Post-cultural hospitality: settler-native-migrant encounters.

Smith, Jo

Contemporary settler states can be characterized as conjunctural formations that attempt to address the demands of the historical legacies of colonization at the same time as dealing with the present-time and future-oriented imperatives of transnational and international global forces. (1) Indigenous collectivities' calls for social justice challenge the legitimacy of settler-state law at the same time as global economic and cultural flows erode the sovereignty of the nation-state. As a recent special issue of Postcolonial Studies entitled 'Unsettled States' makes clear, these competing conditions (of past and future played out in the heady culture of the everyday) invite settler states to address the question of:

 ... how to exit with grace, justice and humility a formation that
 shows terminal signs of collapsing under the weight of its own
 exclusions, illogics and undecidabilities ... when western
 geopolitical powers are intensifying, rather than loosening, their
 efforts to salvage certainty, predictability and centrality in a
 rapidly re-configuring global landscape. (2)

In contemporary settler states the need for a strong (certain and predictable) national presence on the global market is undermined by intra-national concerns that contest the basis of contemporary settler governmentality. In light of these global economic imperatives and intra-national concerns, strategies of reconciliation instigated by nations such as Australia and South Africa take on new meanings. That is to say, strategies such as the recognition of historical injustices and the attempt by governments to reconcile indigenous claims within the contemporary context are ostensibly discourses of social justice. Yet they are also attempts by a once-colonial nation-state to decide the undecidable (to be done with the responsibility of a settler past), so as to attain a sense of national unity for the future. This is the surest expression of the persistence of settler sovereignty: to make a decision on how differences between settler and native collectivities will be negotiated, maintained, and (ultimately) overcome.

Addressing recent claims to indigenous sovereignty within Australia and New Zealand, the editors of Postcolonial Studies remind us of how strategies of reconciliation tend to conceal the 'differently constituted and positioned socio-cultural systems and practices' that inform competing claims to social power. (3) Indeed, the underlying contradiction of such discourses of reconciliation can be seen in the ways in which such rhetoric and strategies can serve to mask the majority's ability to impose norms and regulations on another collectivity. What of these undecidables? What of these differing socio-cultural systems? Echoing the recent work of Fuyuki Kurasawa, the editors suggest that, in light of these socio-cultural differences, the presuppositions underpinning western social theory and the settler state (including what constitutes social justice, cultural tradition, modernity, rights and sovereignty) must undergo a thorough cross-cultural critique. What is at stake within the settler state is more a 'vexed politics of culture (rather than a politically correct but ethically evacuated "cultural politics")', which is to say that whatever normalizing force prevails, this force must be opened up through perpetual critique. (4) The settler state is thus the limit case of western social theory as the urgencies of indigenous claims to social power (and justice) unsettle orthodox intellectual, methodological and theoretical practices, thus consistently urging the production of mobile theoretical concepts with which the movements of social power might be traced.

The special issue of Postcolonial Studies explores settler-native encounters within Australia and New Zealand as a means to demonstrate these 'unsettling' intra-national tensions. Yet, as the above quote from its editorial implies, the conjunctural characteristics of the settler state also include interactions with trans- and international 'western geopolitical powers' and, by extension, global flows of capital. These international issues are not addressed in the special issue, which focuses more on settler-native encounters. Other intra-national concerns, such as those socio-cultural differences introduced by immigrant collectivities, are also occluded. How can one pursue an examination of a 'vexed politics of culture' of the contemporary settler state without considering migrant national subjects and global economic and cultural flows? I suspect that one can do so when the pressing question of indigenous sovereignty prioritizes the effects of settler power rather than processes of globalization, and calls for the wrongs of the colonial past to be healed before multicultural policies can be considered.

As Australian cultural politics has demonstrated, policies of multiculturalism and the rhetoric accompanying them have threatened the recognition of Aboriginal Australian sovereignty. However, do we not risk a certain ethical negligence when we bracket off considerations of the multicultural and the global when discussing the unsettled nature of contemporary settler states? While the question of a politics of western culture (and the social theories underpinning these cultural formations) is no doubt a complex and vexed research agenda, perhaps it is equally imperative not to leave unexamined the many socio-cultural systems and practices operating alongside those of the settler-native. This discussion plays host to the idea that the 'vexed politics of culture' of the contemporary settler state must include discussions of indigenous and migrant encounters beyond those of the settler-native type. Indeed, beginning from the point of multiple differences (settler-native-migrant) suggests that such a politics of culture must be post-cultural in its focus and alert to the imperatives of global capital in the production and dissemination of cultural identities. Given these conjunctural dynamics, the settler state is unusually positioned to develop strategies and models of cross-cultural encounter that unsettle prevailing intellectual and epistemological practices.

