‘While History Happens Elsewhere’: Fiction and Political Quietism, 1990–2014

McNeill, Dougal

doi:10.1017/cbo9781316050873.021

Cited by 3 publications

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“…35 Answering these questions requires us to read the "utopian space" of the imperial archive 36 alongside the maritime space across which Yate's story unfolds. Attending to the specific political, affective, and sexual possibilities afforded by this space enables us to recover critical currents obscured by nationalist accounts preoccupied with modes of settler occupancy on land, and to extend existing critical accounts which read the novel in terms of a utopian negotiation between the concrete, present realities of settler-colonialism and what the narrator calls the "incoherent shapes" of "other possibilities" (6). Contemporary literature and criticism dealing with settler-colonialism in New Zealand have typically, and perhaps rightly, taken land as their key object.…”

Section: Archivalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dougal McNeill finds little in "the actual record of literary production from the last two decades" to support Turner's account of "a social formation on the run from its history." 6 But Jagose's novel not only participates in what McNeill calls the "sustained revival" of historical fiction dealing with settler-colonialism during this period but develops a model for a kind of contemporary settler fiction in which, contrary to Turner's account, "living in the present" cannot be construed as synonymous with "living without history." 7 Rather, it draws on the capacity of the historical novel to "engender in an aesthetic field of historical signification a punctum that appears singularly ahistorical-affect-but which is, because of the detail it cuts across and unites, a relay through which the historical can be said to be sensed before it is redacted."…”

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confidence: 99%

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Archival Utopics: Annamarie Jagose's Slow Water

Murray¹

2018

JNZS

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Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water (2003), a novel which looks back to the period before Pākehā occupation of these islands solidified into formal colonial rule, begins, curiously and somewhat provocatively, with a scene of settler absence: “All the night, from the darkness of my blanket, I watch the dead houses, Mr Clarke’s house, Mr Williams’s house, Mr Davis’s house, all dead. Still dead, in the first curve of daylight. . . . The church roof points at the sky and you are gone from here.”[i] Stressing reciprocity of desire as one of the relations made possible by colonial “entanglement,”[ii] this letter, narrated by Philip Tohi, intimates the spectacle of eradication by which the expulsion of the missionary William Yate from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was both expressed and enacted: “All your books are burned, your bed, even the picture of your sister. . . . Ashes from the fire fill my mouth and again I cry” (2). NOTES [i] Annamarie Jagose, Slow Water (Wellington: Victoria UP, 2003), 1. Subsequent citations given parenthetically in text. [ii] The term is Tony Ballantyne’s, who notes that “while thinking about empires through the metaphors of ‘meetings’ and ‘encounters’ allows us to imagine stable and discrete cultural formations existing after cross-cultural engagements,” the term “entanglement” better evinces the ways in which the period preceding formal colonisation drew together and integrated cultural thought-worlds in “new and durable, if unpredictable, ways.” Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori and the Question of the Body (Auckland: Auckland UP, 2015), 17.

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Section: Archivalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%