The Fourth Eye

Māori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand

2013

Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas, Editors

A comprehensive look at the complex relationship between Māori culture and the media

The Fourth Eye brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to provide a critical and comprehensive account of the intricate and complex relationship between the media and Māori culture. Examining the Indigenous mediascape, The Fourth Eye shows how Māori filmmakers, actors, and media producers have depicted conflicts over citizenship rights and negotiated the representation of Indigenous people.

Lively and comprehensive, The Fourth Eye is an ambitious book, the first major collection devoted to Māori media.

Faye Ginsburg, New York University

From the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Indigenous and settler cultures to the emergence of the first-ever state-funded Māori television network, New Zealand has been a hotbed of Indigenous concerns. Given its history of colonization, coping with biculturalism is central to New Zealand life. Much of this “bicultural drama” plays out in the media and is molded by an anxiety surrounding the ongoing struggle over citizenship rights that is seated within the politics of recognition. The Fourth Eye brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to provide a critical and comprehensive account of the intricate and complex relationship between the media and Māori culture.

Examining the Indigenous mediascape, The Fourth Eye shows how Māori filmmakers, actors, and media producers have depicted conflicts over citizenship rights and negotiated the representation of Indigenous people. From nineteenth-century Māori-language newspapers to contemporary Māori film and television, the contributors explore a variety of media forms including magazine cover stories, print advertisements, commercial images, and current Māori-language newspapers to illustrate the construction, expression, and production of indigeneity through media.

Focusing on New Zealand as a case study, the authors address the broader question: what is Indigenous media? While engaging with distinct themes such as the misrepresentation of Māori people in the media, access of Indigenous communities to media technologies, and the use of media for activism, the essays in this much-needed new collection articulate an Indigenous media landscape that converses with issues that reach far beyond New Zealand.

Contributors: Sue Abel, U of Auckland; Joost de Bruin, Victoria U of Wellington; Suzanne Duncan, U of Otago; Kevin Fisher, U of Otago; Allen Meek, Massey U; Lachy Paterson, U of Otago; Chris Prentice, U of Otago; Jay Scherer, U of Alberta; Jo Smith, Victoria U of Wellington; April Strickland; Stephen Turner, U of Auckland.

Brendan Hokowhitu is dean of the faculty of native studies at the University of Alberta. He is coeditor of Indigenous Identity and Resistance: Researching the Diversity of Knowledge.

Vijay Devadas is senior lecturer and head of the media, film, and communication department at the University of Otago. He is coeditor of Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age.

Lively and comprehensive, The Fourth Eye is an ambitious book, the first major collection devoted to Māori media.

Faye Ginsburg, New York University

Taken as a whole, this is a vital, vibrant, important and timely volume.

Parallax

The Fourth Eye is a timely, exciting, and welcome addition to the growing and important body of critical scholarship on global Indigenous media published over the course of the past 10 years, as well as the first book-length study of Māori film, television, and media production. A groundbreaking text.

AlterNative

Contents

Maps
Introduction: The Indigenous Mediascape in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas

I. Mediated Indigeneity: Representing the Indigenous Other
1. Governing Indigenous Sovereignty: Biopolitics and the ‘Terror Raids’ in New Zealand
Vijay Devadas
2. Postcolonial Trauma: Child Abuse, Genocide, and Journalism in New Zealand
Allen Meek
3. Promotional Culture and Indigenous Identity: Trading the Other
Jay Scherer
4. Viewing against the Grain: Postcolonial Remediation in Rain of the Children
Kevin Fisher and Brendan Hokowhitu
5. Consume or Be Consumed: Targeting Māori Consumers in Print Media
Suzanne Duncan
II. Indigenous Media: Emergence, Struggles, and Interventions
6. Theorizing Indigenous Media
Brendan Hokowhitu
7. Te Hokioi and the Legitimization of the Māori Nation
Lachy Paterson
8. Barry Barclay's Te Rua: The Unmanned Camera and Māori Political Activism
April Strickland
9. Reflections on Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema
Stephen Turner
III. Māori Television: Nation, Culture, and Identity
10. The Māori Television Service and Questions of Culture
Chris Prentice
11. Māori Television, Anzac Day, and Constructing ‘Nationhood’
Sue Abel
12. Indigeneity and Cultural Belonging in Survivor-Styled Reality Television from New Zealand
Jo Smith and Joost de Bruin

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index