Aotearoa — New Zealand

Abstract

This chapter focuses initially on the background and historical context of writing by Pakeha (white settler) and Maori women. Early settler writing was pioneering, like that of Canadian and Australian women (Chapters 11 and 9). This led to rather refined romance, and genre writing. Notable among early white New Zealand authors is Katherine Mansfield, and among contemporary writers the internationally acclaimed Janet Frame. Writing by Maori women only came into prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly after the Booker Prize success of Keri Hulmé s The Bone People (1984). Work by Mansfield, Frame, Hulme, Patricia Grace and other contemporary women writers is considered here, largely concentrating on their treatment of women’s roles and constraints, on issues of establishing and maintaining gendered and ethnic identity.

For Maori women in a colonial setting (we avoid using the term post-colonial since we believe that this country remains very much colonial), much of ourselves has been denied, and hence, for many Maori women there is an ongoing struggle to centre ourselves, to deconstruct colonial representations and to reconstruct and reclaim knowledge about ourselves. Maori women have been struggling with such a process from the margins, and many have said that in order to fully release such a process we must locate ourselves at the centre. This includes an inverting of dominant discourses that define Maori women as ‘Other’, seeking to make ourselves visible and to create space for Maori women’s stories, opinions and voices to be heard, we must provide forms of analysis that ensure that issues of race and gender are incorporated and their intersection engaged with.

(Johnston and Pihama, 1994, p. 95)