New Zealand Literature and the Global Marketplace, introduction to Special Issue 'New Zealand and the Globalisation of Culture'

Abstract

[eng] In 2003, New Zealand literary critic Patrick Evans published a controversial and by now much-quoted essay entitled “Spectacular Babies: The Globalisation of New Zealand Fiction” (Evans 2000). This was a time that Evans saw as “epochal” for New Zealand literature in its transition from the postcolonial to the global (94). Two of the defining features of this moment, Evans argued, were “the professionalisation of the role of the author and the commodification of local fiction” (94), mostly as a result of the “growing dominance of the creative writing school in filtering, controlling and normalising the flow of writers into local publishing” (101). In his essay, Evans referred directly to Bill Manhire’s hugely successful creative writing course at Victoria University of Wellington, which he described as “a conveyor belt which [ … ] offers a high-speed ride to exactly where any young writer would want to go” (96). Evans’s main preoccupation was that these writers had left behind the nationalist or regionalist concerns which had historically characterized New Zealand writing, opting instead for “the removal or neutralizing of the New Zealand referent” (104) to accommodate global market requirements. This special issue revisits some of the discussions which Evans brought up almost 20 years ago to explore a range of writing, performing, publishing, teaching and marketing practices and strategies. The overall aim is to reflect on the extent to which national and regional labels, essential to the definition and development of Aotearoa New Zealand’s identity and cultural expression in the colonial and postcolonial periods, are being discarded by authors, critics or publishers to benefit from the cultural flows channelled through diaspora, globalization and transnationalism, or on the contrary are being reformulated in order to resist or negotiate the commodifying impositions of the global literary marketplace.