Led by Director and Chief Exec, Matthew Webb, over 120 editors, writers, and other contributors including Troy Onyango, Faith Adiele, Nicolas D. Sampson, Marie Baleo, Anne Louise Avery, Richard Ali, Robin Hemley, make Panorama possible.
...Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s DAWN issue. This bright, awakening, and challenging composition comprises a multitude of world views, places, and experiences. We explore new beginnings, transitions, dawnings, and realisations. New landscapes are explored. New places ventured. New experiences, in familiar environs, are retold. New is often seen as positive, yet change is often more complex, and we look at this too. With our return comes an expanded scope. Whilst retaining a core travel emphasis, we have added ‘place’ and ‘nature.’ Essays in Panorama have always been place-based but this increased focus on the natural world opens up new avenues to explore. With this in mind, we have added a new Ecology & Conservation Editor, Julia Knights, who uses this first issue to speak with world-leading botanist Ghillean Prance. The result is an enlightening and frightening conversation about the Amazon rainforest.
...Like a dead cat, I lay in bed. Facing the broken air-conditioning on the other side of the room. The temperature here, in Saudi, plummets to nine degrees Celsius every winter, from December until February. He stroked my cheek. In his palm, the cold of three o’clock in the morning. I glanced his way only when he handed me a lit joint.
...Tonight, we would not cross the King Fahad causeway. Despite dreadfully wanting to see the film in a movie house, I knew Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac would never be released in Bahrain. So we streamed it instead. For more than four hours, in the five chapters of volume 1 and three of volume 2, you fixed your gaze at me while your fingers clutched on your misbahah. Was it because the movie was not subtitled in Arabic? Or because of the heroine’s mouth-watering orgasm?
...In my hands, Alice Munro’s short story collection Dear Life. Saudia’s flight to Dammam from Riyadh is delayed. We sit next to each other. You sport a pair of white Lacoste shoes. For a little while now, I’ve been staring at your wristwatch. I’m not interested in the brand. What I’m intrigued about is why you’re always sneaking a look at it.
...Within the tradition of Philippine literature written in Filipino, an œuvre distinct from Philippine Anglophone literature and literatures of other local Philippine languages, the dagli (see Ang Dagling Tagalog: 1903-1936, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007) is a short prose piece which may be flash fiction or flash nonfiction or prose poem, or all, or none of them. It is a genre that proliferated in vernacular magazines, newspapers, and periodicals at the dawn of the 20th century after the Philippine-American War and the Treaty of Paris when the Americans occupied the Philippines, and the English language and American literature was imposed by the state (see Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and US Imperialism in the Philippines, New York University Press, 2011).
...Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s SPACE issue. From the very small to the enormity of our imaginations, essays grow from the furtive earth-bed of mushroom forests to the stars. Granville Carroll’s afro-futuristic cover artwork “Becoming” places us in space. John Angerson provides the obligatory rocket-propelled photos. Matilde Gattoni reminds us that one’s freedom to explore space can suddenly be taken away. The connection with space doesn’t stop there. Melissa Tuckman’s aptly titled poem “Space Junk” connects space debris to modern living. A new section on New Nature Writing probes the world beyond our urban confines. In the second outing for Decolonising Travel, there are excruciating, painful stories, sexual imaginings in the steam room, and personal reflections on historical ties to oppression; all whilst giving writers who have come through VONA/Faith Adiele’s writing programme space to share their work. We finish the issue with a stroll through London — the most ethnically diverse world capital — through the lens of Books Editor Nicolas D. Sampson.
...“… you remained misunderstood because you could not speak the language well enough. One learned to accept the frustration of not being able to express the full range of who you were, to be satisfied with incomplete answers to questions when if asked in another language, you would say more. You learned to bite your tongue when it came to arguments you could not win because you forgot the Mandarin terms for scam or unfair. The language beat you to a pulp even before you opened your mouth. Even then, it was always a question of how long have you lived when they did hear you speak. How long does it take to belong to a place?”
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