Latin America Brief, September 28, 2024.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author has been widely praised for refusing to accept an award from the Noguchi Museum in New York City because of the institution’s ban on wearing black and white keffiyeh scarves, which ‘ show solidarity with Palestine.
Author Jhumpa Lahiri, who was due to receive the prestigious 2024 Isamu Noguchi Prize, turned down the award on Wednesday in a gesture of support for three former New York museum workers who were fired for wearing a keffiyeh last month.
Social media users around the world, as well as pro-Palestinian activists, praised the author’s decision and said that the “principled” and “moral” stance of a respected figure in the world literature greatly influencing.
“Jhumpa Lahiri has decided to withdraw her acceptance of the 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award in response to our updated dress code policy,” the museum said in a statement.
“We respect your point of view and we understand that this policy may or may not be in line with everyone’s views,” he said.
In August, the museum, founded nearly 40 years ago by Japanese-American designer Isamu Noguchi, announced that staff could not display clothing or accessories that conveyed “overt political messages , slogans or symbols” during working hours.
Lahiri was born in London, England, and moved to the US when she was three years old. In 2000 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. He has since published several fiction and non-fiction books in English and Italian, after living in Rome, Italy.
She was one of thousands of academics who signed a letter in May to US university presidents, expressing solidarity with the protests on university campuses against “Israel’s” genocidal war in Gaza, saying that ” “It was an unimaginable destruction.”
In May, a wave of encampments and occupations spread across the US and, later, around the world, as students staged mass demonstrations to demand that their educational institutions cut ties with companies associated with the Israeli regime.
The University of California, Los Angeles, received a particularly violent police response to a student protest camp in early May, when dozens of people were arrested, gassed or hit with rubber bullets.
In many cases, universities and public institutions have often banned the keffiyeh during the last eleven months of the war in Gaza, and many public figures have worn it despite receiving negative comments. .
SOURCE: Spanish Al Manar
2024-09-28 22:32:48
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