The Making of New Zealanders

Abstract

Ron Palenski is a noted journalist as well as historian. As someone who has written on the history of sport and who runs the New Zealand Hall of Fame, he has a keen interest in national identity, so much so that we wrote a PhD on the subject at the University of Otago. The Making of New Zealanders is based on this thesis, though readers would not have known without being told as Palenski's skill as a writer ensures that the style is vigorous, engaging and accessible.

In the wake of the quake: Teaching the emergency

“…As a result, the human assembly that is the Pākehā community of Christchurch finds itself undermined by nonhuman forces-or, we would say, actants-and without the means to articulate a new form of life. For Prentice (2013), this makes the disaster 'an event of critique' (p. 55). All such disasters teach us about human settlement, it is tempting to say, is that natural disasters, or 'acts of God,' happen; for Prentice, however, the earthquake demands that the environment be seen not as a static backdrop for human action, but as a dynamic assembly of actants.…”

“…But if earthquakes are 'normal,' as Prentice proposes (2013, p. 65), then the fundamental error of humans is their disavowal of destructive plasticity, their inability to make accidents signify. As Prentice (2013) writes, in a sentence that echoes Malabou, 'the post-quake or post-loss project is not to know who we are, either to return to some pre-loss image of stability or to forge definitive new individual or collective identities' (p. 65).…”