“Song as Contested Worlding in Bougainville’s “Journal de l’expédition d’Amérique” (1756-58)”

Please join us for an upcoming talk by Olivia Ashley Bloechl on Wednesday, February 19th at 4pm in HQ 134. A reception will follow!

“Song as Contested Worlding in Bougainville’s Journal de l’expédition d’Amérique (1756-58)”

In this talk, I propose that song and its interpretation were sites for contested worlding in the context of the multi-Indigenous military coalitions formed by British and French interests during the Seven Years War. My main source is a campaign diary kept by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the future Pacific explorer who at the time was an aide-de-camp to Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, commander of the French forces in North America. Reading a 1757 diary entry describing a French-allied Anishinaabe warrior’s recitation of a dream gifted by his manidoo, I note the entry’s juxtaposition of conflicting interpretations of the warrior’s singing: one quoting an approving Anishinaabe elder, and the other presenting Bougainville’s own view of it as imposture. The warrior’s recitation and the diary entry’s conflicting interpretation of it, I find, enacted contested visions of this world-in-formation. I stress the iterative, multi-scalar nature of songish world-making in conclusion, because I find it helpful for grasping the larger, cumulative effects of so many micro-acts in early modern colonial settings.