Imag(in)ing the Nation through Maori eyes/I's

Abstract

This article focuses on the contribution of Maori writers to the reconstruction of New Zealand’s national profile, with special reference to Patricia Grace’s novel Baby No-Eyes. This process has been articulated around the need to destroy colonial images and preconceptions and has allowed them to gain visibility in a society which for a long time had remained blind to Maori cultural specificity. But whereas gaining visibility constitutes an essential part in their process of cultural recovery, the article also focuses on the simultaneous need to destroy the preeminence of visual material as the main constituent the country’s national identity and stresses the capacity of these writers to delineate their ethnicity through a double process of imag(in)ation more in agreement with contemporary needs, as Grace’s works particularly reveal.