Brief CV and Reference for (original) (raw)

Representing Asia, Remaking Aotearoa, spec. issue of the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 10.1 (June 2008).

From the introduction: This special issue questions the terms ‘Asia’ and ‘New Zealand’ in order to unsettle the assumption of essential identities that is often inadvertently produced by, on the one hand, ‘Asia-in-the-New Zealand imagination studies’ and, on the other, various studies of Asian diasporic communities. While both these approaches are important, I want to suggest a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between concepts of Asia and New Zealand that does not ‘lead to the assumption that the cultural traffic of the imagination only operates in one direction’, nor to the easy delineation of Asia from New Zealand (Hayot 5). A crucial element of this dynamic understanding involves reading representations of Asia not as outside New Zealand, but rather uncovering the diverse ways in which Asia is already and for a long time has been inside New Zealand cultural practices. This also means equally resisting an easy multiculturalism based on static, essentialised identities and instead addressing the complexities of and problems with the very notions of representation and identity. Thus reconceived, there are no simple essential identities that allow one to speak of ‘Asia in New Zealand’ as if it were a matter of what is ‘outside’ coming ‘inside’. The rethinking or remaking of representations of New Zealand and Asia in this issue instead recognises how the study of literature, along with other forms of cultural production, ‘even in a single national context, requires an attention to the transnational contexts and flows that shape and define the relationship between literature and nation’ (Hayot 4). Such ‘relational’ rather than ‘nominal’ thinking is becoming increasingly important to transnational literary studies (Friedman), and has been felt within New Zealand historiography (Moloughney; Ballantyne and Moloughney), but its possibilities within Aotearoa/New Zealand literary and cultural studies still remain to be fully explored.

Tu Tangata : an exhibition report presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Māori Visual Arts at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

2020

Te Kōhanga Reo transformed my life, empowered my children, and connected me to other parents whom were also interested in empowering themselves and their children. By working together, the whānau and kaimahi continue to manage a successful Kōhanga Reo in Flaxmere. The purpose of this exhibition report is firstly, to explore and document my parental learning experiences within my life and Te Kōhanga Reo. Second, to provide a critical analysis of the positive impacts of Te Kōhanga Reo on myself, my children and families who have journeyed with me. This report utilises a narrative framework where parents can stand tall, be counted and recognised within the wider Te Kōhanga Reo movement. While mokopuna and kaimahi are important to kōhanga reo, the positive impacts on parents are represented in "Tu Tangata Kōhanga Reo." This is a series of contemporary Maori visual art, created from my studio practice and exhibited at Creative Arts Napier Art Gallery, from the 1st of December 2...

Collective person, connected gift: some preliminary thoughts on taonga, whakapapa, and 'the gift'in Maori art.

Sites: a journal of social anthropology and cultural …, 2011

In this paper I use interviews with one Maori artist to provide some preliminary thoughts on the ways Maori art can be used to understand Maori personhood. Art work is defined as taonga-whakairo and artistic talent as taonga-tuku-iho. Maori conceive both artistic talent and artistic production as taonga and I argue that the relationships between art, taonga, whakapapa and tipuna encompass networks of connections between persons, objects, and ideas simultaneously. I suggest a structural linkage between art, taonga, and exchange which form distributed social relationships. Underlying this is the proposition that artistic talent comes from the ancestors and involves particular responsibilities. Major points of argument are that: in Maori art, taonga and whakapapa interact to allow the possibility of things being persons and persons being things; taonga are fundamental to Maori concepts of tipuna and whakapapa; taonga and Maussian exchange relations are co-constituting; art-as-taonga is a productive means of understanding a Maori worldview; and that further study should be conducted into Gell’s (1998) ‘distributed person’ through analysis of taonga and Maori art.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF THE ARTS OF OCEANIA Book Review by Rod Ewins

Professor Sidney Mead describes the papers [in this group of papers from the 49th ANZAAS Conference] as covering 'a wider range than at most previous conferences on the Pacific' — specifically, wood¬carving (Bernard Kernot), music and dance (Peter Crowe, Allan Thomas and Jennifer Shennan) and oral narratives (Judith Huntsman). The emphasis on the performing as distinct from the plastic arts is probably fairly representative of the bias of scholarship in the art of Oceania at present, and this in itself is interesting. It is reflected in the priority given music and dance by the UNESCO Oceanic Cultures Project set up in the late 60s, which Crowe in his paper supposes 'were thought more vulnerable than others, such as handicrafts'. It may just as possibly be that even those who should know better will persist in regarding the plastic arts of Island peoples as handicraft — an inherently patronizing and belittling term.