ONCE WERE WARRIORs, BUT HOW ABOUT MAORITANGA NOW? NOVEL AND FILM AS A DIALOGIC THIRD SPACE
Keywords:
postcolonialism, alienation, Maoriness, dialogism, third space
Abstract
Alan Duff’s bestselling novel Once Were Warriors (1990) raised bitter controversies for its harsh depiction of indigenous alienation in the ghettos of New Zealand’s cities. Duff is part Maori and wrote from his own slum experience, and his text shifted responsibility for the Maori predicament and possible solutions partly back to the victims themselves, which met with fierce criticism from indigenous and progressive non-indigenous readership. Under the direction of Lee Tamahori, also of mixed descent, the novel found its way to the screen in 1995 and thus reached a world audience. Given that Duff’s original screenplay was not used for the homonymous film, it should come as no surprise that novel and film tell different stories. While both embed a dysfunctional Maori family within a crippling urban environment, their content and discursive strategies are not quite the same. Applying a Bakhtinian approach to New Zealand’s postcoloniality, this essay investigates up to what point the discursive dialogue between both narratives obeys the requirements of the narrative medium chosen and results in the marketing of different agendas and sites of contestation.
Section
Articles
Authors who publish with Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).