Nights of Storytelling : A Cultural History of Kanaky-New Caledonia / Raylene Ramsay.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Ramsay, Raylene, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

New Caledonian literature (French)--History and criticism.

New Caledonian literature (French).

Folk literature, New Caledonian (French)--Translations into English.

Folk literature, New Caledonian (French).

New Caledonian literature (French)--Translations into English.

New Caledonia--History.

New Caledonia.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (409 p.)

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, [2011]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I. Kanak (Hi)stories

Chapter One. Origins and Orality

Chapter Two. Pathways and Interconnections1

Chapter Three. Cultural Initiation

Chapter Four. Transformations

Part II. Exploration and First Contact

Chapter Five. James Cook

Chapter Six. The Forsters

Chapter Seven. D'Entrecasteaux

Chapter Eight. La Billardière

Chapter Nine. Nineteenth-Century Perspectives

Part III. Early Texts

Chapter Ten. Colonial Representations of Kanak Culture

Chapter Eleven. Portraits of Colonial Society

Chapter Twelve. Living in the Bush

Chapter Thirteen. Women's Lives

Chapter Fourteen. The Voice of the Other

Part IV. The Modern Period

Chapter Fifteen. From Colonial Regimes to Their Contestation (1870-1946)

Chapter Sixteen. Rewriting Colonial History

Chapter Seventeen. Kanak Rewriting of Colonial History

Chapter Eighteen. Recovering Custom

Chapter Nineteen. A Cultural Politics of Independence

Chapter Twenty. Critique of Custom

Chapter Twenty-one. Writing Together

Chapter Twenty-two. Métissage and Cultural Hybridity

References

About the Editors

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Aug 2019)

ISBN:

9780824871284

0824871286

9780824860356

0824860357

OCLC:

808778103