The impact of non-governmental writers' organisations on freedom of expression

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Literary writers have often seen their poems, plays, essays and novels censored on grounds of offence, blasphemy, libel, political sedition or obscenity and they have also often been eloquent defenders of the right to free expression. This project investigates the intimate relationship between literature and free speech, but focuses on its particular features in twentieth and twenty-first century history. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, insisted on the 'right to freedom and expression...regardless of frontiers'. But writers had, since the 1920s, been claiming that, literature 'knows no frontiers', as the organisation International PEN put it in 1927 and that the dissemination, readership and future significance of literary works could not be owned by nation states. The relationship between literature, censorship and free expression has been of considerable and longstanding interest to lawyers and legal scholars, (Thomas [2007], Dhavan [2008]), literary critics (Pease [2000], McDonald [2009]) and intellectual historians, (Collini [2010], Darnton [2014]. Recent histories of human rights, meanwhile, have analysed the cultural battles over what was 'universal' about rights in the lead up to the UDHR, and its subsequent history (Moyn [2010], Mazower [2009, 2012]). The specific relationship between literature and rights, meanwhile, has also been of considerable interest (Hunt [2007], Slaughter [2007], Anker [2012]). This project engages with this wider body of scholarship, but shifts the terms of the debate. It argues that in order to understand the impact of twentieth and twenty-first century writers on understandings of free expression it is necessary to analyse different sites of cultural exchange, looking beyond governments, law and declarations,. This project argues that the non-governmental writers' organisation has also played a crucial role. It focuses on one writers' organisation, International PEN, but also looks at associated organisations in its three key areas of focus: the UK, South Africa and India. International PEN was founded in London in 1921 but quickly expanded, with centres springing up across Europe and the US in 1922 and 1923, and in China (1924), Canada (1926), South Africa (1927), Argentina (1930), India (1933), Japan and Brazil (1934), amongst many others. Its members have included some of the most prominent writers of the long twentieth century, including Rabindranath Tagore, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie. Many member writers have had their works censored; and many of them have written influential essays, poems, plays or novels reflecting on the boundaries of free expression. Not only have these writers, and these writers' organisations, engaged intellectually with attacks on free speech; they have also influenced government policies, international charters and legal interpretations through campaigning, educational and translation initiatives. When PEN began in the 1920s its internationalism entailed an expansionist and supposedly apolitical spirit of international 'friendliness' through encounters with writers from other cultures. The organisation's understanding of internationalism, however, soon changed, firstly in its attempt to protect the 'international' rights of exiled and persecuted German and East European writers in the 1930s, and then in the fierce internal disagreements over whether PEN should defend the right to free expression of Nazi and Fascist collaborators such as Ezra Pound and Knut Hamsun. No less controversial was the organisation's securing international financial and legal influence after acquiring consultative status to UNESCO and the UN in the late 1940s and its subsequent role in the cold war when a humanist 'internationalism' became deeply politicised. The project aims to produce a comprehensive account of the organisation in order to understand what international free expression means today.