UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary by Sarah Brouillette;

Author:Sarah Brouillette; [Brouillette, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2019-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 2. International Book Year Logo. 1972. UNESCO.

Responsibility for book development was given to one unit within the UNESCO Secretariat, which served to focus the organization’s disparate book-related activities and to instill in the organization a sense that the development of book industries was one of its core concerns. The same Czechoslovakian resolution of 1964, which claimed that books foster “mutual understanding and economic and social development” and called for action to stimulate production of low-priced books for the newly literate, invited René Maheu to present for 1967–1968 a coordinated program “to promote the production and distribution of books in the developing countries.”29 Regional meetings on book development followed in Tokyo in 1966, in Accra in 1968, and in Bogota in 1969. These were followed by a meeting in Cairo in 1972.

The programming that arose from these meetings contrasted quite starkly with UNESCO’s earlier book-related efforts. The shift in thinking about the role of the book can be neatly summarized in the growing tendency to slot discussion of book-related programming under the heading “mass media” rather than under “arts and culture”; the first report on the progress of UNESCO’s turn toward book development, titled Books for the Developing Countries, is number 47 in Reports and Papers on Mass Communication. The Collection of Representative Works had been focused on translation of the world’s esteemed literatures into English and French; it was, as we have seen, more about facilitating Western acquisition of knowledge of “other” cultures than about fostering genuine cross-cultural exchange. In contrast, the programming that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s stressed that the lack of indigenous cultural production would not be rectified by this kind of flow of cultural works from the “lesser known” languages into the dominant tongues.

Indeed, whereas UNESCO’s original constitution speaks of promoting the “free flow of ideas by word and image” and supporting measures to “give the people of all countries access to the printed and published material produced by any of them,” by the 1970s these goals appear to be in conflict. If the flow is “free,” will that not ensure the dominance of the already developed industries and thus, in fact, prevent people from accessing materials that do not originate in a few powerful nations? Moreover, is the problem simply one of access to materials or should the focus rather be on the content of what is available, since a failure to support local cultural production may mean a severe limitation on what certain communities are able to communicate about their own experiences, values, and goals?

The research UNESCO supported at this time grappled with precisely these questions. Robert Escarpit’s Révolution du livre, published in French in 1965 and in English the following year, states that the hunger for books could only be overcome by “a vast collective effort bringing into play all the scientific, technical, and mechanical resources of the advanced civilizations, by a profound and systematic reform of social structures, by a concerted world policy which will affect many other sectors.”30 His

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