Re-mapping the Archive

The third event of the ‘Living Archives’ series explores the presence of archives as records of individuals and communities. Absences across archives, marginalized spaces, and attitudes towards languages will be explored. Poet, novelist, and memoirist Marilyn Bowering’s More Richly on Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod traces the life of the obscure 17^th-century Gaelic poet who was exiled and linked to witchcraft. Through misty journeys in the Scottish Hebrides, Bowering weaves rare facts about McLeod’s impact and legacy while ruminating on her own personal journeys as a writer.

In her collection Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonized, Māori scholar and poet Alice Te Punga Somerville writes of love, anger, and alienation in a collection that dismantles the convention of italicizing foreign words. Poems intricately explore how individuals, cultures, and objects belonging to Aotearoa, wider Pacific, and Indigenous peoples are seen and treated in spaces such as archives and workplaces. Furthermore, Te Punga Somerville’s project ‘Writing the New World’ explores Indigenous engagements with periodicals in the twentieth-century Pacific, and the different forms that archives can take.