Holding the mirror to archive: French reading cultures and colonialism in Canterbury Waitaha

Although the British captured the territory, the role of French culture in the colonial project – in the establishment of cultural norms and social hierarchies – was to continue long after Canterbury Waitaha became British. This position of cultural dominance arose due to the unprecedented prestige of French literature and culture on the global stage, the mobility of the book and colonists in a far-flung nation wishing to establish shared and recognised identifiers of culture.

Yet, in spite of French literature’s importance globally and in nineteenth-century Aotearoa, French is often missing from the intellectual and cultural histories of this country. Such silence supports an Anglocentric narrative, creating not just a cultural but a structural asymmetry, amplifying the traditional divisions of class, gender, language and race through relative silence based on those divisions. This raises obvious issues regarding representation and the documentation of history as it is written into relief.

Holding the mirror to archives located in Christchurch and Banks Peninsula, this presentation celebrates archival material and reading history as means to recovering a forgotten area of our intellectual history and often-overlooked voices. Relationships to reading material speak to identity, social organisation and cultural asymmetries, offering inroads to historical experience. A history of reading, after all, is the history of the context in which it occurs, just as the archive reflects the politics of the contemporary moment.