Nights of Storytelling : A Cultural History of Kanaky-New Caledonia

__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. Nights of Storytelling is the first book to present and contextualize the founding texts of Kanaky, 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.

One of the most important and popular premodern Korean novels, The Story of Hong Gildong is a fast-paced adventure story about the illegitimate son of a nobleman who becomes the leader of a band of honest outlaws who take from the rich and punish the corrupt. Despite the importance of the work to Korean culture, studies of the novel have been hindered by a number of myths, namely that it was authored in the early sixteenth century by statesman Heo Gyun, who wrote it not only in protest of Joseon-dynasty laws on the rights of illegitimate children, but also as a manifesto of his own radical political ideas.

In the book, Minsoo Kang reveals that The Story of Hong Gildong was most likely written by an anonymous writer whose primary concern was appealing to the increasing number of readers in the late Joseon looking to be entertained and that the myth of Heo's authorship can be traced to the writing of literary scholar Kim Taejun in the 1930s. Following a detailed examination of the history and literary significance of the novel, Kang surveys the many afterlives of the hero Hong Gildong, who throughout the decades has appeared and reappeared in countless revisionist novels, films, television dramas, and comics, even inspiring the creation of a Hong Gildong theme park in South Korea. He shows how the story was altered, distorted, and reinvigorated during and after the Japanese colonial period in both the North and the South for political, social, and literary purposes. While demonstrating the continued relevance of the novel and its hero in Korean culture up to the present day, Kang makes it clear that such narratives have served mostly to distance readers from a better understanding of this classic work.

Accompanying videodisc, entitled La nuit des contes : mise en image de textes calédoniens / produced by Deborah Walker-Morrison and Neil Morrison in 2008, contains ... "approximately three hours of recorded material ... Texts included in the DVD are indicated within Nights of storytelling[.]"--Page 10