In Circulations, Courtney Handman examines the surprising continuities in the ways that modernist communications discourses shaped both colonial and decolonial projects in Papua New Guinea. Often described as a place with too many mountains and too many languages to be modern, Papua New Guinea was seen as a space of circulatory primitivity—where people, things, and talk could not move. Colonial missionaries and administrators, and even anticolonial delegations of the United Nations Trusteeship Council, argued that this circulatory primitivity could be overcome only through the management of communication infrastructures, bureaucratic information flows, and the introduction of English. Innovatively bringing together analyses of radios, airplanes, telepathy, bureaucracy, and lingua francas, Circulations argues for the critical role of communicative networks and communicative imaginaries in political processes of colonialism and decolonization worldwide.
About the Author: Courtney Handman is the author of Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea (University of California Press). She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches about language, media, and the religious and political forms of circulation.
This event is sponsored by Anthropology and The Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies (CEAPS).