the United States, this award recognises “adult fiction and non-fiction books published within the past year that has led readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples, religions, and political points of view.”
What is peace literature?
The criteria to recognise and award peace literature, defined by the organisers of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, seems simple enough. So why aren’t there more such awards? The number of peace prizes and literary awards keeps growing, but what stops civil society from recognising those writing for the sake of peace? The difficulty lies in defining peace literature. Peace itself is an elusive idea, with innumerable ways of understanding and seeking it.
For an urban person of privilege, peace could be a lofty goal of complete nuclear disarmament, or perhaps a vacation on a luxury island. Whereas for a person living in a war zone, peace could be something as fundamental as a good night’s sleep with no threat of shelling. And then, in more academic domains, peace may be spoken of in categories such as negative peace (absence of war or conflict) and positive peace (conditions conducive to a wholesome life). Peace could even be situated in personal, social, political, institutional, and ecological contexts. Further, it is associated with a cluster of co-dependent values such as justice, equality, freedom, solidarity, dignity, and tolerance – all of which contribute toward the creation of peaceful lives and societies. Thus, any literature that engages with and upholds these ideas and parameters may be deemed as ‘peace literature’.
While this may make the genre of peace literature seem vague and vast, Anthony Adolf, author of Peace: A World History (2009), affirms that the genre is not static. In his introductory essay titled What Does Peace Literature Do? An Introduction to the Genre and its Criticism in the Peace Research Journal (2010, Vol. 42, No. 1/2), Adolf wrote that rather than attempting to define it, “it is more productive to ask what peace literature does and can do, as this leads to opportunities for thought and action”.
He emphasised that, unlike other literary genres that are defined by writers’ identities, the form or structure of language, peace literature is often identified by its stance. Indeed, the expansiveness of its scope may be sampled in his definition where he sees peace literature as “tragicomedy, doubly empathic and cathartic; as active in the limbic discursive spaces between epics and novels; as social acts that are pragmatic both philosophically and linguistically; …scholarly articles, journalistic articles, books, blog posts, tweets, interviews, videocasts, and so on. Peace literature as a genre does not rest upon formal or structural traits; it does, however, rest upon the consistent agreement and recognition of the people who produce, consume, discuss, and act upon that corpus.”