The Bicultural Settler State and Multicultural Discourse

The competing tensions of past, present and future are sharply demarcated within the nation-state of Aotearoa/New Zealand. A treaty signed between the British Crown and New Zealand Maori conditions contemporary cultural politics. At the same time, the geopolitics of the country (its small population and history as an export culture) ensures its dependency on global capital. These tensions can be framed by the competing discourses of biculturalism and multiculturalism. Aotearoa/New Zealand (a place name that literally demonstrates the settler/native divide) pursues a politics of biculturalism which attempts to honour the Treaty of Waitangi, and thus to 'exit with grace' prior forms of colonial governmentality. Yet the bicultural nature of this politics must contend with a de facto multiculturalism, which characterizes the culture of the everyday and highlights the perceived exclusionary nature of biculturalism. Writing in the context of national television culture, Kothari, Pearson and Zuberi note:

 Notwithstanding the degree, intensity and implementation of an
 actual partnership, official bicultural rhetoric effectively means
 that Maori bicultural rights supersede the multicultural rights of
 immigrants. Therefore, New Zealand is a place in which
 multiculturalism as policy has been explicitly deferred.
 Nevertheless it lurks in the quotidian shadows as a de facto
 reality. (5)

While bicultural rhetoric within the mainstream (settler-structured) public sphere does indeed appear to preclude multiculturalism (and we shall return to this issue in a later section), the de facto multicultural reality of Aotearoa/New Zealand often feeds political rhetoric celebrating the 'quotidian shadows' of the contemporary nation.

As I shall argue, discourses of multiculturalism attempt to assert a pragmatic response to global flows of labour, people and resources, and are at times at odds with the more historical concerns that policies of biculturalism reflect. Whenever these two terms circulate, they do so at the service of a nation-building agenda and involve some form of identity positioning within the categories of Maori (or tangata whenua), Pakeha (a settler identity distinct from European identity and in relation to Maori), or migrant. Discourses of biculturalism and multiculturalism rarely enable the possibility of simultaneous identity positions across these categories. Such identity categories are embedded in a history of meanings that can never quite express the constantly shifting parameters of identification characterizing the everyday. These ill-fitting categories contribute to the 'unsettled' nature of this settler state and disrupt governmental drives to be 'post-settler'. The limits of these concepts and the rhetoric surrounding these terms (Pakeha , Maori, Migrant) bring into relief the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning cultural identities and throw into question the basis for collective political action within the settler nation. That is to say, the contemporary context of Aotearoa/New Zealand exemplifies the vexed question of a settler-native-migrant politics of culture.

The ontologico-epistemological dimensions of bicultural and multicultural discourses, as concepts designating the cut and shape of Aotearoa/New Zealand political culture, generate notions of belonging in at least three ways: as dependant upon a state of injury (where Maori are the victims of historical violence); as derived from a willful forgetting of the past or as an economy of guilt and debt (the heirs to colonial settlement, Pakeha); or as a condition premised on the benevolence of the state (Migrant subjects). Each approach fails to provide an affirmative collective project around which a people might rally. The specific context of Aotearoa/New Zealand raises more general questions about the viability of a post-settler politics. If we lack a belief in the image of political collectivity given in the bi- or the multicultural, then what other images or concepts can those living in the aftermath of colonization believe in? What are the necessary conditions to generate new discursive spaces through which alternative political collectivities might emerge? What post-cultural concepts and strategies can challenge the orthodoxies of identity entrenched in the bi- and the multicultural? In short, how do we affirm our time and place here in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and more generally, how do we affirm the contemporary condition in a manner that productively registers the exit wounds of the 'post' of post-settlement? The dynamic of host-guest relations is explored in this article as one such model that begins a discussion of settler postcolonialism in light of the mutually transformative relationships between settler, native and migrant collectivities.

Affirmation in the Wake of Colonization

Strategies exist to heal the ambivalent condition of the settler subject. These include narratives of reconciliation where apologies are rendered and historical wounds healed by shifts in legal, educational and epistemological practices. Other strategies involve cloaking the historical processes of colonization with a contemporary rhetoric of indigeneity that aligns the settler subject with other migrant subjects, resulting in a de facto multiculturalism that responds to the needs of the present while obscuring the significance of the colonial past. A recent example of the latter approach can be found in the banal and theatrical arena of government politics. In his speech as Race Relations Minister, Labour MP Trevor Mallard framed indigeneity as predicated on the 'now' of present-day occupation when he stated that 'New Zealand ... has to get its British imperial past behind it' and that 'Maori and Pakeha are both indigenous people to New Zealand now'. (6) Continuing in a multiculturalist model, Mallard states:

 Indigeneity is about the diversity of ways in which we belong and
 identify with our country. There are Chinese and Indian New
 Zealanders who have become deeply indigenous too, just like other
 Kiwis whose forbears come from a huge range of other countries. (7)

In Mallard's speech notions of indigeneity become a catchphrase for the multifarious ways of belonging to a place. The 'depths' of this form of indigeneity come not from autochthonous belonging or from notions of a homeland that one is born to, but from a migrant form of belonging--that of occupation. Implicitly, Mallard asserts a shared commonality between Pakeha , Chinese and Indian New Zealanders, and uses migrant identities to naturalize settler relationships to the land as part of a continuing and universal process of becoming indigenous. 'Kiwi' becomes the multicultural term to indigenize all introduced identities, and describes the perpetual present of a nation-state premised on asserting an historical distance from British imperialism of the 1800s and on affirming New Zealand's links to other national cultures and the democratic values of multiculturalism. (8) One can also detect an instrumental form of reason in other parts of Mallard's speech where he urges the nation to drive to 'perfect our nationhood' and to banish the 'demons' of the past so that we may begin the task of 'cheering each other on as New Zealand citizens'. What this rhetoric stresses is the importance of competing in a 'race' of sorts to achieve a national unity to which all New Zealanders can subscribe. What this cheerleading presupposes is that unity within the present, under the multiculturalist term 'Kiwi', will ensure the nation's future success and perfection and that the aims and ambitions of this future are agreed upon in advance.

