Abstract:
In this article, Nishhza Thiruselvam interrogates Aotearoa/New Zealand politics in the last decade and a half, attempting to make sense of the events leading up to March 15, referred to by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
as ‘New Zealand’s darkest day’. She argues that the terror attacks perpetrated on this day were, paradoxically,
both shocking yet unsurprising, given that racist and Islamophobic scapegoating and anti-Māori rhetoric are
consistently manipulated by Aotearoa/New Zealand’s political elite in a strategy to maintain power. Informed
by postcolonial feminist analysis, Thiruselvam argues that social discourses in the wake of March 15, such as
Ardern’s insistence that ‘This is not who we are’, constitute forms of institutional gaslighting, which invalidate the author’s own lived experience of occupying the space of the ‘Other’ in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
