Possession? Captain Cook in the Political Imagination
Cook Colloquium:
Possession? Captain Cook in the Political Imagination
12-13th July 2007
Hosted by University of Technology, Sydney
James Cook was a man who undertook a particular journey for a set of different purposes; military, scientific, personal and political. He became in Australia, Captain Cook, a figure, variously remembered and forgotten through national political imaginings and integrated into everyday life via modes of consumption, geographical namings and ordinary activities. In this sense Cook is both a marker of the most violent and unresolved tremors in our national imagining and of our banal everydayness. That is Cook reminds us and is bound into national thinking around Indigenous Sovereignty, immigration arrival and ideas of environmental and scientific development and he is also known to us as Captain Cook who chased a chook, as a Bunnykins statue, as the name on hundreds of streets, parks and rivers. Up north we can even eat him in the shape of the Captain Cook pig. There are as Paddy Wainburranga said so presciently, 'too many Captain Cooks'.
This Cook Colloquium is conceived as a two day conversation between experience, scholarship, disciplines and desires. It will bring together twenty-five selected people to think and talk in the role of paper givers or roving discussants. Through that conversation we hope to create a convocation of the best in contemporary thinking around the figure of Cook and the key themes he evokes including possession, the ordinary, sovereignty, ethnography, whiteness, processes of cultural history making and many more. We expect and encourage disagreement and irritation but we will make every effort to sustain those important energies alongside pleasure and passion!
For comments and further information, contact Jan Idle.