The ruse of appropriating 'native' authority in order to naturalize a settler socio-cultural system is a recognizable trope of colonization and informs contemporary discourses of cultural nationalism such as Mallard's. The nationalistic trope of 'Kiwi' allows Mallard to distance Pakeha identity from the British imperialist subject as well as replace the settler-native dyad with a model of inclusivity that incorporates a variety of cultural identities. 'Kiwi' becomes the multicultural term that shifts the grounds for cultural belonging from a notion of authentic autochthonous belonging to a more general nationalistic model. As Johnston and Lawson argue in relation to the settler impulse to rewrite their origins:

 In the founding and growth of cultural nationalism, then, we can
 see one vector of difference (the difference between colonizing
 subject and colonized subject: settler-indigene) being replaced by
 another (the difference between colonizing subject and imperial
 center: settler-imperium). We can see this, with the benefit of
 postcolonial hindsight/analysis, as a strategic disavowal of the
 colonizing act. In this process, 'the national' is what replaces
 'the indigenous' and in doing so conceals its participation in
 colonization by nominating a new 'colonized' subject--the colonizer
 or settler-invader. (9)

Mallard's rhetoric chimes with the project of cultural nationalism found in discourses surrounding New Zealand literature, film, history writing and art. Mallard's claim to indigeneity has been made orthodox through the work of biographer and historian Michael King, whose seminal work Being Pakeha (and its reprised version Being Pakeha Now) laid the foundation for a notion of Pakeha identity as distanced from the British imperialist subject and as a friend to Maori, joined in a common love of the land. Political rhetoric aside, Mallard's speech demonstrates a colonial consciousness that persists within a contemporary settler society honed and shaped by the instrumental logic of global capital. Where the overtly British imperialism of the 1800s justified colonization in the name of 'civilization' (and all the attendant claims to modernity and progress that this term entails), Mallard's speech exemplifies a similar desire to incorporate cultural differences under the reprised term of national citizenship. (10) This distinctively post-British form of citizenship is linked to a nation that acknowledges the differences between Pakeha , Maori and Migrants (and their underlying sameness as 'Kiwi' citizens) while also, in Mallard's words, 'recognising how those differences add value to our country as a go-ahead, positive, future-looking nation'. (11) Yet, what precisely is this form of value?

One could say, in light of the neo-liberal economic policies of the Labour government (that were definitively established in 1984), that this logic of added value implicitly ties the citizens of this newly perfected nation to the unsaid force characterizing the landscape of current global culture, that of capital. Thus, the 'recognition' of cultural difference becomes part of a process of framing those differences as marketable commodities that can contribute to an already existing system of exchange (continuous, we might say, with colonial systems of exchange). This form of recognition is precisely designed to shut down debates about the kinds of value systems the nation subscribes to. Cultural difference in this scenario provides diversity on a market-driven landscape and is not the kind of undecidable difference that poses a challenge to the hegemony of the modern state (a difference that might form the basis for a 'critical multiculturalism' as opposed to the more regulatory form of a state-sponsored multiculturalism. (12)) Yet it is precisely this possibility of a critical consciousness, which can contest the prevailing norms and express the undecidables of culture, that is at stake within the settler state.

In general terms, the affirmation of Pakeha nativeness and Kiwi citizenship exemplified in Mallard's speech draws on the language of rights given in western democratic systems and the norms of a market-driven economy tied to global capital. However, claims to democratic principles and the language of modern political discourse, when deployed within postcolonial societies, functions to entrench existing relations of power as much as claim a space for their transformation. (13) The affirmation of an inclusive social unity as the basis for community and collectivity always entails an exclusionary violence. What gets left behind or is excluded in

Mallard's vision for New Zealand is the question of what an alternative system of exchange and economy of belonging might look like. What is left out of Mallard's equation for Kiwi New Zealanders is the mutually transformative effects of the colonial encounter and the alternative systems of exchange and value that circulate alongside, if imperceptibly, the dominant and more orthodox systems of exchange. Due to this remainder of differing socio-cultural systems, the notion of 'affirming' the relations that structure cultural belonging in Aotearoa/New Zealand can never be a project dedicated to a utopic belief in cultural unity or perpetual peace. We could deem such a project impossible in the wake of the violence of colonial settlement and claims to redress the Treaty signalled in the persistent slash designating the difference between Aotearoa and New Zealand (Aotearoa/New Zealand). The properly post-settler project of affirming belonging must register the intra-national and agonistic differences that would underlie any claim to nationhood, and more generally, that of cultural identity. Such approaches would begin from the logic of colonial encounter as a mutually transformative engagement between settler and native where competing juridical, economic, esoteric and epistemological discourses produce a web of shared meanings and misrecognitions that unsettled each socio-cultural collectivity. Within these messy entanglements, particularly within the ambivalent force of settler law, one can find the 'basis' (ever so contingent and shifting) of a post-settler project.

