Galleries of Maoriland introduces us to the many ways in which European colonists to New Zealand discovered, created, propagated, and romanticised the Maori world summed up in a popular nickname describing New Zealand; Maoriland. But Blackley shows that Maori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of romanticisation. What, this book asks, were some of the Maori purposes that were served by curio displays, portrait collections, and the wider ethnological culture? Galleries of Maoriland looks at Maori prehistory in European art; the enthusiasm of settlers and Maori for portraiture and recreations of ancient life; the trade in Maori curios; and the international exhibition of this colonial culture. By illuminating New Zealand's artistic and ethnographic economy, this book provides a new understanding of our art and our culture.

Galleries of Maoriland introduces us to the many ways in which European colonists to New Zealand (called Pakeha by the indigenous Maori) discovered, created, propagated and romanticised the Maori world at the turn of the century summed up in a popular nickname describing New Zealand; Maoriland. It could be seen in the paintings of Lindauer and Goldie; among artists, patrons, collectors and audiences; inside the Polynesian Society and the Dominion Museum; among stolen artefacts and fantastical accounts of the Maori past. The culture of Maoriland was a colonists creation. But Galleries of Maoriland shows that Maori were not merely passive victims: they too had a stake in this process of romanticisation. What, this book asks, were some of the Maori purposes that were served by curio displays, portrait collections, and the wider ethnological culture? Why did the idealisation of an ancient Maori world, which obsessed ethnological inquirers and artists alike, appeal also to Maori? Who precisely were the Maori participants in this culture, and what were their motives? Galleries of Maoriland looks at Maori prehistory in European art; the enthusiasm of settlers and Maori for portraiture and recreations of ancient life; the trade in Maori curios; and the international exhibition of this colonial culture. By illuminating New Zealand's artistic and ethnographic economy at the turn of the twentieth century, this book provides a new understanding of our art and our culture.

Galleries of Maoriland looks at Māori prehistory in Pākehā art; the enthusiasm of Pākehā and Māori for portraiture and recreations of ancient life; the trade in Māori curios; and the international exhibition of this colonial culture. By illuminating New Zealand's artistic and ethnographic economy at the turn of the twentieth century, this book provides a new understanding of our art and our culture.

The arts of Africa, Oceania and native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation? This revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing and outnumbering but never eclipsing native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, visual art has loomed large. Settler artists and designers drew upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities. Yet powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange has been a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to insist on the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.

In the first major national history of Aotearoa New Zealand to be published for 20 years, Professor Michael Belgrave advances the notion that New Zealand's two peoples — tangata whenua and subsequent migrants — have together built an open, liberal society based on a series of social contracts. Frayed though they may sometimes be, these contracts have created a country that is distinct. This engaging new look at our history examines how.

This book reveals how art and sex promoted the desire for the genetically perfect body. Its eight chapters demonstrate that before eugenics was stigmatized by the Holocaust and Western histories were sanitized of its prevalence, a vast array of Western politicians, physicians, eugenic societies, family leagues, health associations, laboratories and museums advocated, through verbal and visual cultures, the breeding of 'the master race'. Each chapter illustrates the uncanny resemblances between models of sexual management and the perfect eugenic body in America, Britain, France, Communist Russia and Nazi Germany both before and after the Second World War. Traced back to the eighteenth-century anatomy lesson, the perfect eugenic body is revealed as athletic, hygienic, 'pure-blooded' and sexually potent. This paradigm is shown to have persisted as much during the Bolshevik sexual revolution, as in democratic nations and fascist regimes. Consistently posed naked, these images were unashamedly exhibitionist and voyeuristic. Despite stringent legislation against obscenity, not only were these images commended for soliciting the spectator's gaze but also for motivating the spectator to act out their desire. An examination of the counter-archives of Maori and African Americans also exposes how biologically racist eugenics could be equally challenged by art. Ultimately this book establishes that art inculcated procreative sex with the Corpus Delecti - the delectable body, healthy, wholesome and sanctioned by eugenicists for improving the Western race.

The nineteenth century witnessed a series of revolutions in the production and circulation of images. From lithographs and engraved reproductions of paintings to daguerreotypes, stereoscopic views, and mass-produced sculptures, works of visual art became available in a wider range of media than ever before. But the circulation and reproduction of artworks also raised new questions about the legal rights of painters, sculptors, engravers, photographers, architects, collectors, publishers, and subjects of representation (such as sitters in paintings or photographs). Copyright and patent laws tussled with informal cultural norms and business strategies as individuals and groups attempted to exert some degree of control over these visual creations. With contributions by art historians, legal scholars, historians of publishing, and specialists of painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic arts, this rich collection of essays explores the relationship between intellectual property laws and the cultural, economic, and technological factors that transformed the pictorial landscape during the nineteenth century. This book will be valuable reading for historians of art and visual culture; legal scholars who work on the history of copyright and patent law; and literary scholars and historians who work in the field of book history. It will also resonate with anyone interested in current debates about the circulation and control of images in our digital age.

Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.