Department Speaker Series: Alice Te Punga Somerville (Professor of English, UBC)

Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki), Professor of English and Critical Indigenous Studies, UBC

 

 

Papua New Guinea writer/ scholar/ educator Steven Winduo wrote in his iconic 2000 essay “Unwriting Oceania” about the disparate locations of Pacific texts: “Scattered in various journals and anthologies are some of the Pacific writer scholars’ articles that are unnoticed as a result of their obscure existence.” Over two decades earlier, in his classic 1976 essay “Towards a new Oceania,” Samoan writer/ scholar/ educator Albert Wendt describes the Pacific region: “So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature…” I can’t help but notice that both authors use the word “scatter” even as one uses it to describe expansiveness and the other to describe fragmentation. In my current work about Indigenous engagements with periodicals in the twentieth-century Pacific, I have found myself grappling with the shape of the new literary genealogy I am attempting to create. In this talk, I will propose “scatter” as an approach to tracing transnational creative and critical networks that feel simultaneously “obscure” and “dazzling.” 

 

Reception to follow.