Writing Lit & Culture Seminar 13 April 12n: Prof Jacob Edmond

Our April seminar features a presentation from Professor Jacob Edmond (University of Otago).

When: Wednesday 13 April from 12.00 noon to 1.00 pm.

Where: Zoom https://deakin.zoom.us/j/82786149515?pwd=Z0xPWFlqLzZWVUVzdzhmQVVlTlVjZz09

Meeting ID: 827 8614 9515. Password: 65764920

Title: Making the News, Mapping the World: Indigenous Voices, Environmental Protest Art, and Global Studies

 Abstract:

Contemporary global literary and cultural studies, global environmental humanities, world history, and many other forms of global studies have a problem. They often purport to escape imperial, colonial, and Eurocentric perspectives only to reproduce those perspectives by falsely claiming to offer a map of the whole world. In other words, they mistake one map of the world for the world, a certain picture for the totality of pictures. This paper offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of mistaking one picture of the world for the world at large, a tale that at the same time contains lessons for avoiding the current dead end of global studies.

The tale relates to the battle over the proposal to build an aluminium smelter at Aramoana, a site located at the mouth of Te Awa o Ōtākou, the Otago harbour, very near the important marae (Māori meeting ground) of Ōtākou, and within half an hour of the city of Ōtepoti/Dunedin. The battle was significant in the political, social, and artistic history of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Taking place between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the battle involved contested pictures of the local area, of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and of the wider world. These contested pictures were produced through thousands of pages of newspaper articles, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor, through the texts of globally connected local environmental campaigners, and through major protest works by a roll call of leading Māori and Pākehā (settler colonial) writers and artists, including Ralph Hotere, Hirini Melbourne, Muru Walters, Ian Wedde, Cilla McQueen, and Brian Turner.

The cultural work of the anti-smelter campaign points to the need for an alternative to the current penchant for global studies in the humanities, one that would address the complex entanglement of Indigenous and colonial art, writing, and perspectives. Aramoana occupies a threshold or liminal position both geographically and in terms of literary and cultural history:  between land and sea, between colonial and Māori interests, between colonial environmentalism and the mana whenua (Indigenous people) of Ōtākou, between a local place and the global connectivity of the world’s largest ocean, between rightly avoiding speaking for others and wrongly ignoring others completely.

Bio:

 Jacob Edmond is a professor of English at the University of Otago. He is the author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019) and A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham University Press, 2012).