The Long Forgetting: Post-colonial literary culture in New ... - JPCS

Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures and Societies
The Long Forgetting: Post-colonial literary culture in New Zealand, by Patrick Evans,
Christchurch, Canterbury University Press, 2007.
Patrick Evans’s The Long Forgetting is a bold and ambitious study of New Zealand literary culture,
engaging with various branches of antipodean and international postcolonial theory and offering a
wide-ranging overview of local literary and cultural developments from the late nineteenth century to
the first decade of the twenty-first. In particular, the book makes an important contribution to the field
of ‘settlement studies’ – the analysis of white settler societies and literatures – that has flourished
within the antipodes over the last decade or so. Evans’s thesis is that literature produced by Pakeha
(ethnic European) New Zealand settlers and their descendants has enacted a process of cultural
‘forgetting’ that occludes the material realities of the British colonisation of New Zealand, in particular
the brutalities enacted upon indigenous Maori and the landscape. He argues that the ‘recolonisation’ of
New Zealand – which followed the colonial wars (1843-1872) that resulted from disputes over the
terms and consequences of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi - was accompanied by a rhetoric of the sublime
that masked the ‘gobbling up of the land’, marginalised Maori, and fed into a tourist industry that has
marketed New Zealand as a ‘clean, green’ scenic wonderland, from the late nineteenth-century ‘grand
tour’ era to more recent manifestations such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Evans
also argues that where Maori have been incorporated into New Zealand’s myths of nationhood, it has
been in terms of a ‘Pakeha-style’ biculturalism in which Pakeha have symbolically ‘indigenised’
themselves (thereby transcending colonial guilt and responsibility) and Maori have been co-opted into
a romantic discourse of ‘Maoritanga’ largely based on Pakeha written sources. This is an extension of a
contentious debate on the discursive ‘construction’ of Maori cultural identity (particularly centring on
‘spirituality’) begun in the late 1980s by, inter alia, literary critic Ruth Brown and anthropologist Allan
Hanson (not ‘Robert’ Hanson as he appears on p. 94), and Evans will no doubt ruffle some feathers
within the Maori literary community with his assertions that many indigenous writers (since the Maori
literary renaissance of the 1970s) have been unable to transcend this dominant discourse. Evans’s
avowedly neo-Marxist approach to New Zealand literature is well-justified in the main, but in the
discussion of Maori literature, and in his assertions that contemporary Pakeha New Zealand writers
have sacrificed an attention to local material realities in order to court overseas success (here drawing
upon Graham Huggan’s notion of the postcolonial exotic) he can appear rather prescriptive and
moralising at times.
Evans argues that The Long Forgetting ‘updates’ his earlier study The Penguin History of New
Zealand Literature (1990), and like the former work it makes extensive use of subheadings and blends
literary analysis with cultural/social history. In this case, however, the balance didn’t always feel right:
lengthy contextual sections (focusing, for example, on the history of whaling, sealing, and the meat
trade) could have been pruned back to allow a more detailed analysis of the impressive range of
primary texts mentioned in the book (in some cases, these appear merely as lists of titles with their
relevance not always clear). The introductory chapter in particular was structurally disorienting, with
some dizzying temporal and thematic leaps and spirals, though later chapters (which follow a broadly
chronological trajectory) became easier to follow. More careful copy editing was also needed, as there
are a sizeable number of misspellings of authors’ names and Maori/Pacific words.
Book Review: Michelle Keown.
JPCS Vol. 1 No. 1 2010. http://www.jpcs.in 103

Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures and Societies
That said, as someone intensely interested in settlement studies (as well as New Zealand
literature more generally), I found this book extremely helpful in revealing the astonishing range of
literary and theoretical production in this area. While I did not always agree with Evans’s arguments, I
admire his encyclopaedic knowledge of New Zealand literature and literary culture, and found The
Long Forgetting a provocative and often audacious work that will no doubt give rise to some
stimulating future debates within New Zealand literary-critical circles.
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Michelle Keown is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has
published widely on Maori and Pacific writing and is the author of Postcolonial Pacific Writing:
Representations of the Body (Routledge, 2005) and Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial
Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Book Review: Michelle Keown.
JPCS Vol. 1 No. 1 2010. http://www.jpcs.in 104