Cautionary Tales

Methodologically grounded in postcolonial discourse theory and the critical accounts of legal institutional discourses pioneered by Peter Goodrich and Terry Threadgold, Seuffert's study is committed to an intersectional analysis of the racing and gendering of the developing Aotearoa New Zealand nation state, highlightfing the repetition of colonial tactics . . . tracing the oudines of the "good citizen" of free trade imperialism, and the "global entrepreneur" of free trade globalisation, embodying and enacting law and policy reform and national identity, ... positioning . . . these raced and gendered identities in crucibles of institutions of power, agency, resistance, mimicry, negotiation, coercion, complicity and compromise [to produce] historically specific configurations: white male colonial citizen/subjects (momentarily) performing free trade imperialist citizenship; Maori men criminalised at the boundary of a nation; white women as leaders of a state feminised by the dispersal of national sovereignty into the global economic order; indigenous Maori men as global entrepreneurs, or "corporate warriors" negotiating commercial deals to "settle" colonial injustices; Maori women as bearers of a reconstructed traditional Maori culture, and "hysterical" activists; and "raced" immigrants paradoxically embodying both the boundary of a bicultural nation that recognises only Anglo-Europeans and indigenous Maori, and . . . dispersal of the nation into the global economic order.6 Like Goodrich and Threadgold, too, Seuffert is a teller of tales out of school, of "alternative jurisprudences" silenced, suppressed, and marginalized by relendessly monologic constitutional imaginaries, such as in her accounts of Maori women's resistance and agency in the latter decades of the twentieth century, and the Maori activist plowmen and "pacifist fencers" who opposed government land grabs a century earlier.