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The Spirit of Colin McCahon provides a vivid historical contextualisation of New Zealand’s premier modern artist, clearly explaining his esoteric religious themes and symbols. Via a framework of visual rhetoric, this book explores the social factors that formed McCahon’s religious and environmental beliefs, and justifications as to why his audience often missed the intended point of spiritual his discourse – or chose to ignore it. The Spirit of Colin McCahon tracks the intricate process by which the artist’s body of work turned from optimism to misery, and explains the many communicative techniques he employed in order to arrest suspicion towards his Christian prophecy. More broadly,...
The present volume contains general essays on: unequal African/Western academic exchange; the state and structure of postcolonial studies; representing male violence in Zimbabwe’s wars; parihaka in the poetic imagination of Aotearoa New Zealand; Middle Eastern, Nigerian, Moroccan, and diasporic Indian women’s writing; community in post-Independence Maltese poetry in English; key novels of the Portuguese colonies; the TV series The Kumars at No. 42; fictional representations of India; the North in western Canadian writing; and a pedagogy of African-Canadian literature. As well as these, there is a selection of poems from Malta by Daniel Massa, Adrian Grima, Norbert Bugeja, Immanuel Mifsud...
This book offers a bold and illuminating account of the worldviews nurtured and sustained by indigenous communities from across continents, through their distinctive understanding of concepts such as space, time, joy, pain, life, and death. It demonstrates how this different mode of ‘knowing’ has brought the indigenous into a cultural conflict with communities that claim to be modern and scientific. Bringing together scholars, artists and activists engaged in understanding and conserving local knowledge that continues to be in the shadow of cultural extinction, the book attempts to interpret repercussions on identity and cultural transformation and points to the tragic fate of knowing the world differently. The volume inaugurates a new thematic area in post-colonial studies and cultural anthropology by highlighting the perspectives of marginalized indigenous communities, often burdened with being viewed as ‘primitive’. It will be useful to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, linguistics, literature, and tribal studies.
Passionate, witty, and erudite, these essays by a radical curator describe how museums approach their sometimes conflicting missions to sponsor scholarship, generate popular appeal, and claim social significance. This analysis includes discussions of art and ethnology, the failure of late-Modernist art history, the construction of official culture, the intellectual history of European exploration in the Pacific, problems with cultural studies of the Pakeha Maori, and the conservation of archives and narratives.
Featuring brilliant urban photography, this celebration of the dynamic presence of sculpture in Wellington vividly captures more than 40 sculptures throughout the city's streets and parks. An informative and provocative examination of the sculptures' origins, this collection shows how many of the gorgeous art works came into being due to the shared vision of individuals, government agencies, and corporations who value the relationship of art and city, to brighten the lives of its citizens. The result is both a visual feast and a unique record of the 21st-century city's fabric--sure to be treasured by travelers, art enthusiasts, and locals alike.
Clearly demonstrating how her poetry is drawn from personal experience, this bold and innovative collection of new poems exemplifies characteristic themes of her work: personal responsibility, social justice, and living in the natural world. Additionally, two prose journals--one written in the month following September 11, while her husband worked at the United Nations in New York City, and the second written while they were in Geneva in early 2002 when the U.S. response to September 11 was taking shape--further explore these themes and her response to these events.
Current: Contemporary Art From Australia and New Zealand is the first comprehensive survey of all that is cutting edge in Australian and New Zealand contemporary practice. In a landmark publication, the book features eighty artists, carefully chosen to best reflect the vibrancy of art of the moment. While Current could be seen as a hot list of contemporary taste in the tradition of Taschen's Art Now, inclusivity is the book's abiding theme. Current is also underpinned by scholarship with commissioned essays by the region's leading writers and curators. Current's beautifully designed pages are filled with many names familiar to followers of contemporary art - including Paddy Bedford, Simryn G...
A New Zealand Book of Beasts is a groundbreaking examination of the interactions between humans and 'nonhuman animals' - both real and imagined - in New Zealand's arts and literature, popular culture, historiography, media and everyday life. Structured in four parts - Animal Icons, Animal Companions, Art Animals and Controversial Animals - the Book of Beasts touches on topics as diverse as moa-hunting and the SPCA, pest-control and pet-keeping, whaling and whale-watching; on species ranging from sheep to sperm whales and from pekapeka to possums; and on the works of authors and artists as various as Samuel Butler and Witi Ihimaera, Lady Mary Anne Barker and Janet Frame, Michael Parekowhai an...
&‘You approach family stories with caution and care, especially when a thing long forgotten is uncovered in the telling.'In this deft memoir, Richard Shaw unpacks a generations-old family story he was never told: that his ancestors once farmed land in Taranaki which had been confiscated from its owners and sold to his great-grandfather, who had been with the Armed Constabulary when it invaded Parihaka on 5 November 1881.Honest, and intertwined with an examination of Shaw's relationship with his father and of his family's Catholicism, this book's key focus is urgent: how, in a decolonizing world, Pakeha New Zealanders wrestle with, and own, the privilege of their colonial pasts.
Since the late 1960s, drama by Pacific Island playwrights has flourished throughout Oceania. Although many Pacific Island cultures have a broad range of highly developed indigenous performance forms—including oral narrative, clowning, ritual, dance, and song—scripted drama is a relatively recent phenomenon. Emerging during a period of region-wide decolonization and indigenous self-determination movements, most of these plays reassert Pacific cultural perspectives and performance techniques in ways that employ, adapt, and challenge the conventions and representations of Western theater. Drawing together discussions in theater and performance studies, historiography, Pacific studies, and p...