MEITS Blog

Long before its international associations with events in New York, 11 September has marked Catalonia’s national day, the Diada. Originally celebrated to pay tribute to those involved in the defense – and eventual loss – of Barcelona in the Spanish War of Succession (1714), the day has become increasingly politicized since 2012. Last year´s Diada was celebrated with a multitudinous pro-independence demonstration, less than a month before the referendum on Catalan sovereignty. 

One hundred years ago, Europe was the site of a revolution of languages without precedent in scale and speed in modern history. In a matter of mere months in 1917-18, a host of languages side-lined and often suppressed in the Russian Empire – Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Crimean Tatar, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian – suddenly became vehicles for the formal declaration of sovereignty over swathes of territory.

Probably the most ill-famed Colombian writer, Fernando Vallejo, has laid the foundations for a genre often referred to as la sicaresca antioqueña [the ‘sicaresque’ novel from Antioquia] after the publication of his first novel, La virgen de los sicarios, in 1994. The term, used for the first time by Héctor Abad Faciolince, playfully subverts the meaning of the term picaresca –the Spanish picaresque novel– by substituting the word pícaro [rogue] by sicario [assassin]. While constituting a genre of its own, la sicaresca combines different genres: chronicles, novels or films that revolve around the figures of assasins at service of the drug mafia.