With Culture Comes the Nation: Women, Cultural Citizenships and Late Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

Abstract

Given serious consideration by sociologists only since the 1990s, ‘cultural citizenship’ was described in 2001 as, ‘the maintenance and development of cultural lineage through education, custom, language, and religion and the positive acknowledgement of difference in and by the mainstream’. Works explicitly interested in cultural citizenship focus on ethnic-based cultures in contemporary contexts; they privilege postmodernity, the current wave of globalisation, and the internet and television. Recent historiography concerned with imperial belongings, part of the ‘new imperial history’, is edging increasingly closer to describing citizenship in the British Empire in terms that resonate with ‘cultural citizenship’. Histories by Kathleen Wilson, Daniel Gorman, and Catherine Frost among others, demonstrate a growing convergence with the understanding of citizenship favoured by Nick Stevenson or Toby Miller. Works by both Wilson and Miller, for example, are interested in ‘extra legal’, culturally performative forms of citizenship requiring access to media of mass communication. For Wilson this type of imperial citizenship manifested in political and debating clubs that ‘not only imbricated empire, state expansion and local and national prosperity in ways that multiply constituted the national; [they] also constructed the identity of the citizen, the nature of the state and the contours of the political nation in social, racial and gendered terms’. The structural requirements of contemporary cultural citizenship sit remarkably comfortably alongside these citizenships of eighteenth-century Empire. As Richard Price notes, the cultural orientation in recent imperial histories largely concerns itself with the metropole. Even when the