The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 by the leaders of some Maori tribes (iwi) and representatives of the British Crown, forms the basis of bicultural tensions within the New Zealand nation-state. Maori perception of the signing of the 1840 Treaty is encapsulated in the often cited response from Te Rarawa rangatira, Nopera Panakareao, who stated, 'The shadow of the land goes to the Queen, but the substance remains with us'--a view that was swiftly revised with the Land Wars of the 1860s. While the 1840 Treaty signed between the two peoples gave the appearance of peaceable settlement, subsequent land wars, property acquisitions and contestations over the meaning of the Treaty contravened its spirit of good will. The Land Wars were fought not only over land but also over final authority as to the meaning of the Treaty--a contestation over the sovereign right to decide what rule of law would prevail. According to Fleras and Spoonley, European law prevailed in the aftermath of the Treaty's signing when 'indigenous forms of political organization and customary title to land were suppressed in exchange for individual freehold title'. (14) The force of settler law is evident in the systems of ownership that upheld individual rights and installed universal rights of citizenship on subjects at the expense of collective iwi (tribal) identity. Protection under colonial law required due recognition as citizens under that law: a double-edged system of justice that denied iwi jurisprudence and iwi sovereignty at the same time as it allowed individual Maori access to imperial forms of sovereignty. This force of law persists today and is enshrined in the presuppositions underlying Mallard's speech (equal access for all to the rights to indigeneity). To not turn away from this tainted history but affirm the indignity accompanying colonial law would then mean to acknowledge that contemporary settler society is based on a history of vagrancy and usurpation; a history of illegitimate claims to belonging enabled by the ambivalent forces of western law.

As the opening quote from 'Unsettled States' suggests, the key task for settler societies is to find ways to 'exit with grace, justice and humility' from a state formation based on the violence of colonial occupation. Mallard's speech demonstrates one way to exit this formation by claiming an inclusive sense of multicultural belonging that naturalizes the settler in the contemporary landscape alongside other Kiwis. Yet this exit still serves to wound those collectivities that claim a prior history of relations with the land. Mallard's wish to 'settle' the problems of history through a pragmatic (and celebratory) focus on the present, overwrites all other ways of being and belonging to this country. Indeed, one could question the aspiration to maintain 'grace, justice and humility' in the aftermath of a process of settlement where discourses of justice provided the scaffolding for colonial rule. Rather than aspire to the vexed ideals of settler justice, perhaps contemporary settler states might instead acknowledge the force of the law that conditioned initial settler occupation. Perhaps the post-settler project entails recognizing, and then relinquishing, the use of property law and ideals of social justice that subsequently perpetuated land theft and social inequity when imposed by the British legal systems upon tangata whenua. Perhaps contemporary citizens of Aotearoa/New Zealand must critically engage with the possibility that the force of settler law used the Treaty of Waitangi as a transformative device to change the substance of indigenous forms of political and social organization into the shadow language of universal rights.

'Vagrant', 'usurper', 'thief' are three of the many possible terms that might be used to replace orthodox notions of settler identity and highlight the claims to power that inform all discussions of cultural belonging. Yet it is this very threat of being named as such that fuels contemporary debates about race relations in New Zealand as well as other post-settler societies. Some groups within contemporary settler society cannot bear the burden of shame that comes with its colonial history and shame cannot (yet) be considered a productive and affirmative force within the postcolonial context. (15) Yet to embrace the inherent violence of colonial and contemporary law might mean that post-settler subjects more clearly refuse to support the epistemological and juridical violence imposed by national institutions (including government, legal, media and educational institutions). They might use their substantial powers of invention to create other ways of enabling social exchange among communities. Such approaches would replace the dream of oneness of Mallard's nation-state with a mode of cultural identity radically open-ended and in a state of continual flux. This mode of belonging might then be structured as an agonistic state of encounter between the orthodox language of belonging (Pakeha, native, here) the historical relations that condition the present (iwi, native, then), and the persistent (and creative) desire for futurity (Aotearoa [slash] New Zealand--land of interminable difference) that encompasses all who live here. The basis of a beginning in terms of a national identity would then be a contingent and strategic one, attentive to the possible violence of all claims to social justice and collective practice. To affirm settler belonging as one based on vagrancy and theft does not mean to suggest that the ills of the nation might be healed when Pakeha confess to the wrongs of history. Rather, to affirm the vagrant nature of settler identity means to enter into relations with other economies of belonging and other modes of knowing that throw into question the basis of one's cultural identity and social power. To affirm one's vagrancy is to affirm another's sovereignty.

Host--Guest as Post-cultural Model of Belonging

If the Treaty forms the basis of bicultural tensions in Aotearoa/New Zealand, it also provides the grounds for imagining possible bicultural futures; futures that can include migrant subjects other than and alongside those who inherit a settler past. As Miranda Johnson suggests in her discussion of indigenous oral histories and practices of reconciliation, the interpretive tensions surrounding the Treaty bring contesting ontological and epistemological presuppositions into the public realm. (16) In her example of the 'evidentiary weight' that oral narratives can carry in secular courts and tribunals, Johnson reminds us that these oral histories are bound by kinship networks and community protocols that do not sit easily with the demands of secular state practices. Strategic uses of oral histories can produce effective histories (in Foucault's sense) that, on one hand mark the limits of orthodox representational systems even as they are partially incorporated into that system; and on the other hand, fragment the political desires of the ruling class 'to weave diverse perspectives more tightly together' due to the communicative difficulties that attend these oral narratives. (17) Johnson goes on to write:

 This fragmentation questions the assumption of what political
 'modernity' means and the purpose of the (secular) public/private
 distinction. The deployment of these strategies suggests something
 more about the politics of reconciliation in a contemporary
 postcolonial democracy such as New Zealand. In refusing to explain
 their presence by limiting their representations to the tribunal,
 claimants also pull apart the model of dialogue and the sphere of
 toleration that such democracies are premised on, not to mention
 the universal claims of justice that are offered only to be
 withdrawn. By refusing to tell, or translate, some parts of these
 histories and by delimiting what can and cannot be alienated and
 publicised they also mark the limits of a 'special' right and even
 the limits of the universalising, and always ambivalent, liberal
 discourse that produces such rights. (18)

Practices of tikanga (protocol) mark these oral narratives as dangerous 'supplements' to orthodox narratives of history and processes of reconciliation. It is the recurring saliency of tikanga and the performative dynamics of culture surrounding Treaty discussions that, as Johnson notes above, 'suggests something more about the politics of reconciliation in a contemporary postcolonial democracy'. Reconciliation, as a discourse tied up with western juridical law, is always-already a Trojan horse of justice. If secular-state logic is undermined by the ontologico-epistemological practices of iwi, then the 'resolution' for a democracy such as Aotearoa/New Zealand is to affirm these tensions and differences at the level of everyday practice and not at the level of universalizing discourses of rights, which serve to naturalize settler law over that of other socio-cultural practices.

This insistence upon everyday practice does not mean to suggest that one must lodge a politics of culture within the same perpetual present (and utopic 'Kiwi' future) as that espoused by Trevor Mallard. Rather, the persistence of tikanga within the contemporary life of the nation fragments the teleological trajectory of Mallard's cultural nationalism and introduces another temporal order into the national imaginary where past, present and future are intimately entwined. To insist on the importance of the everyday is a strategy to ground the abstract language of national belonging and to reveal the power dynamics involved in any cross-cultural encounter. Tikanga, as a living force and a dynamic principle that organizes the everyday of iwi, provides one of the many possible ways of worlding the national imaginary in a manner that highlights the vexed politics of settler culture.

In her 2004 Bruce Jesson Lecture, lawyer Ani Mikaere offers up a model of belonging that acknowledges the historical relationship between Maori and Pakeha as an agonistic and eternally open mode of encounter between two parties. (19) Mikaere works from the premise that by ignoring and overwriting iwi sovereignty, Pakeha have usurped the rights of hospitality from Maori, and by extension, we could surmise that the hospitality offered by the state to all immigrants, asylum seekers and strangers is a gift originally involving theft. However, rather than encouraging Pakeha to be overcome with guilt and shame about this original theft, Mikaere invites her audience to 'think Maori' and to embrace the tikanga surrounding the host-guest relationship as an antidote to the paralysis of settler ambivalence.

Mikaere argues that the nation is in a state of disequilibrium due to the fact that currently 'manuhiri [visitors] dictate the way things should be done in the tangata whenua's domain', leading to the wronged-party of colonial history being expected to adhere to the laws of the wrong-doer. Mikaere argues that the fundamental purpose of Maori law is 'to maintain appropriate relationships of people to their environment, their history and each other'. The basis of all proceeding tikanga comes from the understanding that Maori are born out of the land, and that these spiritual and epistemological connections are strengthened and renewed by occupation of particular lands, intimate connections born out of the practices of everyday life over a sustained period of time. Mikaere connects these relationships to the land with the conceptual regulators of tangata whenua (hosts) and manuhiri (guests). Tangata whenua have the right to assert tikanga over their domain and manuhiri must comply with the terms set by tangata whenua. According to Mikaere, both sides actively work to nurture the relationship and both parties are bound by mutual obligation as time passes. Citing the example of land allocation to outsiders, Mikaere states that such a gift to manuhiri was not an act of land alienation but served to bind the individual to the larger community. The recipient of the gift was thus obliged to adhere to the tikanga of tangata whenua. The current state of imbalance can only be resolved when Pakeha place their trust in Maori, and take a leap of faith in order to gain the sense of belonging 'they so crave'. But what are the conditions necessary for this great leap of faith? How can a dominant majority work assertively to relinquish control when colonization has established the cultural norms of maintaining and pursuing control, norms that are embedded in governance and the economy?

Mikaere gives us a concrete image of social transformation that provokes us to think in different directions. Hers is a discourse of 'hope against the evidence' (20) that Pakeha will take a leap of faith and allow tangata whenua to take up their role as legitimate hosts of this nation-state. However, the first piece of historical evidence that Mikaere must hope against is that iwi never issued an invitation for European explorers to discover and then settle this country. Even while iwi petitioned the United Kingdom to adjudicate over her subjects in the colonies in the form of a treaty, iwi did not invite the Crown to take possession of the substance of iwi society and custom. If the host has never issued an invitation, then on what grounds does the guest arrive if not as stranger, as an imposition, as a problem to resolve? These are not the most auspicious conditions for hospitality.

