{"id":2813,"date":"2019-12-30T10:29:44","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T10:29:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2813"},"modified":"2019-12-30T10:29:44","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T10:29:44","slug":"cfp-pacific-paratexts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2813","title":{"rendered":"CFP – Pacific Paratexts"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interdisciplinary symposium exploring paratexts in writing from and about the Pacific<\/strong><\/p>\n

Plenary lectures: Rod Edmond (University of Kent); Anna Johnston (University of Queensland)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, November 7-8 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n

This two-day interdisciplinary symposium investigates the role and status of paratexts in the mediation and representation of Pacific cultures, geography and history. \u201cParatext\u201d is the label coined by theorist Gerald Genette to describe those threshold devices that help shape a text\u2019s reception, including annotations, blurbs, cover design, epigraphs, fonts, format, front and back covers, glossaries, illustrations, indices, introductions, maps, prologues and epilogues and titles.<\/p>\n

Paratexts have been a frequent presence in Western literary representations of the Pacific. Consider, for example, the \u201cPreface\u201d, annotations and glossary that accompanies Louis Antione de Bougainville\u2019s Voyage Autour du Monde (1771); John Hawkesworth\u2019s paratexts for his edition of Captain Cook\u2019s An Account of the Voyages (1773); the famous marginal gloss that accompanies Samuel Taylor Coleridge\u2019s 1817 version of \u201cThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner\u201d; Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s deconstructive \u201cPreface\u201d and footnotes for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym\u00a0of Nantucket (1838); Pierre Loti\u2019s epigraphs, notes and parallel transcriptions of Tahitian and French for The Marriage of Loti (1880); and Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s ethnographic annotations for his Polynesian Ballads (1890). In
\ntranslations, travel writings, missionary accounts and ethnographic studies, paratexts have provided a crucial site for the mediation of Pacific cultures and the establishment of scholarly authority. Pacific writers such as Jos\u00e9 Garc\u00eda Villa and Albert Wendt have used paratexts to create a space for their voice and assert their identities in conditions that suppress and exclude indigenous and hybridic voices. On the other hand, Patricia Grace has argued that writers from \u201csmall population cultures\u201d should not have to \u201cother\u201d their languages and cultures by providing glossaries and other explanatory information in footnotes for readers.<\/p>\n

This symposium will explore how paratexts facilitate the juxtaposition of different writings, the crossing of generic and cultural boundaries, the collision of different languages and intersections between the factual and the fictional, the creative and the imaginary and the historical and ethnographic. These devices can operate legalistically to provide documentary evidence of economic, historical, legal and political claims asserted in the core text. They can be deployed to make manageable the foreignness of a text by either domesticating it or intensifying those aspects that are considered foreign via exoticization. In some cases, paratexts are utilized to assert dominant racist paradigms and contain indigenous voices within boundaries considered acceptable. In others, they provide a surreptitious means of authenticating and archiving indigenous perspectives. Multiple paratexts also offer a means of staging contestatory and contradictory views of the Pacific and the position of the speaker in relation to it.<\/p>\n

This symposium examines the various ways in which paratexts are used to mediate the Pacific in literary and non-literary writing in different languages. Questions for exploration include:<\/p>\n