Waiting for the post: Some relations between modernity, colonization and writing∗

Abstract

Summary The concept of “modernity” requires the exclusion of societies and practices deemed pre‐modern. Today, however, the category of the “modern” can be historicized and problematised. Repetitions across, and adjoining folds between, the modern and non‐modern do exist. The expression of enlightened values in the South African liberation struggle provides one example of this, and the chiastic process by which Maori culture has been Europeanised and Western culture Maori‐ised in New Zealand, another. This latter process can be celebrated under the name of the “post‐cultural” but it involves a certain de‐sacrilisation and de‐politicisation. In the West literature has been an important tool for secularisation and modernisation but some texts can exist on the border which joins and separates the two orders which the “modern” divides. Frederick Maning's Old New Zealand is one such.

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