The second issue is one that acknowledges that, as Ghassan Hage has argued in the context of Australian multiculturalism, '[t]here is something about our humanity which cannot allow us to live in a guest-/host-dependent relationship beyond a certain time'. (21) The temporality of the guest-host relationship is limited as problems can arise when the guest never leaves. This 'something' about our humanity is, one could wager, our relationship to property and the logic of capitalist exchange that harnesses individual accumulation rather than collective good. Where tikanga Maori might protect and esteem the guest and tie them into the community through land gift, paradigms of private ownership, and other modern structures, determine orthodox relationships in the settler state. These economic, political and social structures cannot be easily transformed by a willful return to the earlier forms of social exchange that Mikaere invokes. Or, as Henry Schwarz reminds us:

 Colonizers also tend to implant modern structures on their
 territories, such as the exploitive economic system of capitalism,
 and political structures borrowed from Europe, such as territorial
 boundaries, parliaments, and censuses that de facto transform
 traditional practices into modern ones that can never be repudiated
 if a new nation is to participate in the international state system
 once it is liberated. (22)

Mikaere's hope against the evidence is thus itself a leap of faith that attempts to rewire existing relations of power, property and economics that constitute the social. Such a call urges the settler subject to affirm their place in the nation as vagrants who have found a home via a mutually obligatory relationship with tangata whenua. But how to address this perpetual drive toward private ownership and this initial act of imposition that corrupts the right and proper relationship between host and guest? How is tikanga Maori to be asserted when colonization has produced a painful split between the terms 'tangata' (people) and 'whenua' (land)? What can heal the breach?

Mikaere's speech offers an opportunity for her audience to 'think Maori'. However, the conditions do not yet exist where the public sphere can be hospitable to other ways of speaking, other forms of expression. Indeed, Mikaere is charged with an act of ressentiment by Elizabeth Rata, who addresses her speech as yet another example of a Maori discourse of victimology and as 'an extreme example of neotribal fundamentalism'. (23) Rather than explore the conceptual dimensions of Mikaere's discourse (the shadows, nuances and rhetorical qualities of the speech), Rata searches for a presupposed substance, that is to say, a recognizable identitarian position that can then be read through existing discursive structures and that has one collectivity speaking past another. In these moments, then, the weight of the history of settlement threatens to foreclose speculation on how it might be to think otherwise, to extend our imagination and our critical consciousness beyond the dialectical clash between discourses of colonizer and colonized.

What so upsets Rata is the perceived attempt on Mikaere's part to enact a form of 'present-day Maori revivalism' that is an 'up-dated restoration of a traditional culture'. (24) Yet we might also see Mikaere's public lecture as a performative and strategic interruption of orthodox knowledges and as an insertion of an alternative ontologico-epistemological system of thought into mainstream settler society. If so, then we might approach Mikaere's speech as a post-cultural discourse that seeks to disarticulate perceived notions of cultural belonging and property law. This is post-cultural discourse in the sense Simon During invokes:

 The term can refer variously to an event, a programme or a mode of
 analysis. One has entered postculturalism when, accepting that the
 construction of a non-modern cultural identity is the result of
 interactions between colonizer and colonized, of mutual
 misrecognitions and forgettings, one celebrates the productive
 energy that is released in these processes. (25)

Against Rata's reified divide between modern and traditional, Mikaere's speech can be framed as a 'non-modern' cultural discourse in three ways: as a discourse that assumes tikanga is a dynamic and flexible system responsive to colonizer--colonized interactions; as a discourse that poses a strategically essentialist argument in order to signify in an always-already defined field determined by the national orthodoxy; and as a post-identitarian discourse that focuses on mutual responsibilities and obligations and revolving nature of host--guest relations. That is to say, while Rata reads Mikaere's speech as returning to reified ideals of traditional culture, Mikaere's oratory is based upon alternative ontologico-epistemological presuppositions that do not assume a simple tradition/modern divide.

To pervert Mikaere's speech, and to affirm its post-cultural dimensions, one could suggest that Mikaere offers the greatest act of hospitality of all when she asks her audience to 'think Maori' beyond the confines of the identities that structure the national collectivity as Pakeha , Maori or Migrant. As terms, the bi- and the multicultural work to prevent the possibility of forging networked relations between the terms Pakeha, Maori, and Migrant. The difficulty of forging these networks is due to the ontological presuppositions that accompany any discussion of cultural belonging. As Rata's critique of Mikaere reminds us, the question arises consistently: who must one 'be' in order to think in this place? Due to these ontological demands to be before one can think or act, Mikaere's speech demonstrates the most compelling affirmative political project imaginable when she asks us to think otherwise in a place that is consistently inhospitable to such possibilities. This invitation does not suggest that we must think 'as Other' but that we imagine the possibility of other ways of being and of thinking in this place that do not conform to predictable national orthodoxies. This would be the first principle of hospitality for an affirmative postcolonial project; how to think otherwise in a place inhospitable to indeterminacy; how to maintain the differing dimensions of cultural identity itself. Accordingly, the second principle of hospitality would be to resist the drive for perpetual peace and cultural unity embedded in narratives of reconciliation or in attempts to 'exit with grace, justice and humility' a state formation tied to the injustices of colonization. The settler state can then be more pragmatically framed as a conjunctural formation with impure origins that necessitates a rethinking of western epistemologies and the ontological assumptions underpinning them. A persistently critical consciousness might then replace the more lofty ideals of justice, law and reconciliation. If so, then the host-guest model, as a post-cultural model of mutual transformation, might illuminate those shadows cast by the identitarian discourses of biculturalism and multiculturalism.

