Always Italicise: How to write while colonised - Softcover

Alice Te Punga Somerville (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1869409760 ISBN 13: 9781869409760

Publisher: Auckland University Press, 2023

Synopsis

Shrink-wrapped, vacuum-packed, disassembled, sold for parts, butt of jokes, scapegoats, too this for that, too that for this, gravy trains, too angry, special treatment, let it go . . .

‘Always italicise foreign words’, a friend of the author was advised. In her first book of poetry, Māori scholar and poet Alice Te Punga Somerville does just that. In wit and anger, sadness and aroha, she reflects on ‘how to write while colonised’ – how to write in English as a Māori writer; how to trace links between Aotearoa and wider Pacific, Indigenous and colonial worlds; how to be the only Māori person in a workplace; and how – and why – to do the mahi anyway.

I wanted to pick up baby, and I wanted to pick a fight: The eternal Waitangi Day dilemma.

About this title

About the Author

Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) is a scholar, poet and irredentist. She researches and teaches Māori, Pacific and Indigenous texts in order to centre Indigenous expansiveness and de-centre colonialism. Alice is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. She studied at the University of Auckland, earned a PhD at Cornell University, is a Fulbright scholar and Marsden recipient and has held academic appointments in New Zealand, Canada, Hawai‘i and Australia. Her first book Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) won Best First Book from the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association. Her most recent book is Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook (BWB, 2020).

Edition details

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1869409760
• ISBN 13: 9781869409760
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88