[ANU Pacific.Institute] PAH Seminar Mon, 21 Jul

[Nicholas Mortimer]

Dear All,
Please see below for details of next Monday's Pacific and Asian History seminar.
With apologies for cross posting.


School of Culture, History and Language
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
 
Department of Pacific and Asian History
2014 Seminar Series

 
Monday, 21 July 2014, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Seminar Room B, Coombs Building (9), Fellows Road, ANU

 
Imagined Futures in the Past: Place, Race, Empire, and Nation in the Mapping of Oceania
 
Bronwen Douglas
Department of Pacific & Asian History, CHL
ANU College of Asia & the Pacific
 
Since 1511, recurrent couplings of fact and fantasy have constituted the European invention, naming, regionalization, and mapping of the fifth part of the world, known as Oceania after 1816. Using comparative critique of maps as historical texts, this paper investigates cartography's varied graphic realization or anticipation of scientific, imperial, racial, colonial, and national visions. I range across the representational gamut from local charts and surveys to the regional and global syntheses they underpin. Charts and surveys are the largely empirical outcomes of located technical expertise, often in dialogue with Indigenous guides or intermediaries. Mappae mundi are the teleological products of science in the service of geopolitics, often embodying strategic misdirection and more or less fervid imaginings. Regional maps occupy the ground between, at once pragmatic, synoptic, and prescriptive and sometimes inflected by Indigenous presence. I outline successive vignettes of the fifth part of the world, or Oceania, as mapped and named from the 16th to the early 21st centuries. By adopting an existential stance that suspends knowledge of outcomes and leaves space for thinking other futures, I show how uneasy liaisons of empirical observation, deductive reasoning, and wishful thinking literally coloured Euro-American maps, culminating in the appropriated colonial palimpsest underlying modern maps of Oceania's nations.
 
 
Bronwen Douglas is adjunct associate professor in Pacific & Asian History. She recently publishedScience, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania 1511-1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

All welcome. You are invited to join the speaker for drinks after the seminar at Fellows Bar, University House 

Enquiries: 
Danton Leary <danton.leary at anu.edu.au>
 
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