Neoliberalism and the politics of indigenous community in the fiction of Alan Duff and Witi Ihimaera

Abstract

This article contextualises the discourse of self-determination in contemporary Māori fiction within the international pressures of neoliberal economic doctrine. Indigenous self-determination movements and neoliberalism are congruent to the extent that they advance the value of autonomy, achieved by devolving state powers to smaller, more responsive, and supposedly more accountable communities of interest. Neoliberalism is therefore misconstrued if it is regarded solely as an individualist-based philosophy; instead it incites certain forms of collective identity, without wholly determining them. Aotearoa/New Zealand serves as a distinctive crucible for defining this relationship because it has experienced both an unusually pure implementation of neoliberal economic reforms, and a politically effective movement for Māori self-determination based on the guarantees secured in the Treaty of Waitangi. These reforms have not produced an ethnically-based partition in the geographical sense, but they have exacerbated ethnic divides in terms of both economic indicators and governmental systems. On the basis that literary fiction is well equipped to attach political discourse to the affective world of intimate relationships, the second part of the paper turns to novels by Māori writers Alan Duff and Witi Ihimaera to compare their representations of family, whānau, kinship, and parenting under the pressures of economic change. Despite the authors’ very different political stances, an analysis of Once were warriors (1990), Whanau (1974), and Whanau II (2004) shows that the applications of indigenous cultural nationalism and the tenets of neoliberalism share a considerable confluence of interests.

Keywords:

• Aotearoa
• New Zealand
• globalisation
• neoliberalism
• Māori
• indigenous
• Duff
• Ihimaera
• fiction
• postcolonialism
• self-determination