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Focus Asia: Language and Power in Pacific and Asian History - Dr Lewis Mayo

Language and Power in Pacific and Asian History
Dr. Lewis Mayo. Lecturer. Asia Institute, University of Melbourne

No-one directly experiences the worlds that were in existence before they were born. What we know about those worlds relies on what is related about them either in speech or in writing. This means that any engagement with the past worlds that were there before us is a matter of language. In cultures that do not use the written word, the past is transmitted by spoken language. In literate societies, what we hear about the past is augmented by what we read about it. In societies where the past is recorded as moving images with sound accompanying them, we see and hear representations of past worlds which may be direct recordings of events or they may be recreations of those events. Language is embedded in a world of images, both those that move and those that are stationary.
Each of these ways of engaging with the past - the spoken word, the written word, recorded, replayable speech and recorded, replayable images - has a set of power relations that surround it. In the history of societies in the Pacific and Asian region, the power relations that affect language situations are of diverse kinds, reflecting the huge range of different languages and language modalities in those societies. In this talk I will be looking at the power and language issues that are involved in a range of Pacific and Asian historical situations that I have been interested in over the years and will reflect on how historians do and do not reflect on these questions.