Connecting literary cultures

Abstract

What are the assumptions (institutional, individual, cultural, structural, artistic) of encounter andexchange? How can they be measured and tested? And how do they play out in creative writing andliterary communities in the region broadly defined as the Asia-Pacific? This paper argues thatmethodologies enabling an examination of the ethics and power relations inherent to interculturalencounters must be predicated on creative uncertainty; be collaborative; and be testable in the sensethat they allow artists and researchers to ‘meet’ structures of power and ethical knots through evolving,creative-led, iterative, practices. This paper is interested in what might be understood as a pedagogy ofencounter. The emergent methodology holds a number of overlapping principles including ethics as aprocess, holding (prepositional) space, and uncertainty and the not-yet-made.