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Nights of Storytelling - A Cultural History of New Caledonia (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R1,478
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Nights of Storytelling - A Cultural History of New Caledonia (Hardcover, New)
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Total price: R1,498
Discovery Miles: 14 980
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Nights of Storytelling is the first book to present and
contextualize the founding texts of New Caledonia, a country sui
generis in the relatively little-known French Pacific. Extracts
from literary, ethnographic, and historical works in English
translation introduce the many voices of a diverse culture as it
moves toward "independence" or the "common destiny" framed by the
1998 Noumea Agreements. These texts reflect the coexistence of two
major cultures, indigenous and European, shaped by the energies and
shadows of empire and significantly influenced by one another. From
the founding stories of Kanak oral tradition to the contradictory
reports by Cook and d'Entrecasteaux, from the accounts of the
French colony's difficult first destiny as a penal settlement to
the construction of settler mythologies, the book investigates the
nature of overlapping spaces created by cultural contact between
Europe and the Pacific. The final section focuses on the literary
effervescence of the contemporary period and its revisiting of
colonial histories in the difficult movement toward a national
identity. Historical romances describe the harshness of life for
freed convicts, the impossibility of love between a liberated
prisoner and a free settler. Sagas of late-nineteenth-century
indentured laborers seeking a living on the nickel-rich main island
speak similarly of physical struggle, sacrifice, and ultimately, of
contribution to the country's development and the right to a place
in the new land. Kanak texts disseminate that community's oral
culture and largely silenced voice through the printed word. In a
world still moving from colonial to postcolonial frames, the
engagement of these works with vital contemporary questions of
historical legacy, legitimacy, and cultural hybridity is intensely
political. Aesthetics is a political ethics as the different
communities of New Caledonia experiment with artistic and textual
forms to write their distinctive place in the land. Nights of
Storytelling is a collaborative work complemented by La nuit des
contes, a subtitled DVD of images and text, which features key
works read or spoken, generally in the original French. It provides
visual and aural access for the book's Anglophone readers to the
specific cultural, linguistic, and geographic contexts of these
historical and literary works.
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