In his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, Diderot evokes the presence of Ahutoru, the Tahitian brought back by Bougainville from his voyage around the world (1766-1769), but denies him any ability to understand what is happening to him, to make sense of his experience and his voyage. He makes her a victim, but a passive, melancholy one. He then sets her aside to portray fictitious Tahitians, to whom he gives a philosophical discourse, a denunciation of colonialism and a critique of the hypocrisies of European culture. The text is thus emblematic of the ambivalences of the Enlightenment : bold, even radical, in its criticism of prejudice, but reserving the exercise of this criticism for Europeans alone.
What can we know about Ahutoru, his year-long stay in Paris (1769-1770), his reasons for embarking with the French ? To understand his story is to revisit the history of first contacts in the Pacific. Ahutoru was not the only Polynesian to travel with the Europeans in those same years. Mai, Tupaia and Hitihiti embarked with the English on James Cook's expeditions, and Mai spent two years in London, from 1774 to 1776, before returning to the island of Huahine, northwest of Tahiti. Pautu traveled to Peru with the Spanish in 1773, was baptized in Lima, then returned to Tahiti with a Catholic mission. This year's lecture will attempt to follow these characters between Tahiti, Europe and Spanish America, so as to better understand a history woven of missed appointments and productive misunderstandings. We'll be revising many received ideas, inherited from the enchanted vision produced by 18th-centurynavigators . This implies a reflection on the plural historicity of societies, on the achievements and renewals of historical anthropology, on the history of first contacts and on how to work with rare and fragmentary sources. Should we agree to work against the archive, using the resources of the imagination to write impossible histories, as proposed by Saidiya Hartman with the notion of " critical fabulation " ? Or should we instead make the " fictions " produced by the encounter an object of historical inquiry. This introductory session argues for the second approach, and considers the consequences of this choice. It concludes with a discussion of Albert Serra's film Pacifiction (2022) and the long history of political fictions in Tahiti.