Registering the Exit Wounds of the 'Post'

The conjunctural characteristics of the settler state should be affirmed as eternally 'unsettled' so that it continues to demonstrate the limits and constraints of western social theory and the cultural dimensions of contemporary settler politics. While the editors of 'Unsettled States' raise the question of 'how to exit with grace, justice and humility a formation that shows terminal signs of collapsing', I suggest that we must register the exit wounds of any post-settler strategy. Indeed, the concept of post-settlement itself should be viewed with scepticism, suspicion and perpetual critique, as it is a term open as much to those political discourses of futurity, which celebrate the present and attempt to erase the past, as it is a term that signals a state in eternal movement and transformation (between past, present and future). Instead of embracing narratives of reconciliation, discourses of settler indigeneity, or amnesiac treatments of the 'post' of post-settlement, we must deem the violence of colonization as the ethical horizon that conditions the possible futures of the nation-state. An affirmative post-settler response would be to acknowledge the fact that the residues of colonization, (in the case of Aotearoa/New Zealand, the split between tangata and whenua) can never be erased, and that the differences between collectivities within the settler state, including those of migrants, are never resolvable. The best that can be done is to produce models, concepts and strategies based on the continuous and mutually transformative process of cross-cultural encounter that is the only sure legacy of colonization.

In the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Ani Mikaere's speech offers up a model of cross-cultural encounter based upon the contingencies of the present and the incommensurabilities of the colonial past. Mikaere suggests that Pakeha embrace the conditional nature of their belonging, a form of guest economy that can illuminate other forms of agency and abilities to act in the world. This guest economy can also be applied to iwi experiences of settler society, where the painful split between tangata and whenua is a split that cannot be healed and which renders some iwi guests on their own land. This emphasis on the tensions between host responsibilities and guest economies can also address the shifts undergone in property relations and the processes of globalization that increasingly threaten to make guests of us all within the nation-state. In beginning from the socio-cultural practices of iwi (post-cultural in the sense that protocols of host-guest are alive to the internally changing nature of social and economic life), orthodox analyses of the settler state (beginning from the settler-native dyad) are de-framed and reinvigorated by a dynamic and role-oriented model that includes settler-native-migrant interactions and the wider circuits of capitalist exchange surrounding and informing the settler state. These contested relationships form the basis of post-settler hospitality.

Post-settler hospitality uses the dynamic host-guest framework as a recurring reminder of a shared history and a shared predicament that conditions the social life for all who inhabit and exceed the categories of the bi- and the multicultural. It is also a model that highlights the role of capital in the production and dissemination of cultural identities and the 'vexed politics of culture' that characterizes contemporary settler society. As a contingent and context-specific alliance, the host-guest model opens up to perpetual critique those normalizing forces that seek power in the name of culture or western ideals that fit uneasily within the settler context. Using the host-guest model, discourses surrounding the state's role as 'host' to immigrants can be nuanced in light of the historical role of the state as usurper of customary rights casting out tangata whenua as originary host. Such a critical (cultural) consciousness acknowledges the violence underpinning banal discourses of 'Kiwi' and provides us with an invitation to invent other modes of engagement, other descriptors and critical categories that can illuminate and contribute to the dynamics of the everyday.

A focus on the roles and obligations within the host-guest relationship bring into sharp relief the economic forces mediating and underpinning claims to cultural difference and the processes of cultural homogeneity surrounding a settler state within a global landscape. Where discourses of the bi- and the multicultural cloak and derail larger questions of the settler state's relationship to global capital, focusing on the state's responsibility to all its people brings to light its position as guest to the hospitality of global capital. This subsequently raises the question of the nation's cultural sovereignty in light of processes of globalization, bringing the claims to sovereignty of indigenous peoples into a wider web of relations. Under this model, the pragmatic question of who has the power to play host, and who must endure the role of guest, would replace identitarian politics and denaturalize the language of natural rights. This then would reveal the norms of modern political theory (justice, rights and law) as discourses that mask claims to power, wealth and conquest. The principle of hospitality would be one of an eternally revolving relationship between host and guest that is informed more by the forces on hand--that is to say, the contingencies of the present that mix with that spectres of a colonial past and its possible post-settler futures.

Conclusions

The conditional sense of belonging signalled in the host-guest relationship is an attempt to replace the abstract language of biculturalism and multiculturalism. Terms such as 'host' and 'guest' articulate the practices of the everyday that are out of joint with the abstract language of nationalism. The host-guest model is a relationship we inhabit everyday. It is a model that requires immediate engagement with the pragmatics of hospitality and the conditional nature of social belonging. It is a concept that conjures images of the material nature of social discourse: the houses in which we eat, the beds we prepare for our guests, the gifts we bring to our hosts. It is a model that highlights the power relations of such encounters, and raises the questions of what are the necessary conditions for the expression of hospitality and what is the state's role in fulfilling these conditions? Ghassan Hage argues that it is the state's responsibility to provide the conditions from which hope might circulate and prosper within the nation-state. Only then can the host provide hospitality for its immigrant guests. (26) Within the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand this also holds true. How can one become generous with one's resources when there is no guarantee that there will be enough for all? Who has the power to issue an invitation? Who has the resources to care for their guests? Is my hospitality to be enjoyed or merely endured by my guest? What bonds of mutual care and obligation are forged between us in these moments of hospitality? Relinquishing the language of biand multicultural discourses, the host-guest model is a post-cultural discourse of belonging that foregrounds the vexed politics of culture at play in the places and spaces we inhabit daily within the contemporary settler state.

