Aotearoa/New Zealand: An unsettled state in a sea of islands

• Jo Smith
• settler colonial studies, Vol 1 (2011)

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Image: divemasterking2000 / flickr

28 February 2011This paper considers how ways of talking about New Zealand national identity still privilege a settler-centric perspective. The paper begins from the premise that settler colonialism is an ongoing project that 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. Somewhat akin to an obsessive-compulsive disorder, settler colonialism 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. Drawing on work in the field of Pacific Studies and Pacific arts, the paper considers how a form of Oceanic consciousness might act as an antidote to settler colonialism’s obsessive-compulsive disorder. The paper argues that the imaginative, aesthetic and inventive dimensions of Pacific and Indigenous art and media contribute to an expanded vocabulary for thinking settler-native-migrant encounters within a contemporary settler nation such as Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Image: divemasterking2000 / flickr