Connecting literary cultures

towards a methodology for ethical encounter and exchange

Abstract

What are the assumptions (institutional, individual, cultural, structural, artistic) of encounter and
exchange? How can they be measured and tested? And how do they play out in creative writing and
literary communities in the region broadly defined as the Asia-Pacific? This paper argues that
methodologies enabling an examination of the ethics and power relations inherent to intercultural
encounters must be predicated on creative uncertainty; be collaborative; and be testable in the sense
that 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 of
encounter. The emergent methodology holds a number of overlapping principles including ethics as a
process, holding (prepositional) space, and uncertainty and the not-yet-made.