Spiraling Subversions: The Politics of Māori Cultural Survivance in the Critical Fictions of Patricia Grace, Paula Morris, and Kelly Ana Morey

Abstract

The principal objective of this doctoral research is to examine the ways in which key contemporary (2000-2005) fictional writings by Māori women authors Patricia Grace, Paula Morris, and Kelly Ana Morey demonstrate “survivance” – a term used by University of New Mexico Professor Gerald Vizenor and Ohio State University Professor Chadwick Allen to refer to the ways in which indigenous authors use their texts as “a means of cultural survival that comes with denying authoritative representations of [indigenous peoples] in addition to developing an adaptable, dynamic identity that can mediate between conflicting cultures” (Allen “Thesis” 65). I argue that acts of Māori cultural survivance are manifested in the works of these three authors both internally, in terms of the actions of characters in their fictional narratives, and externally, by the authors themselves who fight for survivance in a literary publishing world that is often slow to recognize and value works of fiction that challenge traditional (Western) modes of novel form and style. Thesis chapters therefore include both extensive critical readings of Grace’s novel Dogside Story (2001), Morris’s novels Queen of Beauty (2002) and Hibiscus Coast (2005), and Morey’s novel Bloom (2003) as well as detailed biographical information based on my interviews with the authors themselves. The thesis emphasizes the ways in which each woman’s approach to writing survivance fiction is largely driven by her personal history and whakapapa. The study also asserts that Grace, Morris and Morey are producing acts of indigenous literary cultural survivance that “imagine the world healthy,” something author and critic Maxine Hong Kingston demands that contemporary writers of critical fictions must do if they are going to convince the book-buying populace “not to worship tragedy as the highest art anymore” (204). Grace, Morris, and Morey depict the creative, generative, and “healthy” aspects of Māori cultural survivance as taking place in both the real and imagined communities which they live in and write about. Their texts offer hope for the ongoing survival – and survivance – of Māori culture in the twenty-first century.