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Book Cover
E-book
Author Erai, Michelle, author

Title Girl of New Zealand : colonial optics in Aotearoa / Michelle Erai
Published Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, [2020]
©2020

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Description 1 online resource
Series Critical issues in indigenous studies
Critical issues in indigenous studies.
Contents Prologue -- Introduction. Colonial Optics -- Chapter 1. Punch -- Chapter 2. Girl of New Zealand -- Chapter 3. Plage de Korora-reka -- Chapter 4. Māori and Europeans on the deck of a ship -- Chapter 5. Kiss Me -- Chapter 6. Spoils to the Victor -- Conclusion. The House of Taonga -- Epilogue
Summary Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of Māori women and girls. Michelle Erai examines more than thirty images of Māori women alongside the records of early missionaries and settlers in Aotearoa, as well as comments by archivists and librarians, to shed light on how race, gender, and sexuality have been ascribed to particular bodies. Viewed through Māori, feminist, queer, and film theories, Erai shows how images such as Girl of New Zealand (1793) and later images, cartoons, and travel advertising created and deployed a colonial optic. Girl of New Zealand reveals how the phantasm of the Māori woman has shown up in historical images, how such images shape our imagination, and how impossible it has become to maintain the delusion of the "innocent eye." Erai argues that the process of ascribing race, gender, sexuality, and class to imagined bodies can itself be a kind of violence. In the wake of the Me Too movement and other feminist projects, Erai's timely analysis speaks to the historical foundations of negative attitudes toward Indigenous Māori women in the eyes of colonial "others"--outsiders from elsewhere who reflected their own desires and fears in their representations of the Indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Erai resurrects Māori women from objectification and locates them firmly within Māori whānau and communities. Provided by publisher
Notes Michelle Erai was an assistant professor of gender studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is originally from Whangarei, Aotearoa, and is descended from the tribes of Ngāpuhi and Ngati Porou
online resource; title from PDF title page (ProQuest Ebook Central, viewed September 13, 2021)
Subject Women, Māori -- Social conditions
Women, Māori -- Violence against
Māori (New Zealand people) -- History
Māori (New Zealand people) in art
Māori (New Zealand people)
Māori (New Zealand people) in art
Women, Māori -- Social conditions
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780816541201
0816541205