As some of us will have noticed from the blogroll on the right, the Catalonia Direct blog has just highlighted a talk by Matthew Tree in which he gives an overview of the situation as he sees it, primarily from a cultural and language perspective.
Matthew is English and has lived in Catalunya for 26 years. Last year, in this post, I linked to an essay he had written based on a talk he gave at the London School of Economics. This year, he was one of the speakers at an event called the Emma Dialogues at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Col·lectiu Emma is a group of academics that seek to correct some of the more misleading articles that appear about Catalunya in the world media.
His essay gave a very moving account of the "low-level conflict" that exists between Catalunya and Spain, and this talk covers much the same ground; but it's nice to hear him say it rather than just see it in print. Unfortunately the video on the VilaWeb site streams very slowly (at least it did for me) and that made it almost unwatchable, so I've taken the liberty of putting it on another server which should stream much better. It's a 40 minute talk with a question and answer session at the end.
Alternatively you can listen to just the audio here:
2 comments:
Thank you for sharing, my heart goes out to the Catalan people.
Its time for the Cymry to show the same strength, but then again most don't even know their own history so in turn don't understand what the fuss is all about. Time for the eduction system to give them a crash course.
Very interesting video! Why the hatred of the Catalan language by the Spanish? In Wales we only have to contend with the hatred of the terminally indoctrinated monoglots, deprived of their own language, and taught to be proud of the face. Those and the few, thankfully ever scarcer, tourists and white settlers who seem to think that it is their right to listen in to other people's conversations, and become angry when that conversation is conducted in Welsh! But, given the continuing oppression of Catalan, and the fact that it is thriving, perhaps Welsh could do with a bit more oppression as a spur to further growth!
I do agree with treckie that the Kings and Queens of England should be dropped from the Welsh national curriculum to make room for Tywysogion Gwynedd, Hywel dda, and so on - give our children a true sense of perspective!
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