New Zealand literature and the global marketplace

Abstract

This special issue revisits some of the discussions which Patrick Evans brought up 20 years ago to explore a range of writing, performing, publishing, teaching and marketing practices and strategies. The overall aim is to reflect on the extent to which national and regional labels, essential to the definition and development of Aotearoa New Zealand’s identity and cultural expression in the colonial and postcolonial periods, are being discarded by authors, critics or publishers to benefit from the cultural flows channeled through diaspora, globalization and transnationalism, or on the contrary are being reformulated in order to resist or negotiate the commodifying impositions of the global literary marketplace. The contributions in this issue revolve around “New Zealand literature” as a body of writing once perceived as unitary in purpose and more or less coherent in orientation, which John Newton has recently pronounced “a finite chapter, complete and increasingly remote” (2017, 11) and which, in his view, is “effectively ‘dead’” (9).