Th is qualitative study, conducted between August and December 2006, explored the opinions and experiences of New Zealanders who challenge orthodox attitudes to the use and consumption of nonhuman animals. To date, New Zealand (NZ) has under-investigated the perspectives of those who oppose animal farming, the eating of nonhuman animals, and the exploitation of nonhuman animals. Agriculture substantially infl uences the economy and cultural heritage of the nation. Given that national identity in New Zealand strongly associates with farming and meat production, this paper investigates how vegetarians living in this country experience and challenge prevalent imagery and ideas about New Zealand. In particular, the paper examines the ways in which "kiwi" 1 vegetarians are disputing the dominant image of New Zealand as "clean and green" and a land of "animal lovers" and how they are experiencing mainstream (meat-loving) kiwi culture in their everyday lives. Th e paper also examines some of the more positive aspects for vegetarians of living in New Zealand.
In contrast to others who have read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist exclusively as a political novel, I argue that the novel’s most significant contribution to the body of post-9/11 literature is formal in nature. The novel indeed mobilizes political issues, but it achieves this by creating a series of allegories that centre on various forms of travel connected to the terrorism hinted at in the term “fundamentalist” in the title. These allegories, which I examine in the first part of this article, revolve around the interactions between the protagonist and those he encounters as he travels: the hosts and guests in the travel interactions function as allegories of different nations, and the relationships between nations within global space. However, while the novel’s travel allegories indeed raise political concerns, these are often conflicted and ambiguous owing to the unreliability of the narrator. Rather than selecting one of the unreliable perspectives brought forth by the travel allegories as “true”, I read them as part of a larger meta-allegorical project in which the narrative itself becomes an allegory of the uncertainties of the post-9/11 environment. In the second part of this article, I discuss this meta-allegorical project through an examination of the novel’s narrative structure, particularly its frame narrative which, I argue, provides a means for Hamid to allegorically explore the ways that permeable borders engender paranoia and fear of terrorism in the post-9/11 context.
In a study offering postcolonial perspectives on crime fiction, Christine Matzke and Susan Mühleisen observe that the "boundaries of the genre have become fuzzier than ever, stretching over a wide range of registers, themes and styles". The growing diversity within crime fiction, they suggest, has created a need for new critical paradigms (2006: 2). This symposium has two related aims: first, it examines the changing formal characteristics of crime narratives, and second, and more importantly, it considers how, in an age in which crime takes the form of terrorism, industrial disaster, state violence, corporate corruption, drug wars, and cyber scams, conceptions of crime and criminality are being challenged and reconfigured within these narratives. A key concern of the symposium is the shift from a mode of writing that endorses the colonial project to one that reflects critically upon its legacies. In this respect, it extends Matzke's and Mühleisen's comparison of crime fiction in the colonial era, which often served to reaffirm imperial power, to a postcolonial mode of crime writing that questions the social order, launching an investigation of "power and authority" (2006: 4-5).This transferral of focus from the individual to the social system as the subject of investigation is not a new phenomenon in crime writing. In his account of the evolution of detective fiction, Martin Priestman refers to two "national" traditions: the English detective story, beginning with Wilkie Collins in the 1860s and continuing into the interwar "Golden Age" dominated by Agatha Christie, and the US hardboiled private-eye style of detective fiction initiated by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which Priestman suggests evolved in "conscious opposition" to the English model of the detective novel (2003: 2). The clear-cut rationality of the detective figure who upholds law and order in the "clue-puzzle" English tradition can be compared to the confusion and angst of the private eye negotiating a corrupt and morally questionable society whose institutions cannot be trusted. As Andrew Pepper explains, "one of the distinctive features of the hardboiled crime novel has traditionally been the problematic nature of notions like 'law ' and 'justice'" (2003: 212).
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