RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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What a Womad wants
GEORGE FOGARTY asks why the great music of the colonised isn’t accompanied by an equally great political discussion
womad
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
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DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
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SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
Womad Festival
Chartlon Park, London
THE Womad Festival, now in it’s 42nd year, has always had a political edge. Indeed, the showcasing of artists predominantly from the majority world in the heartlands of their former colonisers could hardly avoid the traces of that relationship, and is pregnant with commentary on it, regardless of the extent to which it is explicitly articulated.
But explicitly articulated it often is, and a spirit of joyful defiance — of coloniality, of chauvinism, of borders and boundaries of all hues — is in many ways a defining characteristic of many of the acts here.
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