Culture-specific narrative representations of re/membering in contemporary Māori and first Australian novels: “[P]ulling tomorrow’s sky from [the] kete”

Birk, Hanne

doi:10.1075/sin.21.11bir

Part of

Narrative and Identity Construction in the Pacific Islands
Edited by Farzana Gounder
[Studies in Narrative 21] 2015
► pp. 209–223

“[P]ulling tomorrow’s sky from [the] kete”

Culture-specific narrative representations of re/membering in contemporary Māori and first Australian novels

Hanne Birk

Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia constitute plural, heterogeneous and hybrid spaces, in which a multiplicity of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures live together but are not treated equally. How can indigenous novels contribute to ensuing transcultural negotiations of competitive and synergetic processes of re/membering in “post”-colonial contexts? What roles do the texts play in the construction processes of different versions of the past and of cultural identities? Proposed answers rely on a cultural contextualization of “classic” categories of narratology: Indigenized methods of a “post”-colonial narratology are used to interpret culture-specific representations of cultural re/membering and to outline transcultural functional potentials of a contemporary Māori novel, Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986), complemented by references to a First Australian text, Bruce Pascoe’s Earth (2001).

Published online: 20 May 2015

https://doi.org/10.1075/sin.21.11bir

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