(Un)saying the said: Negotiating Postcolonial Theories of Otherness

Abstract

This thesis takes its leave from the observation of a central contradiction which seems to underpin the articulation of a postcolonial Maori identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand: while postcolonial theories tend to celebrate the "transcendence" of binary oppositions through the panacea of cultural hybridity, Aotearoa/New Zealand's official government policy of biculturalism emphasises a maintained, or even accentuated, binary opposition between Maori and Pakeha. The challenge which presents itself to postcolonial Aotearoa/New Zealand, as a result, is how to disarticulate biculturalism from the binary logic which underpins the colonial self/other structure. Asking whether biculturalism can be "founded" on a different logic, the thesis traverses two very different "logical answers": Hegelian dialectical logic, on the one hand, ancl Derridean deconstructive logic, on the other. It argues that while dialectical logic successfully renegotiates the subject/object structure of Cartesian philosophy, it disregards the double logic of representation: Vertretung and Darstellung, (political) "proxy" and (discursive) "portrait," and therefore can enable political representation only at the cost of violating the ethical singularity of the other. Seeking to avoid such violent "portraits," Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical reworking of the self/other relationship, by contrast, sheds the language of representation, but thereby also risks its politically enabling function. The thesis suggests that the challenge of how to make use of the "proxy" side of representation without falling into the traps of the "portrait" side is met by deconstructive logic. Derrida’s theory of iterability offers the possibility of an ethical politics which reworks the self/other relationship in a way that is both politically viable and ethically desirable. As such, it emerges as a promising logic upon which to base biculturalism. The thesis argues, however, that greater attention needs to be paid to the double function of iterability-as identificatory and altering repetition-to prevent it from replicating the very logic it seeks to displace. A concluding analysis of Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors and Patricia Grace’s Patricia brings the theory of iterability "face-to-face" with fiction in an attempt to demarcate the articulatory requirements of alterability