The Pacific Festivals of Aotearoa New Zealand : Negotiating Place and Identity in a New Homeland

With a history now stretching back four decades, Pacific festivals of Aotearoa assert a multicultural identity of New Zealand and situate the country squarely within a sea of islands. In this volume, Jared Mackley-Crump gives a provocative look at the changing demographics and cultural landscape of a place frequently viewed through a bicultural lens, Pākehā and Māori. Taking the post–World War II migrations of Pacific peoples to New Zealand as its starting point, the story begins in 1972 with the inaugural Polynesian Festival, an event that was primarily designed as a Māori festival, now known as Te Matatini, the largest Māori performing arts event in the world. Two major moments of festivalization are considered: the birth of Polyfest in 1976 and the inaugural Pasifika Festival of 1993. Both began in Auckland, the home of the largest Pacific communities in New Zealand, and both have spawned a series of events that follow the models they successfully established. While Polyfests focus primarily on the transmission of performance traditions from culture bearers to the young, largely New Zealand–born generations, Pasifika festivals are highly public community events, in which diverse displays of material culture are offered up for consumption by both cultural tourists and Pacific communities alike. Both models have experienced a significant period of growth since 1993, and here, the author presents a thought-provoking and wide-ranging analysis to explain the phenomenon that has been called a “Pacific renaissance.” Written from an ethnomusicological perspective, __The Pacific Festivals of Aotearoa New Zealand__ incorporates lively first-person observations as well as interviews with festival organizers, performers, and other important historical figures. The second half of the book delves into the festival space, uncovering new meanings about the function and role of music performance and public festivity. The author skillfully challenges accounts that label festivals as inauthentic recreations of culture for tourist audiences and gives both observers and participants an uplifting new approach to understand these events as meaningful and symbolic extensions of the ways diasporic Pacific communities operate in New Zealand.

In this rich and absorbing analysis of the transformation of political thought in nineteenth-century Japan, Douglas Howland examines the transmission to Japan of key concepts - liberty, rights, sovereignty, and society - from Western Europe and the United States. Because Western political concepts did not translate well into their language, Japanese had to invent terminology to engage Western political thought. This work of westernization served to structure historical agency as Japanese leaders undertook the creation of a modern state.

Where scholars have previously treated the introduction of Western political thought to Japan as a simple migration of ideas from one culture to another, Howland undertakes an unprecedented integration of the history of political concepts and the semiotics of translation techniques. He demonstrates that Japanese efforts to translate the West must be understood as problems both of language and action–as the creation and circulation of new concepts and the usage of these new concepts in debates about the programs and policies to be implemented in a westernizing Japan.

Translating the West will interest scholars of East Asian studies and translation studies and historians of political thought, liberalism, and modernity.

Contents Glossary Introduction Part I Pacific Peoples and Festivals in Aotearoa New Zealand 1 Migration and Festivalization: How New Zealand Became a Center of the Pacific Diaspora 2 A Pacific Renaissance? Understanding Festivalization 3 Contextualizing the Ethnographic Space Part II Understanding the Pacific Festival Space 4 Logistics, Leadership, and Development 5 Performances 6 Community 7 Place and Identity Conclusion: Pacific Festivals and Diasporic Flow References Index