I want belatedly to draw attention to the publication of “Asia in New Zealand Lives,” a special issue of the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, edited by Henry Johnson and myself, and to thank the contributors for their diverse and insightful essays on prominent New Zealanders, including Nancy Kwok-Goddard, Vic Percival, Anand Satyanand, and Edmund Hillary.
These essays help to complicate understandings of an increasingly diverse Aotearoa / New Zealand society, going beyond the population statistics that tend to dominate public discourse around multiculturalism in New Zealand. They offer a historically grounded and rich account of, in the words of our introduction, “the dynamic interactions among a web of different Asian cultures and traditions that have helped shape the lives of all New Zealanders.”
All articles in the issue are freely available for download here.
A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature 