(An abstract for a paper to be presented
at the LALALAND Conference.)
My paper will explore the various texts of identity, representation and
construction as presented in eighteen selected New Zealand novels, films and
poetic works. In so doing it will try to engage with the semiotics of
contact and the various diasporic, immigrant, exilic and expatriate notions
of this country, alternatively known as the Land of the Wrong White Crowd.
The alternative realities, asymmetries and linguistic aesthetics of Pakeha
New Zealand and their textual collisions with the Maori race will also be
explored, much as Shashi Tharoor has done for India in his seminal
revisionist, eclectic and postmodernist work, The
Ingrate's Indian Novel. My
paper is offered in homage from one subversive to another. The selected New
Zealand texts are:
