The Māori Renaissance from 1972

Abstract

The Māori Renaissance is the most significant literary movement since cultural nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. The latter produced a cogent body of literary and critical work that sought to wean the descendants of settlers from their colonial dependency; the former since the 1970s has asserted a separate nationalism within a bicultural nation, one with its own modes of expression, its own history, and its claim to represent a truly postcolonial Aotearoa-New Zealand. Both locally and internationally, the Māori Renaissance has been recognised for its transformation of European-derived genres of literary, cultural, and artistic practice to accommodate non-European experience; its joining of traditional and contemporary perspectives in aesthetic practice; and its uncompromising statement of cultural distinctiveness. After more than forty years the Māori Renaissance has a canon of major writers – Hone Tuwhare, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, and Keri Hulme – as secure in public consciousness and esteem as were Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, and Frank Sargeson in the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, it has accumulated cultural gravity over time, and faces as yet no concerted voice of opposition, as the literary nationalists did by the 1950s and, especially, the 1960s. The Māori Renaissance continues to dominate in new Māori writing today. Its governing tenets – continuity with the pre-European past, coequality in the bicultural present, positive cultural difference, the secure possession of a distinct world outlook, and special status derived from priority in the land – have considerably influenced non-Māori New Zealand fiction as well as national literary and cultural criticism across the humanities and social sciences. In both fiction and responses to it, the Māori Renaissance provides a literary road map of the turbulent years of the Māori sovereignty movement and an emerging national biculturalism that came to define the relationship between two peoples committed to a permanent partnership by signing the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. The debate in literary circles about the form, function, and impact of Māori fiction as a subgenre of – or counter to – the national literature mirrors and to some extent has engendered broader debates over Māori culture and identity, and shaped the way both Māori and Pākehā (Europeans) perceive themselves and each other.