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This article focuses on the contribution of Maori writers to the reconstruction of New Zealand’s national profile, with special reference to Patricia Grace’s novel Baby No-Eyes. This process has been articulated around the need to destroy colonial images and preconceptions and has allowed them to gain visibility in a society which for a long time had remained blind to Maori cultural specificity. But whereas gaining visibility constitutes an essential part in their process of cultural recovery, the article also focuses on the simultaneous need to destroy the preeminence of visual material as the main constituent the country’s national identity and stresses the capacity of these writers to delineate their ethnicity through a double process of imag(in)ation more in agreement with contemporary needs, as Grace’s works particularly reveal.

This article analyses Lydia Syson's Mr Peacock's Possessions as a neo-Victorian Robinsonade. In order to assess the contemporary pertinence of the format, I organize my discussion around the notion of un/settlement, a concept which applies to both the frustrated process of colonial domestication of the island depicted in the novel and to the author's project of writing back to the narrative and ideological codes of the Victorian Robinsonade. The term "un/settlement" is also useful to explore the novel's engagement with the violent colonial history of the region, which resurfaces in the present forcing the characters (and the author) to recover and narrate those stories and thus settle their debt with that past. The article starts by contextualizing Syson's novel in relation to a long tradition of castaway narratives, and then moves on to discuss the novel in the light of neo-Victorian and postcolonial preoccupations with the possibilities and limitations of historical revision and reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 2020, on the wave of the Black Lives Matter Movement, statues and public monuments became focal points of political struggle, perceived by many as symbolic reminders of pervading western imperial legacies. Yet, the debate over public memorialisation is far from new. Starting from the 2020 BLM protests in Britain and going back to previous campaigns, this article contextualises the toppling, effacing and removal of well-known statues of colonial agents in Britain, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and examines artistic interventions which appropriate, challenge and shatter static historical interpretations of imperial figures and events. Our contention is that these interventions constitute diverse forms of performative and re-storied resistance reflecting transnational demands for redress and reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the YA paranormal romance series Telesā by Samoan writer Lani Wendt Young to discuss how the author repurposes generic conventions to portray island identities and material realities as nuanced and complex. This is accomplished by revising three key island tropes prevalent in western popular narratives about the Pacific: the island as a lush and exotic paradise, the island as a place of sexual freedom, and the island as a site of danger and adventure. The novels create a culturally specific fantasy world which amplifies the scope of popular fiction and is also capable of implementing a postcolonial, feminist and ecocritical agenda, offering discussions of gender violence, neocolonialism and the impact of climate change in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to our special issue "Island Narratives of Persistence and Resistance" focuses on the ongoing proliferation of neocolonial, neoimperial and neoliberal constructions of the island in western and continental texts and discourses. It discusses the double and paradoxical logic of the island trope – which simultaneously suggests confinement and freedom, isolation and connection, over- and underdevelopment, inclusion and exclusion – and the evident material effects that these persistent figurations continue to have on the lives of islanders. It then places the focus on the mechanisms of resistance to these island narratives as exemplified in a range of fiction and non-fiction works from or about various island locations: Singapore, Vanuatu, Samoa, Nauru, Manus Island, the Bahamas, St Lucia, New Zealand, Staten Island, and the island continent of Australia. The essays engage with recognizable tropes and uses of the island: islands of exception and offshores, treasure and trash islands, island fortresses and militarized zones, fantasy and tourist islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Lyons 2006: American Pacificism. Oceania in the U.S. Imagination. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge. 271pp + xii. In the last decade numerous critics (see, [...]

Silvia Martínez Falquina 2004: Indias y fronteras: el discurso en torno a la mujer étnica. Oviedo: KRK. 264 pp. En Indias y fronteras: el discurso en torno a la mujer [...]

Patricia Grace, of Ngati Raukawa, Ngati Toa, Te Ai Awa descent, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1937. While she was working as a primary-school teacher, Grace wrote the [...]

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This article focuses on Alison Wong's 2009 novel As the Earth Turns Silver, the first published by a New Zealand writer of Chinese descent, and considers the expectations and pressures placed on the author as a result of her ethnic background. As argued in the article, the "competing demands" affecting her as a novelist are solved by reconstructing Chinese New Zealand history as interrelated to the history of other New Zealanders. This is done, primarily, by fictionalising the interracial love story between the two protagonists, a Chinese man and a Pakeha woman, but also by contextualising their romance within a range of interrelated debates on ethnic, gender and national identity. Ultimately, Wong's creative choices allow her to recover the silenced Chinese voice while exploring issues that were and continue to be of upmost importance for New Zealanders of all ethnic backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]