Teaching Māori literature as a tauiwi scholar: A German case study

ABSTRACT

Drawing on personal teaching experiences, this article turns a spotlight on the potentials, pitfalls and peculiarities of engaging with Indigenous literature from Aotearoa (New Zealand) in a contemporary German tertiary education context. It directs attention to the entanglement of individual teaching endeavours and classroom constellations with the national university landscape, as well as to the necessity of considering such teaching in a global context. The underlying ambition of the described teaching approach is to provide a local and cultural focus that allows for nuanced insights, while also acknowledging comprehensive interweavings and a plurality of voices. Arguing for a reflective, inquiring, and plurifying pedagogy that consciously emphasizes ambiguities and frictions, I conclude that, while complexities can only ever be adumbrated and exemplarily discussed in any university course, it is essential to emphasize the multifacetedness and concurrently local as well as global embeddedness of Māori literature, its authors and its readers.

KEYWORDS:

• Māori
• Aotearoa New Zealand
• Indigenous
• local and global
• pedagogy
• self-reflexive

Acknowledgements

This article has greatly benefited from editorial and peer review feedback. I give thanks to Erica Newman and Karyn Paringatai for allowing me to peek at their classes in Aotearoa. Ngā mihi nui ki a Alice Te Punga Somerville, who has always been a researching and teaching role model for me, even though I never got the chance to attend one of her classes. Finally, I am indebted to the students who took part in my own classes. They have taught me a lot about myself and about the texts that we discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. See Der Junge Häuptling Winnetou (The young Chief Winnetou), to be released in German cinemas on July 24, 2022. Much can be said about the notorious enthusiasm for playing Indian (Deloria 1998) or Indianthusiasm (Lutz 2016) in Germany. On these problematic traditions and possible educational interventions, see Däwes and Baudemann (2016) and Calloway, Gemunden, and Zantop (2002).

2. For a recent example of the unauthorized and caricatural use of a copyright protected haka, see Richter (2020). Like many theorists and activists as well as recent style guides (e.g. Younging 2018) I capitalize “Indigenous” and “Indigeneity”, and have not italicized Māori terms.

3. These tenets agree with what critical theory scholars as well as anti-racist and decolonial traditions have long demanded for tertiary spaces, to name but a few areas of expertise to which one may turn for essential recommendations and inspiration.

4. In Frankfurt, Dieter Riemenschneider established an enduring strand of literary courses dealing with Māori media and transcultural connections in the 1990s that was carried forward by Frank Schulze-Engler. By contrast, most other academics teaching Māori literatures are early career researchers. Teaching in Germany is mostly either cyclical or non-repetitive and only rarely is the same course taught consecutively at any university.

5. Though I will indicate further personal experiences and relationships where relevant, I agree with Sam McKegney (2008) that, even though “scholars need to be aware of their own limitations, and [ … ] must be self-reflexive, [ … ] they do not need to make themselves the stars of their studies, especially to the ongoing neglect of Indigenous voices” (60).

6. Working with specific cultural concepts can increase sensibility for expectations as well as obligations, thereby directing attention to the centrality of relationships (cf. Smith, Tuck, and Wayne Yang 2018, 9; Justice 2018, 71–112). See John (2020) on the manuhiri position; I acknowledge that I perceive and express some aspects slightly differently now, confirming that research and pedagogy are based on continuous processes of reflection, sometimes leading to consolidation but at other times to dismissal or reversal.

7. German university courses are typically offered in lecture periods of 14–15 weeks. Classes take place once a week for 90 minutes.

8. See Te Punga Somerville: “[I]nstead of reading [Māori texts] as solitary or marginal brown voices in a white literary room (this is how it can feel when Māori are only understood as a ‘subset’ of New Zealand) I read them in the company of Indigenous voices from so many times and places. Expansion: the antidote to colonial contraction” (2021, 96).

9. On the inside/outside binary in Māori research and collaborative contexts, see also Beals, Kidman, and Funaki (2020) and Hoskins (2012).

10. Te Punga Somerville raises important issues related to (un)knowability and colonial attitudes: “For readers of all kinds, suggesting there are limits to one’s engagement with a text is a radical move. Within colonial structures of knowledge, the reader has a right to know and understand everything” (2021, 101). But Melissa Kennedy (2017) highlights the merit of “teaching difference through searching for similarity” (64), or “build[ing] on the common by incorporating the new” (65), as encouraging foreign students to engage with world literatures. For me, both aspects – unknowability and connectivity – are central to teaching Māori literature.

11. In the light of structural inequities that prevent equitable access to academia, I emphasize that having more Māori and Indigenous scholars teach and write would be an incalculable enrichment for literary studies.

12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993) comments: “I understand all my work as being a sort of stream of learning how to unlearn and what to unlearn, because my positions are growing and changing so much; since I don’t really work from within an expertise, I have to really be on my feet learning new things all the time, and as I learn these new things, my positions change” (24). Unlearning may apply to a number of aspects, including fallacies, stereotypes, privilege, and academic approaches and assumptions.

13. Nor should reading be an exploitative practice that confines itself to sifting through texts “for particular content to be removed for future use [ … ], sorting [these texts] by what is useful and what is discardable” (Smith, Tuck, and Wayne Yang 2018, 15).

14. Te Punga Somerville also indirectly criticizes the exclusionary logics of canonization: “[T]he books on offer [in university courses from 2015] imply that nobody Māori has published anything worth reading (or at least teaching) since 2005 or written fiction since 1994” (2016, 103). This focus on older literature – both in Aotearoa and in Germany – may be related to the scarcity or complete absence of secondary texts on certain authors and works, but also to personal taste and expertise.

15. On publications arranged according to ethnicity in 2019 (based on data from The Journal of Commonwealth Studies), see Freegard (2022).

16. Though unfailingly thoughtful and engaged, these blog posts sometimes bespoke an undifferentiated understanding of Māori culture, which reveals the limits of what I as a teacher can achieve in the space of one course.

17. If students were unable to attend a certain number of class sessions, I asked them to engage with both assigned and additional texts by writing response papers that articulate personal connections and first impressions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonie John

Leonie John is a postdoctoral literary scholar who recently joined the Centre of Australian Studies at the University of Cologne, where she co-designs an online master programme for Australian studies that will be offered at five German universities. Her doctoral thesis centred on representations of im/mobilities in contemporary Māori short fiction. Her current project investigates transnational conversations in 20th-century nuclear narrations.