Girl of New Zealand
200 pages, 6 x 9
20 color illustrations, 16 b&w illustrations
Paperback
Release Date:19 May 2020
ISBN:9780816537020
Girl of New Zealand
Colonial Optics in Aotearoa
The University of Arizona Press
Viewed through Maori, 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 Maori 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 Maori 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 Maori women from objectification and locates them firmly within Maori whanau and communities.
Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the ways in which violence and colonial looking shaped the representation of Maori women and girls. Erai focuses on eight different depictions to think through the effects that colonial violence had on their construction and reception. In this way the author resurrects these women from objectification to being firmly located within Maori whanau and communities.”—Ngarino Ellis, author of A Whakapapa of Tradition: A Century of Ngati Porou Carving, 1830–1930
“Catching the tide of a resurgence of women’s issues in the wake of #MeToo and other feminist projects, Michelle Erai’s Girl of New Zealand is timely. Erai’s analysis speaks to the historical foundations of negative attitudes toward Indigenous Maori 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.”—Arini Loader, Victoria University of Wellington
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 Ngapuhi and Ngati Porou.
