What is it about?
This article demonstrates the process of layering the personal story alongside the wider historical and social story, and alongside stories of other peoples, through a Critical Family History. As a strategy of decolonization, the stories are interrogated using critical theory. It is one story to make sense of a descendent of white settlers - Pākehā, the descendent of a colonial New Zealander.
Featured Image
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Making sense of a white settler identity is significant to better understand and disrupt assumptions of a homogeneous white people group. To understand the complexity of identity stories and the wider macro factors that inform our becoming is one way to begin important conversations around privilege, mixedness, and equity.
Perspectives
This was a difficult story to write - interrogating the story of one ancestor and making sense of the ongoing process of colonisation. Using Derrida's concept of hauntology and creatively writing the stories enabled a more authentic and accessible approach to those stories that are difficult to share.
Esther Fitzpatrick
University of Auckland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Story of Becoming: Entanglement, Settler Ghosts, and Postcolonial Counterstories, Culture Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, September 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1532708617728954.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
