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 co-existence 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, its revisiting of colonial histories in the difficult movement toward a national identity, ultimately, of contribution to the country's development and the right to a place in the new land.