Articulating New Zealand and literature in “New Zealand literature” classes: Attending to the parergon

ABSTRACT

With the increasing globalization of tertiary education through international study abroad and university exchange schemes, New Zealand literature classes are today increasingly likely to be taught to diverse groups of students from different countries and ethnicities. How might this affect the framing of courses, texts chosen for study, and the conversations that take place in the classroom? Yet with the greater diversity of the New Zealand population, and as New Zealand students increasingly identify as subjects of a globalized world, any opposition between local and global perspectives breaks down. Following a discussion of recent debates about the institution of “New Zealand literature” in the context of globalization, this article turns to particular examples of New Zealand literature undergraduate university courses. It adopts the critical lens of Derrida on the parergon to show how “New Zealand literature” is the product of, and at the same time always disturbed by, its framing.

KEYWORDS:

• National literature
• educational markets
• critical debate
• global perspectives
• local–global binary
• parergon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This question was in part prompted by the debate about such “non-New Zealand” novels beginning with Patrick Evans’s (2000) essay. Referring to a number of recent New Zealand novels set outside New Zealand, he asks: “Are these still New Zealand novels? Does the question have a meaning any more, in the supposedly globalised world in which we live?” (102).

2. The sequence of dates here (Kite, 2002; World Literature Written in English/Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2000; New Zealand Listener, 2003) appears to be out of sync, but publication of World Literature Written in English had lagged behind the year date by three years; and therefore volume 38 of its replacement, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, had to be dated 2000, although issue 38(2) was in fact published in 2003.

3. In 2002, Auckland University had held a conference called “Unsettling Settlement”, in which local cultural politics were examined through literature, painting, photography, film, and other arts and cultural products and moments, instantiating a new field of “Settlement Studies” that took a critical distance on many aspects of international postcolonial studies for the New Zealand context.

4. Otago University includes among its postgraduate degree “graduate attributes” a “global perspective”, defined as an “appreciation of global perspectives in the chosen discipline(s) and the nature of global citizenship” (Otago University 2019, n.p.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Prentice

Chris Prentice is associate professor in the English and linguistics programme at the University of Otago, where she teaches postcolonial literatures and theory, and New Zealand literature. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of decolonization in “settler-Indigenous” postcolonial contexts, explored through literary and other cultural sites. She has published articles on related topics in such journals as Interventions, Modern Fiction Studies, Ariel, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Australian Humanities Review, and Australian Literary Studies. As well as numerous chapters in edited books, and edited special journal issues, she is co-editor of Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age (2010). She was chair of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) from 2016 to 2019.