Aotearoa/New Zealand: An Unsettled State in a Sea of Islands
Jo Smith. “Aotearoa/New Zealand: An Unsettled State in a Sea of Islands.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 1, no.1, 2011, pp. 111-131
“settler-native-migrant encounters within a contemporary settler nation such as Aotearoa/New Zealand.” 111
Already I have questions! Why is NZ only a ‘Contemporary Settler nation’?
“For settler ships not only transported people, produce and cargo from one place to another, these ships carried with them the norms of Western property law, religion, and gendered and classed relations. When these ships and peoples fetched up on distant shores, they encountered Indigenous forms of sociality. Both ship peoples and shore peoples were irrevocably transformed in these encounters.” 111
“Accordingly, the settler nation must continually code, decode and recode social norms and social spaces so as to secure a meaningful (read: proprietary) relationship to the territories and resources at stake.” 112
“Somewhat akin to an obsessive-compulsive disorder, the settler nation is deeply vexed by its own precarious identity, a precariousness that at the same time extends its powers throughout the social matrix that is the nation.” 112
“In the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand we can see these forms of governance at work in a variety of social spaces, most clearly, in the fields of the arts and communication (literature, fine art, film and television). These fields help build up, disseminate and contribute to, meaningful conversations about belonging and community. These conversations take place in the colonising language of English; they assume a shared investment in notions of nationhood and they change over time. They are expressive of social and economic contradictions and they help express group and self-identity.” 112
“In the field of New Zealand film and literature studies a key topic of discussion concerns problems to do with how texts reflect what and who ‘we’ are. The ground, however, shifts in terms of defining this elusive national identity,” 112
National identity is described as a question, one which usually has multiple competing answers.
“This question or problem of national identity is dispersed across a range of academic and creative areas, and is met with a variety of answers.” 113
“Current models of national identity acknowledge the artificial and fundamentally displaced nature of this identity” 113
“Yet, is there not something in these repetitions of uncertainty and un-placeability (How To Be Nowhere in author Ian Wedde’s terms) that reveals national identity as a problem peculiar to the settler subject?” 113
“By occupying the landscape prior to colonisation, Maori may well have generated the problem of ontological uncertainty for the settler subject, and while colonisation enacted displacements of another kind for Maori, the problem of ‘how to be nowhere’ is not a central problem for tangata whenua as such.” 113
“Metaphors and tropes that place New Zealand at a distance from European or North American metropoles reinscribe other elsewheres as the hidden centres of settler culture. These imaginary centres function as cloaking devices that obscure more productive affinities and affiliations that settler being in place – and taking up of space – inaugurates.” 114
“According to art critic Robert Leonard, the postcolonial gothic references the unfinished business of colonisation and the spectral traces of this traumatic past that haunt the everyday” 114
“New Zealand landscape as a haunted and unheimlich terrain – a treatment of landscape made orthodox by Pakeha (settler descendants) painters such as Colin McCahon.” 114
“Leonard understands the gothic as a tendency in art practices that emerged as a response to the bicultural themes of early 1990s art. While Leonard suggests that some Maori artists have played on this theme, (in particular, Shane Cotton’s 2006 show ‘Maori Gothic’), he admits that the gothic is ‘principally a Pakeha thing’.” 114
“Maori artist Michael Parekowhai’s giant inflatable rabbits Cosmo McMurty and Jim McMurty (2006) are used as evidence of this unease. His ‘disturbingly Disney-like’ inflatables provide a rich metaphor for a settler colonial context where introduced species tend to multiply with devastating effects.” 115
“Niuean-born John Pule’s Tukulagi Tukumuitea/Forever and Ever (2005) – a work featuring ‘porous red stains’ – is framed as expressive of dispossessed land and Pule’s experiences as a migrant freezing worker in South Auckland.” 115
"The New Zealand Project exhibition catalogue is Lisa Reihana’s portrait, Dandy, a work from her Digital Marae series (2001-ongoing). This work features a mid-length portrait of a Maori man in colonial clothing with a full moko (facial tattoo). Reihana’s piece is a reenactment of colonial portraiture photography, a repetition of othering that reworks stereotypical discourse to produce uneasy affects. Presumably this sense of disquiet comes from the unlikely coming together of signs of Western modernity (the finely detailed costuming of a colonial gentleman) and Indigenous tradition (the full moko of a Maori warrior or rangatira).” 115
“Francis Pound’s outstandingly detailed The Invention of New Zealand: Art & National Identity, 1930-1970 (2009) sets out to map the artistic, literary and critical discourses that worked to consciously create a national identity and a specifically New Zealand high culture during that period.” 116
“Taking issue with Ernest Gellner’s 1983 contention that New Zealand national identity is homogenous and British, Williams identifies three distinct nationalisms, post-settler Pakeha, Maori and bicultural, each of these categories disclosing ‘its own separate phases of development, revisionary tendencies and internal differences’.” 117-118
“Williams calls these categories ‘micronationalisms’, and this attention to micro-level narratives of belonging chimes with Horrocks’ notion of national identity as a ‘changing field of forces involving many conflicts and local differences’”118
“Williams ends his range of ‘micronationalisms’ in the late 1990s, at a time when biculturalism was a dominant discourse.” 118
“Many Pakeha argue that through the fact of long-term occupation, Pakeha are now indigenous to Aotearoa/New Zealand” 124
I actually disagree, we are not native but if we go by that logic neither are the Maori because they weren’t born here they were voyagers and came across the land.
“The stakes for expanding existing paradigms of political thought in a settler colonial context are high. New Zealand is now entering what some call a post-settlement era where many tribes have successfully negotiated compensation for historical wrongs” 125
“By claiming to be indigenous to Aotearoa/New Zealand, contemporary settler subjects forget the fluid logic that underpinned colonial encounters.” 125
“The work of Indigenous film pioneer, writer and activist Barry Barclay reflects a form of Oceanic cosmopolitanism in his commitment to embedded filmmaking practices that reach across raced and ethnic differences.” 126
