Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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I blame the malign influence of the PAS Women's XV who can swear to make a sailor blush, but still suggest you still think a little about gendered insults.
Yeah. Gosh, with the list of ladybit- and non-heteronormative-derived taboo words we're cataloguing on this thread, you might think that New Zealanders, as a group of language users, have a bit of a problem with female and non-hetero sexuality. Who would have thought?
Oddly enough, while reading this, I was also leafing through a memoir by, well, Muriel Box, and came across this quote, which seemed apposite:
Even now I find it a little difficult to stomach epithets smacking of derision and contempt for sex in its various manifestations. D H Lawrence's gallant attempt in Lady Chatterly's Lover to regenerate certain four-letter Anglo-Saxon words in our language ended in failure. I rather wish it had not. I've often thought it would be amusing to invent some highly-coloured expletives to replace the traditional ones smacking of human excreta, sodomy, buggery, or copulation. Obviously strong, racy language is needed at times to relieve unbearable tensions but children listening to the currently fashionable brand are unfortunately liable to conclude that sex is the epitome of filth, and certain human functions degrading. ("Odd Woman Out," 22)
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It'd be like me running for office in outback Australia and gaining votes by blaming all the town's problems on the Aboriginals and offering to round them up and throw them in jail if everyone votes for me. Taking a swing at minorities has always been a cheap way to gain and maintain popularity.
Repeated for emphasis.
I think New Zealanders don't quite get this, because they have no (recent) folk memory of race and immigration riots or large-scale ethnic conflict. Inciting the attitudes that lead in that direction -- and for what? Breakfast TV ratings? -- is just incredibly asinine and irresponsible.
The fostering of a racist environment is a progressive thing. How long before Henry's fan-base feels entitled to pull stunts like this? I'm not joking. 7 years on from Orewa and thousands of hours of race-baiting talkback and "anti-PC" media stunts later, NZ feels ... different. And not in a good way.
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What should "Canadians" be called, then? I'm surrounded by them at the moment ... all different hues, and a tremendous diversity of family names too of course.
"Canadians." Of course. But that's a nationality, not an ethnicity. It's kind of an important distinction.
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It's the empire, on a form.
That's just beautiful, dude. You some sort of historian or something?
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Of course it's a combination. Which makes it very similar to "Australian", "American", "Canadian", ... and perhaps even "British" (Act of Union pretty recent in human history too).
Totally. In that they're all majority-Anglophone nations whose recently-imported majority cultures are often suspiciously keen to claim some form of indigeneity, in defiance of the actual histories of population movement, violence, and dispossession that underpin their current dominance.
So yes. I would argue that "Australian," "Canadian," "American," and "New Zealander" are indeed "not-ethnicities." Or rather, they're pseudo-ethnicities, the assertion of which is a way of denying the fact of colonial settlement and the basic un-originality of their supposedly distinctive (white) national cultures.
Mexico and Jamaica, you'll agree, have rather different ethnic histories, ones that reflect another set of colonial policies altogether from those that governed the "British World" system that produced Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US.
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What I do claim is that people should be able to identify themselves as New Zealanders (and any other ethnicity) if they wish to do so, without being subjected to abuse from the likes of you.
Except New Zealander is not an ethnicity. It is, at most, a particular combination, at a particular moment in time, of pre-existing ethnicities, all of which (with the exception of one) originated outside of this country within the very recent past, in terms of human history.
As such, it's useless for the purposes of the census, except as a measure, I guess, of how far a certain form of reactionary cultural politics percolated the national consciousness in the post-Orewa speech era. Because that was the context in which "New Zealander" as a putative ethnic identity existed in in 2006.
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This is a fascinating post: thanks so much for writing it, Jolisa! I went to Lydia Wevers's Inaugural Lecture on the Brancepeth at Victoria back in 2008, and was enthralled. I can't wait to read the book.
As for reading in colonial New Zealand, it was a hugely important aspect of culture, and Traue's essay in Libraries & Culture on the circulating libraries of early NZ is fabulous. (I've got a PDF of this, if anyone wants it.) Wevers's book should be a real eye-opener for anyone who assumes that settler culture was in any way averse to the life of the mind. In fact, there was a vibrant textual economy at many levels of social class (not simply among the elite), and a strong tradition of autodidacticism and "self-culture," supported by lending libraries, atheneums, and clubs and associations. The idea that books and "high" culture in general are something for the "elite," and therefore suspect, is very much a twentieth-century phenomenon.
The New Zealand Reading Experience Database, modeled on this and which is currently being set up at Victoria University, should be the stimulus for a lot more research in this area.
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You obviously never received a student loan statement between 1999-2008.
Oh, I received plenty of those. I just never opened any of them ... :)
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The tragedy is, a few more rounds of cuts in governmental comms. departments, and all .govt.nz websites are going to read something like this. But then again, I guess "Plain English" is so unevolved, right?
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the Tongan psychiatrist incident.
Anyone want to start a post-shoegaze noise rock band with me? We have the perfect band name now.