Modernism and Māoritanga

In its reading of the bone people, this chapter reexamines Keri Hulme’s controversial borrowings from literary modernism in light of her claims to represent a postcolonial identity derived from Māori cultural traditions. The chapter distinguishes between a “modernist critical realism” deriving from Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson and a more formally experimental modernism employing myth, fantasy, intertextual borrowings, and Joycean wordplay. This second strain of modernism has raised doubts about the “authenticity” of Hulme’s representation of a New Zealand reborn out of Māori culture. The chapter argues that it was never Hulme’s aim to portray or preserve a pure and “authentic” Māori culture. Hulme’s narrative instead models an understanding of indigeneity as capable of incorporating modernist aesthetics within it. Hulme thus reconfigures “postcolonial hybridity” in the service of a bicultural vision of New Zealand that embraces settler culture within a distinctively Māori framework.