Call for Papers<\/p>\n
New Perspectives on James Cowan<\/p>\n
A One-Day Symposium<\/p>\n
\u00a0Centre for Research on Colonial Culture and the Alexander Turnbull Library<\/p>\n
National Library, Wellington, 21 February 2014<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
James Cowan is best known for his official history of the New Zealand Wars, but his significance for the production and circulation of knowledge about M\u0101ori in the late colonial era covered a broad range of subjects. Alan Mulgan wrote after Cowan\u2019s death in 1943 that more than anyone else, he had \u2018shown us how to think as New Zealanders\u2019. Mulgan signaled here not only Cowan\u2019s prolific writing, but also his cross-cultural engagement from the 1890s to the 1940s. He was himself a figure of the type he so admired: the cultural go-between. Although his work often purveys the racial ideologies of his time, Cowan\u2019s early use of oral historical methods, and familiarity with a wide range of M\u0101ori informants, effected the transition to print of much that would not otherwise have been circulated in P\u0101keh\u0101 contexts, or recorded in print.<\/p>\n
Cowan\u2019s reputation has fluctuated in response to shifts in cultural politics, writing and historiography. His work began to attract contemporary scholarly attention with an article by Chris Hilliard in NZJH<\/em> in 1997. Stories of the New Zealand Bush<\/em> has been republished recently with a critical introduction by Alex Calder. The Adventures of Kimble Bent<\/em> was read on National Radio in 2011, and re-written as a graphic novel, and film-makers have drawn on his work over decades. Some dimensions of Cowan\u2019s work invite closer study: his significance for iwi history, his photographic collection, and the personal life of this particularly colonial figure, for example, would repay investigation.<\/p>\n For this one-day event, we invite papers which evaluate Cowan\u2019s contribution to colonial encounter and colonial memory from a wide range of perspectives.<\/p>\n