(1.) Aspects of this work developed out of the course 'Indigeneity, Migrancy, Media', co-taught with Stephen Turner, whom I thank for his feedback and conversations. Thanks also to Simone Drichel for her comments on different versions of this article.

(2.) M. Grossman and C. Spark, 'Unsettled States', Postcolonial Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2005, pp. 235-41.

(3.) Grossman and Spark, p. 236.

(4.) Grossman and Spark, p. 236.

(5.) See 'Television and Multiculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand', in R. Horrocks and N. Perry (eds), Television in New Zealand: Programming the Nation, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 139.

(6.) Mallard's speech can be seen as a response to the National Party opposition's stance on Treaty issues and race relations, encapsulated in Don Brash's speech 'Nationhood', given on 27 January 2004 at the Orewa Rotary Club. Brash sees the Treaty as contributing to divisive race-based legislation that gives special privilege to Maori.

(7.) See T. Mallard, 'We Are All New Zealanders Now', speech to the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria University, Wellington, 28 July 2004, see <www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=20451>.

(8.) For a detailed discussion of the role of 'Kiwi' in the mediation of New Zealand cultural politics, see Stephen Turner's '"Inclusive Exclusion": Managing Identity for the Nation's Sake in Aotearoa/New Zealand' in this issue of Arena Journal. For a discussion of the emergence of Pakeha identity politics see Avril Bell's 'We're Just New Zealanders: Pakeha Identity Politics', in P. Spoonley, C. Macpherson and D. Pearson (eds), Nga Patai: Racism and Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Palmerston North, Dunmore Press, 1996, pp. 144-58.

(9.) See A. Johnston and A. Lawson, 'Settler Colonies', in H. Schwarz and S. Ray (eds), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Massachusetts, Blackwell, 2000, pp. 360-76.

(10.) In his speech, Mallard states, 'We've left behind a British identity. This has meant that we no longer easily understand the people who tried to tear up the Treaty and went to war with Maori in 1863. Once were Warriors. Once were British'.

(11.) Mallard, 'We Are All New Zealanders Now'.

(12.) Sneja Gunew emphasizes the distinction between state multiculturalism, which manages cultural diversity, and critical multiculturalism, which is 'used by minorities as leverage to argue for participation, grounded in their differences, in the public sphere'. See Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 16.

(13.) For a local rehearsal of these kinds of arguments, see the televisual debate Issues 2001: Waitangi Day Special, in which Pakeha social commentator Chris Trotter, and Maori constitutional lawyer Moana Jackson disputed the nature of the Treaty of Waitangi. In this debate Trotter drew upon the principle of liberal democratic politics, majority rules, in his call for a new constitution that could reflect present-time New Zealanders. Implicit in his argument was the claim that special recognition of indigenous rights as guaranteed by the Treaty was not democratic. Trotter did not go so far as to say that recognition of Treaty rights was inherently racist against non-Maori (the argument made by classical liberal Association of Consumers and Taxpayers MP Stephen Franks). However, Trotter's defence of democracy drew on the norms of universal rights to representation and freedom of expression, a practice of universalism that overwrites the importance of history. This is the point that Moana Jackson made when he reminded Trotter that, in 1840, the majority living in New Zealand were Maori and to throw out the Treaty as a contract undermines the very tenets that Trotter now upholds. Trotter's recourse to present-time universal rights thus erases the history of violence underpinning such norms and demonstrates how the language of inclusivity can act not so much as a force of repression as a machine that incorporates and overwrites difference.

(14.) See A. Fleras and P. Spoonley's Recalling Aotearoa, Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 51.

(15.) For a recent discussion on the ethical dimensions of shame, see E. Probyn's Blush: Faces of Shame, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2005.

(16.) See M. Johnson, 'Honest Acts and Dangerous Supplements: Indigenous Oral History and Historical Practice in Settler Societies', Postcolonial Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2005, p. 266.

(17.) Johnson, 'Honest Acts', p. 272.

(18.) Johnson, 'Honest Acts', p. 273.

(19.) See A. Mikaere, 'Are We All New Zealanders Now? A Maori Response to the Pakeha Quest for Indigeneity', Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture, November 2004, <www.brucejesson.com/lecture2004.htm>.

(20.) See Alphonso Lingis's contribution, 'Murmurs of Life' in M. Zournazi (ed.), Hope: New Philosophies for Change, Sydney, Pluto Press, 2002, p. 23.

(21.) See Hage's interview, 'On the Side of Life: Joy and the Capacity for Being' in Zournazi (ed.), Hope, p. 166.

(22.) See Schwarz, 'Mission Impossible' in H. Schwarz and S. Ray (eds), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Massachusetts and Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 2000, pp 1-20.

(23.) See E. Rata, 'The Rise and Rise of the Neotribal Elite', address to the Summer Sounds Symposium, Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand, 11-13 February, p. 3, fn 6.

(24.) Rata, p. 3.

(25.) See During's essay 'What was the West?', in Meanjin, vol. 48, no. 4, 1989, p. 767.

(26.) See G. Hage, 'The Shrinking Society: Ethics and Hope in the Era of Global Capitalism', in N. Papastergiadis (ed.), Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, London, Sydney, Chicago, Rivers Oram Press, 2003, p. 222.