The paper engages in plumbing The Bone People, an anomalous, belated modernist fiction by Keri Hulme, a contemporary New Zealand writer of Maori descent. Although the book has often been examined in light of its autobiographical overtones, the paper is focused on the novelist's "identity construction" that crops up in the book's main characters' hybridized idiolects where the traces of an original but long suppressed Maori culture are detected. The English adopted/adapted and violated by Hume is intended to signal the interface between the history of colonial abuses inherent in the imperial project and the resistance of tangata whenua (the people of the land) to invasion and dispossession through an appropriation of the colonizer's language.
Grammars of the self: linguistic patterns of identity construction in K. Hulme's The Bone People
DEGANI, Marta
2008-01-01
Abstract
The paper engages in plumbing The Bone People, an anomalous, belated modernist fiction by Keri Hulme, a contemporary New Zealand writer of Maori descent. Although the book has often been examined in light of its autobiographical overtones, the paper is focused on the novelist's "identity construction" that crops up in the book's main characters' hybridized idiolects where the traces of an original but long suppressed Maori culture are detected. The English adopted/adapted and violated by Hume is intended to signal the interface between the history of colonial abuses inherent in the imperial project and the resistance of tangata whenua (the people of the land) to invasion and dispossession through an appropriation of the colonizer's language.
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