Alexandre Rocha*
São Paulo – In coming months Arab and South American professors and researchers are going to have a new tool to exchange information: the site South America-Arab Countries Research Centre/Library. It should go on air up to the beginning of the month of July and will be edited by Brazilian professor Paulo Farah, an Arab culture language and literature professor at the University of São Paulo (USP).
"The idea is to promote cultural cooperation, offering a space for academic debate between Arabs and South Americans," stated Farah, who is also the director of the University of São Paulo (USP) Arab Study Centre.
The site will have its content published in three languages (Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic) and is going to include poetry, photography, article and academic event promotion sections as well as an area for exchange of information between researchers. The main focus of the works will be the area of humanities, areas like librarianship, anthropology, history, literature, linguistics and geography.
The establishment of the site is one of the initiatives in the cultural area that is a result of the Summit of South American – Arab Countries, which took place in May last year in Brazilian capital Brasília. Another measure in the same area that will soon be put in place should be the publication of magazine Sikr, "thought" in Arabic.
The publication, to be released at the end of this year or the beginning of next year, is going to include studies, essays and articles by Arab and South American authors. Also edited by Farah, most of the content of the magazine will be in Portuguese, Arabic and Spanish. But different from the site, it is also going to include some material in English and French. The idea is for the magazine to be six-monthly.
Initiatives like this have the support of the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, which recently signed an agreement with the Brazilian Foreign Office (Itamaraty) for joint work in activities that follow through with the decisions made at the Brasília Summit.
The site and the magazine are part of a more ample work of cultural cooperation, which involves the creation, in Algiers, of a physical library to house Arabic and South American works and the translation of works of reference from both regions.
According to Farah, researchers from various Arab and South American countries have been participating in this exchange. In Brazil, apart from him, the professor of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Paulo Gabriel Hilu, is also participating in the coordination of the work.
Farah, aged 34, started working in policies for the generation of closer ties between both regions in 2004, at the invitation of the Itamaraty. A grandson of Syrians and Lebanese, he is a master in linguistics and a doctor in literary theory.
Suggestions and further information
Paulo Farah
E-mail: paulof@usp.br
*Translated by Mark Ament
