Publisher's Synopsis
Liberation Lit is a landmark collection of art and criticism of social change: contemporary liberatory fiction and criticism, poetry and visuals. What is art in face of torture, aggression, domination? Art may be liberatory. Liberatory art helps build and power a just, egalitarian, and free culture, society, politics, people. The artworks of Liberation Lit are gathered toward that end - to engage, to en-lighten, to liberate. Lib Lit favors fiction that may be deemed too partisan or didactic or overtly factual and political for publication by most corporate presses. This anthology primarily includes fiction, poetry, and visuals - plus personal narratives, essays, interviews, blog posts, criticism. The issue features three focus sections: 1) US in Iraq, 2) Prison, and 3) Kenya. Our view is that didacticism or other overt liberatory content (e.g., abundant implicating or enlightening public facts as foreground or background to some private narrative) need not necessarily rule out the use of significant formal aspects of ambiguity or other aesthetic aspects that commonly enhance fiction. Accomplished aesthetics, far from overwhelming or muddling central purpose and power in works of art, may function to generate and enhance the most vital liberatory elements. We call the works included in this anthology liberatory, a remarkably neglected literature descriptor. The works are normatively left or progressive - and broadly speaking: geopolitical. Many are class focused. Race issues are prominent - gender, less so, as it turns out here. In contrast to other existing anthologies, Liberation Lit consists largely of "geopolitical" lit (broadly understood) that is left progressive - including especially fiction with a strong focus on class and place, also race, often with an activist or agitational edge. The anthology contains especially engaged works of literature. Art for social change. All artworks are ideological. Certain ideologies and topics are distorted, marginalized, or buried by the literature establishment. Liberation Lit makes room for such vital artworks.
