ABSTRACT
Where Alistair Campbell’s writing explores cortico-visceral dysfunction largely at a personal or microcosmic level, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983) – the primary focus of discussion in this chapter – investigates pyscho-social dysfunction as an expression of a broader cross-cultural disharmony within New Zealand society. This chapter considers the novel’s movement from sublimated colonial violence to public resolution and socio-somatic regeneration with particular reference to Frantz Fanon’s influential discussion of cultural and political nationalism in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), arguing that a new post-imperial nationalist imperative emerges from the suffering and conflict which afflicts the three central characters in Hulme’s text.
