Senior Research Seminar with Dr Courtney Handman (University of Texas at Austin)

Dr Courtney Handman (University of Texas at Austin)

Channels of modernity: imaginaries of colonialism and decolonization in Papua New Guinea

In this presentation, I argue that modernist discourses of circulatory primitivity have shaped projects of both colonialism and decolonization. Defined in opposition to classic theories of circulatory modernity that assume the positivity and health of increased circulation, circulatory primitivity is a discourse that labels certain places or communities as primitive for not allowing or desiring circulation. Within Papua New Guinea, circulatory primitivity was especially important in the context of not only colonial projects of governance and management, but also anti-colonial attempts at decolonization in the post-World War II era. With the continual emphasis on what seemed to be the circulatory blockages produced by Papua New Guinea’s extraordinary number of mountains and languages, I focus on how teleradios, airplanes, or lingua francas made the place seem all the more disconnected and fragmented for colonial actors who remained largely ignorant of the exchange networks so famous from 20th century anthropology. Australian administrators, foreign missionaries, and international observers kept coming back to the idea that managing the problem of circulation seemed like it could be the way to fix the colonial problem, leading to United Nations Trusteeship Council efforts to spur anti-colonial projects in Papua New Guinea by attending to how information flowed to and from New York.