![]() ![]() The purpose of this article is to reread, using Mana Wahine theory, existing arguments about the book’s withdrawal, and to propose an original resolution of the question at the centre of debate: should the book have been withdrawn from schools, or not?ĭuring the 1960s the United States followed a policy of benevolent imperialism in Oceania. This research brings Māori feminist philosophy to the Washday debate: I take up Mana Wahine theory as a useful lens on the controversy, understood as an event about, with and for women, in the history of Māori education. Washday at the Pā provoked a national debate when the Minister of Education acceded to protests by the Māori Womens Welfare League against its use in classrooms by withdrawing it completely, and the story of this controversy has remained alive in national consciousness ever since. Washday at the Pā (‘pā’ is used colloquially by Pākehā to refer to a Māori settlement) is the title of an old schoolbook, a picture reading book for younger schoolchildren, which was produced in 1964 by the state education system in Aotearoa-New Zealand in 1964, written and photographed by Ans Westra, who later became one of the most famous photographers in the country. New fiction from the Pacific during the 1990s exhibits its postcolonial identity through the perspectives it adopts, through innovations in language use, and through its ability to transform traditional images of society and culture into images of postcoloniality. ![]() The realities of contemporary writers from the Pacific illustrate the complications in claiming privilege for Pacific voices because they are native. When the insider perspective is examined in postcolonial terms, it is clear that “there can hardly be such a thing as an essential inside that can be homogeneously represented by all insiders” (Minh-ha 1995, 218). For example, “Parade” by Patricia Grace can be read as a trope of the transforming power of the insider perspective. After the beginning of what Paul Sharrad called an “authentic” Pacific literature, the perspective shifted to one that viewed life through the eyes of Pacific peoples. Historically, the perspective assumed in writing about the Pacific until 1970 presented Pacific peoples through European eyes in roles of spectators and objects of European desires.
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