Author(s): Anisha Sankar (ed.); Lana Lopesi (ed.); Arcia Tecun (ed.)

Politics | Aotearoa New Zealand Non-Fiction | Ethnicity, Race and Identity

A search for new ways to talk about race in Aotearoa New Zealand brought together this powerful group of scholars, writers and activists. For these authors, attempts to confront racism and racial violence often stall against a failure to see how power works through race, across our modern social worlds. The result is a country where racism is all too often left unnamed and unchecked, voices are erased, the colonial past ignored and silence passes for understanding. By ‘bringing what is unspoken into focus’, Towards a Grammar of Race seeks to articulate and confront ideas of race in Aotearoa New Zealand – an exploration that includes racial capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. A recurring theme across the book is the inescapable entanglement of local and global manifestations of race. Each of the contributors brings their own experiences and insights to the complexities of life in a racialised society, and together their words make an important contribution to our shared and future lives on these shores.

 Contributors to this book: Pounamu Jade Aikman, Faisal Al-Asaad, Mahdis Azarmandi, Simon Barber, Garrick Cooper, Morgan Godfery, Kassie Hartendorp, Guled Mire, Tze Ming Mok, Adele Norris, Nathan Rew, Vera Seyra, Beth Teklezgi, Selome Teklezgi and Patrick S. Thomsen.

Contents: Introduction: Understanding the grammar of race in Aotearoa New Zealand (Anisha Sankar, Lana Lopesi and Arcia Tecun) A stock take of race discourse in New Zealand (Anish Sankar, Lana Lopesi and Arcia Tecun) Hidden Beneath Tiriti Justice (Garrick Cooper) Tenants in our own land? Racism, settler colonialism, and Maori home ownership (Pounamu Jade Aikman) The intimacies of four continents - and sea of islands (Anisha Sankar) Knew World Undercurrents (Arcia Tecun) The Gathering of Disparate Things: An interview with Dr. Simon Barber (Simon Barber) 'Race is colonialism speaking': Some notes on colonialism's imagination (Faisal Al-Asaad) Whiteness, blackness, and somewhere in between: Maori and the whakapapa of race (Morgan Godfery) Black Asian, White Asian: Racial histories and East Asian choices in the white settler state (Tze Ming Mok) The limits of Pakeha Treaty work - Why race matters to anti-racism (Mahdis Azarmandi) My Husband's Samoan, So Talofa: The Erasive Racial Politics of Judith Collins (Patrick S. Thomsen) Irrecon-tweet-able Differences: The digital rub of racial grammars and ethnic fragility (Lana Lopesi) To Speak of Liberation in a Black Oceania (Nathan Rew) Anti-blackness and 'White unseen': Exploring the use of the N-word in New Zealand (Adele Norris and Guled Mire) The Future is Change: Reflections on the Black Lives Matter march in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Beth Teklezgi, Selome Teklezgi, Vera Seyra and Kassie Hartendorp)