Connecting literary cultures: towards a methodology for ethical encounter and exchange

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.