ABSTRACT
This chapter canvasses Australian Aboriginal literature, Pacific Island and New Zealand Maori literature in English from the cultural renaissances of the 1960s and 1970s onwards. The section on Aboriginal literature in English surveys life stories, poetry and fiction, arguing that life stories constitute for male writers an archive of masculinity, and for female writers gendered, transgenerational accounts of women’s pivotal role in family and communal life, which acted as a buffer to assimilation. It looks at the impact of the Black Power movement on militant Aboriginal masculinity, and at how poetry and fiction by Aboriginal women have addressed gendered and racialized violence. Another important intervention by Aboriginal writers in the representation of gender is the queering of heteronormative sexuality, with writers undertaking queering investigations into the entanglement of race and gender, challenging both hegemonic masculinity and stereotypes of Aboriginal femininity.
Life-writing has not played the same role in Maori literature in English, with works more consciously fictionalized from the outset, and men and women writers relatively evenly represented. Gender relations depicted in the early works are generally patriarchal, though emphasis is on gender complementarity and Maori community and cultural cohesion in the face of assimilation, rather than Western-style feminist contestation. Gender is prominent in works that thematize family obligation and leadership. Girls and women characters depicted as possessing qualities of leadership serve to challenge a hypermasculine patriarchal order that blends ‘tradition’ with colonial influence. This fictional affirmation of female leadership emerges in conjunction with the powerful roles that women played in the 1970s–80s era of political protest. Contestation of Maori hyper-masculinity includes treatment of gendered domestic and sexual violence, along with gang violence. Later fiction challenges heteronormative social and cultural values, presenting lesbian, gay and transgender characters and issues from Maori perspectives.
The section on Pacific Island writing in English argues that Pacific writers across all genres have had to engage critically with a history of gendered and sexualized European representations of their bodies and cultures for voyeuristic consumption. However, Pacific writers have also engaged with the domestic and community impact of colonial and capitalist Western influences on gender identities and relations in daily life. Fictional depictions of a patriarchal social order suggest the mutual complicity of ‘traditional’ and colonial influences. While Pacific women poets have protested the unequal status of women since the 1970s, fictional works from the 1990s more uncompromisingly give voice to female experiences of domestic and sexual violence perpetrated by male family and community members. However, such violence is also cast variously as a repudiation of Western fantasies of Pacific eroticism and as a colonial departure from more flexible gender and sexual identities, sanctioned within some traditional Pacific cultures, and explored in recent fiction, poetry and drama.
