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University of California Press
Open Access

Circulations

Modernist Imaginaries of Colonialism and Decolonization in Papua New Guinea

by Courtney Handman (Author)
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: May 2025
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 241
ISBN: 9780520416000
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations, 2 maps

About the Book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In Circulations, Courtney Handman examines the surprising continuities in modernist communication discourses that shaped both colonial and decolonial projects in Papua New Guinea. Often described as a place with too many mountains and too many languages to be modern, Papua New Guinea was seen as a space of circulatory primitivity—where people, things, and talk could not move. Colonial missionaries and administrators, and even anticolonial delegations to the United Nations that spearheaded demands for Papua New Guinea’s independence in the 1950s, argued that this circulatory primitivity would only be overcome through the management of communications infrastructures, bureaucratic information flows, and the introduction of English. Innovatively bringing together analyses of communications infrastructures such as radios, airplanes, telepathy, bureaucracy, and lingua francas, Circulations argues for the critical role of communicative networks and communicative imaginaries in political processes of colonialism and decolonization worldwide.

About the Author

Courtney Handman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea.