Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2015

An examination of the attitude of the Pacific Dominions to Japan during the First World War indicates that each of the Dominions followed a path from heeding the Imperial government’s advice not to be too critical of its Far Eastern ally in the early stages of the war to giving voice to increasing concern about Japanese penetration into the Pacific as the war progressed. I focus on Japanese military mobilization at the outbreak of war, its takeover of the German Pacific colonies north of the equator, and its insistence on keeping them at the end of the war. These three episodes indicate that Dominion attitudes to Japan sometimes actually influenced the making of British foreign policy. There were points where the British government clearly tried to take on concerns from Australia, Canada and New Zealand in its position towards Japan. A good example of this is the British government’s attempts to secure the Japanese government’s support in issuing a joint statement that the latter was not planning on seizing former German colonies in the Pacific that the Dominions intended to deal with themselves in the early stages of the war. But there were also other periods where the realities of great power politics meant that the three Dominions had to accept the position adopted by the Imperial government.

New Zealand at the turn of the nineteenth century appeared as a social laboratory in the eyes of the world. A small British self-governing colony, soon to become a dominion, New Zealand, together with some of the Australian states, had attracted the attention of a number of intellectuals beyond the borders of the British Empire. In a troubled international context of mounting challenges to the established order, New Zealand appeared as a fascinating compromise: a paradise for the workers, without class struggle; a laboratory of socialist ideas, in the guise of a liberal regime; a loyal colonial society but in the process of maturing and developing its own national identity. André Siegfried, considered to this day the father of French political science, crossed over to the Antipodes to analyze the ‘social laboratory’ of the western world. This was fieldwork that would give him the material for a first Ph.D.

Siegfried had every intention to be objective and to follow a scientific method that would eventually lead to the recognition of political science as a proper discipline. However, he also came to New Zealand with his own bias and was very much influenced by emerging discourses on race and national identity conveyed by certain French intellectuals of the time. This article focuses on the racial assumptions on which Siegfried based his analysis of the New Zealand democracy. It seeks to demonstrate that Siegfried’s vision of progress in New Zealand was not so much based on facts as on an intense preoccupation to do with the future of the so-called white race. Far from supporting progress, Siegfried takes us on a path that sees any social advancement as the natural outcome of superior inherited traits. This article tries to shed light on the discrepancies between this racialist vision and the then dominant ideology in New Zealand. Although notions of a hierarchy between races were common at the time and shared by all colonial powers, Siegfried’s own brand differed and led to a flawed interpretation of the situation in New Zealand, in particular in the field of race relations.

Set in New Zealand during the Land Wars, William Satchell’s Bildungsroman, The Greenstone Door is widely considered to be one of the most seminal novels in New Zealand literary history. The text contrasts the rural topography and the social life of the Waikato with the urban landscapes and mentalities of Auckland and relates the development of its main protagonist, Cedric Tregarthen, to these (symbolic) spaces. This article examines the forms and scope of Satchell’s use of German literary discourses to narrate and comment on the New Zealand Land Wars, and on the ascent of bourgeois modernity and colonial mentalities in New Zealand. Authors and works considered in this comparative context include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Karl May’s Winnetou. Drawing on theories developed by Sigmund Freud, Yuri M. Lotman and Mikhail Bakhtin, this article focuses in particular on The Greenstone Door’s key ‘chronotopes’. In this context, special emphasis is paid to the cave scene in which the novel’s protagonists anticipate the tragic future of traditional Maori culture. My reading suggests that the cave scene in The Greenstone Door can be understood as an adaptation and inversion of the cave scene in Novalis’s early Romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, thus necessitating an extension of Bakhtin’s and Lotman’s theoretical framework, which may be termed ‘chronotopical intertextuality’. The article concludes with a critical assessment of Satchell’s and Novalis’s ‘prophetic’ passages about the political and cultural future of German and New Zealand culture.

‘Across the Board’ is a project initiated by the author, which explores diaspora and migration, bringing together representations of ancestors to a chessboard, which is used as a metaphor for the postcolonial relationship between Maori and Pakeha in Aotearoa New Zealand. Sir Peter Buck, renowned Maori anthropologist, once described his forebears as the ‘Vikings of the Sunrise’. Why? Because his ancestors were part of a wave of remarkable seaborne migration that carried people from their origins to the margins of human imagination and endurance – to the land where the sun rises first in the world. But the word Viking communicated more than just sea travel or migration, it evoked the spirit of a people whose warrior history was conveyed orally in songs, in eddic and skaldic poetry, in myths and legends, and in its amazing tradition of ivory, stone and wood carving. In 1831, Viking chess pieces were discovered on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It is believed that the pieces were made in a workshop in Norway in the mid-twelfth century. Their role as a carrier of culture and memory remains. By reflecting on research and the practice of a twenty-first century bone workshop to make a new chess set inspired by the Lewis pieces, this article explores these ideas in relation to biculturalism in New Zealand. It also examines the conceptual underpinnings of a project that uses the game of chess as a metaphor to consider the impact of diaspora in New Zealand.

Contact between the indigenous peoples of the Pacific and the western world has had immense sociocultural and linguistic impacts on indigenous communities. Perhaps the major source of sociocultural and linguistic impact in the Pacific can be attributed to the arrival of Christianity. This is certainly the case for Samoa. The fusion between fa’asamoa (Samoan culture) and the lotu (church) is evidence of Christianity’s profound impact. The fusion is also evidence of the Samoan people’s unequivocal stance for cultural safeguarding. As missionaries sought to eradicate much of the Samoan beliefs system, the Samoan leaders at the time were content to construct the new doctrine around the fa’asamoa.

The highest class in the church is the faife’au (church pastor). A decade after continued missionary work in Samoa, the faife’au and his family were introduced by the missionaries, once they had deemed that the Samoan church was fit for self-governance. Today, both in Samoa and overseas, the church is structured around the Samoan indigenous political order. To some degree, the faife’au was also bestowed the highest of honorific status in Samoa. Yet the Samoan parsonage family is unique in the Samoan class structure. The aim of this article is to discuss this uniqueness by examining the feagaiga (covenant) and tagata’ese (stranger) experiences of the Samoan parsonage family. Both the feagaiga and tagata’ese concepts are fused entities that have been constructed by both the fa’asamoa and lotu. The Samoan parsonage family has been neglected in both the Pacific mainstream and theological literatures until now.

Encounters: The Creation of New Zealand. A History, Paul Moon (2013) Auckland: Penguin New Zealand, 432 pp., ISBN 978 0 1435 6850 6 (hbk), NZ$55

Changing Times: New Zealand since 1945, Jenny Carlyon and Diane Morrow (2013) Auckland: Auckland University Press, 520 pp., ISBN 978 1 8694 0782 7 (pbk), NZ$49.99

Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past, Tony Ballantyne (2012) Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 374 pp., ISBN 978 1 9271 3143 5 (pbk), NZ$49.99

Flying Kiwis: A History of the OE, Jude Wilson (2014) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 296 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7826 7 (pbk), NZ$44.99

Kerikeri Mission and Kororipo Pa: An Entwined History, Angela Middleton (2013) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 76 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7834 2 (pbk), NZ$29.95

Ko te whenua te utu / Land is the price: Essays on Maori History, Land and Politics, M. P. K. Sorrenson (2014) Auckland: Auckland University Press, 344 pp., ISBN 978 1 8694 0810 7 (pbk), NZ$49.99

The Spirit of Maori Leadership, Selwyn Katene (2013) Wellington: Huia, 180 pp., ISBN 978 1 7755 0121 3 (pbk), NZ$45

Greed and Grievance: Ex-militants’ Perspectives on the Conflict in Solomon Islands, 1998–2003, Matthew Allen (2013) Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 243 pp., ISBN 978 0 8248 3854 6 (pbk), US$55

Mystery Islands: Discovering the Ancient Pacific, Tom Koppel (2012) Suva: University of the South Pacific Press, 345 pp., ISBN 978 9 8201 0888 2 (pbk), US$25

Ancient Religions of the Austronesian World: From Australasia to Taiwan, Julian Baldick (2013) London: I.B. Tauris, 256 pp., ISBN 978 1 7807 6366 8 (hbk), £58

The Pacific Island in China’s Grand Strategy: Small States, Big Games, Jian Yang (2011) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 254 pp., ISBN 978 0 2301 1323 7 (hbk), £64

No Ordinary Deal: Unmasking the Transpacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement, Jane Kelsey (ed.) (2010) Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 220 pp., ISBN 978 1 8772 4250 2 (pbk), NZ$39.99

Greece, Crete, Stalag, Dachau: A New Zealand Soldier’s Encounters with Hitler’s Army, Jack Elworthy (2014) Wellington: Awa Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978 1 9272 4912 3 (pbk), NZ$40

Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand, Simon Sigley (2013) Bristol: Intellect, 208 pp., ISBN 978 1 8415 0660 9 (pbk), £20

Intersecting Identities: Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Fiction from Aotearoa New Zealand, Katharina Luh (2013) Trier, Germany: WVT, 555 pp., ISBN 978 3 8682 1433 8 (pbk), ¤58.50

The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction, Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross (2011) Amsterdam: Rodopi, 407 pp., ISBN 978 9 0420 3474 7 (hbk), €102