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Abstract
The decision to cast a historical essay in the form of a conversation has very obvious ethical and even political implications, of which William Carlos Williams seems to have been aware when in 1924 he wrote one such piece ("Père Sebastian Rasles") on the missionary work of the French Jesuits in Maine at the turn of the seventeenth century. In my essay I consider the key role that conversational modes and metaphors play in the articulation of a dehierarchizing multiculturalist historiography. Specifically, I analyze the two main conversational moments in "PSR" (Williams speaking in Paris with the French man of letters Valery Larbaud and Rasles speaking with the Abenaki Indians of Western Maine) in terms of the featured interlocutors' varying commitments to listening to the voice of a cultural other.