Hawai‘ian and Māori Literatures in Conversation: The Potential of Comparative Poetics as a Relational Tool

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Marc Maufort is Emeritus Professor of Anglophone literatures at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium (ULB). He has written and (co)-edited a number of volumes on Eugene O’Neill, American drama, and Anglophone postcolonial theatre, among which one can list Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Reconstructions of Dramatic Realism (2003); Performing Aotearoa: New Zealand Theatre and Drama in an Age of Transition (2007); and more recently, Indigeneity on the Oceanic Stage. Intimations of the Local in a Globalised World (2025). From 2015-2025, he served as the Editor of Recherche littéraire/Literary Research, the journal of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA).

Abstract

In this lecture, I aim to stimulate praxis reflections about the ways in which Western scholars could approach Indigenous literatures without running the risk of voice appropriation. I wish to show how the perspective of a non-Indigenous “Multi-Perspective Culturally Responsive Researcher (MPCR)” can shed light on the Indigenous Hawai‘ian plays of Ka Hālau Hanakeaka and a recent novel from New Zealand, Kurangaituku, by Māori writer Whiti Hereaka (2021). In a groundbreaking article, Tui Nicola Clery, Acacia Dawn Cochise, and Robin Metcalfe describe the MPCR stance as a way of engaging sensitively and responsibly with different cultures, rather than emphasizing essentialist differences. These scholars conceptualise MPCR as rooted in the Samoan notion of teu le va: “To teu le va is to attend to, care for, and nurture the relationships and relational spaces among and between people” (306). As the novelist Albert Wendt reminds us, Samoan epistemology foregrounds Vā, which informs the MPCR stance, as “the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates, but space that relates […]” (Afterword 402). In this talk, I shall seek to demonstrate how comparative literary poetics facilitates the implementation of a MPCR practice, thus creating a dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous literary traditions.

The first part of my lecture focuses on the still unpublished plays of Ka Hālau Hanakeaka, a theatre company established around 1995 by Tammy Haili‘opua Baker at the University of Hawai‘i/Manoa (Kennedy Theatre). I contend that these Polynesian works could be construed as an illustration of the Hawai‘ian concept of ho‘okipa, which readily evokes the notions of care, kindness, generosity and hospitality. 

I shall subsequently contrast Baker’s Indigenous plays to a narrative reinterpretation of an episode from Māori mythology. In Kurangaituku, Māori writer Whiti Hereaka reconfigures the story of the relationship between a male human being, Hatupatu, and the legendary bird-woman Kurangaituku, who is regarded both as a monster and a sensitive creature. Like Baker’s plays, Kurangaituku can be decoded as an instance of hospitality, as an invitation to readers worldwide to discover Māori cosmology. In that sense, the novel foregrounds the Māori notion of Manaakitanga, which implies care and kindness, thus recalling the Hawai‘ian concept of Ho‘okipa. 

All in all, in order to fully appreciate the unique cultural dimensions of the Indigenous plays and the Māori novel analyzed here, a Western scholar must be willing to comprehend and use theoretical concepts derived from local Indigenous cosmologies. I contend that comparative literature is well equipped to address this concern. Indeed, like the Samoan notion of Vā, it privileges relation over separation. 

Works Cited

Clery, Tui Nicola, Acacia Dawn Cochise, and Robin Metcalfe. “Research Is Relational: Exploring Researcher Identities and Colonial Echoes in Pacific and Indigenous Studies.” Pacific Studies 38.3 (December 2015): 303–36.

Wendt, Albert. “Afterword: Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body.” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Eds. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. 399–412.