Literary festivals as Co-Creation? Challenging territorial stigmatisation in alternative ways

This chapter takes a comparative approach to two initiatives developed by artists and cultural promoters from the Global North and South, to challenge clichés attached to French banlieues and Brazilian favelas as places devoid of the production and consumption of literary texts. The ‘Dictée des Cités’, a spelling competition promoted since 2013 in French banlieues by writer Rachid Santaki, and the ‘Literary Festival of the Urban Periphery’ (FLUP) curated in Rio de Janeiro since 2012 by writers Julio Ludemir and Écio Salles, are analysed through the lens of Co-Creation as examples of artist-driven initiatives to encourage large local audiences’ engagement with literary texts, transform literary institutions and canons and challenge stereotypes associated with urban peripheries. While the chapter seeks to evaluate the potential of large-scale literary events to change the perception of disadvantaged urban areas, it also explores differences between the Global North and South. The chapter ends with the conclusion that socially engaged arts festivals and Co-Creation events may promote similar aims, they however differ in their scale, approaches to knowledge production as well as in their strategies promoting engagement with creative methods.