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The ecologist and the journalist: Imaginings of place in the New Zealand nonfiction of Geoff Park and Steve Braunias

Horrocks, Ingrid

Journal of Commonwealth literature, 2021-06, Vol.56 (2), p.322-341 [Periódico revisado por pares]

London, England: SAGE Publications

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  • Título:
    The ecologist and the journalist: Imaginings of place in the New Zealand nonfiction of Geoff Park and Steve Braunias
  • Autor: Horrocks, Ingrid
  • Assuntos: Braunias, Steve ; Case studies ; Colonialism ; Ecologists ; Essays ; Journalism ; Narrative techniques ; Nature ; Nonfiction ; Parker, Geoffrey ; Sociology ; Writing
  • É parte de: Journal of Commonwealth literature, 2021-06, Vol.56 (2), p.322-341
  • Descrição: Using an Aotearoa New Zealand case study and a contemporary settler-colonial context, this article brings together two traditions of writing about place: that associated with the “New Nature Writing” and that stemming from a sociological or journalistic approach. Place writing shifts location from the background or setting, to being an explicit topic of investigation, and as such bears a relationship to a long history of nature writing and environmental thought. However, it is not given that when we think about “place” we turn to ecology and history. This article activates the potential openness of the idea of “place writing” to develop a model for considerations of different kinds of engagements with place alongside one another. It compares the textual literary geographies created by ecologist Geoff Park in Ngā Uruora /The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape (1995) and journalist Steve Braunias in Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World (2012), paying attention to the role played in these imaginaries by the form of the nonfiction first-person essay. While Park’s book is representative of a path of settler-colonial writing that evokes place through an engagement with Nature, history and Indigenous experience, Braunias’s is representative of a quite different path, one predominantly focused on the various people who live in a place now. In both cases, the writers’ settler-colonial situation complicates the claims they make, while their Pākehā identities unsettle identification of what or who is “native” to either land or society in any location. This article argues that each path provides a potential corrective to the oversights and sentimentality of the other. Treating them together reveals much about Pākehā stories of place and the questions that arise from them, and adds new complexity and nuance to our understandings of place and environmental writing generally.
  • Editor: London, England: SAGE Publications
  • Idioma: Inglês
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  • Realização: ABCD-USP USP   Logos de Redes Sociais: Freepik

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