Title The interplay of the local and the global in

In this paper, I use Witi Ihimaera’s reputation as a pioneer of Maori literature to analyze his negotiation of global and local influences on his writing in view of the claims of posterity and the obligation to the past. Ihimaera’s changing attitude is most discernible in his rewriting of his earliest novels, Tangi and Whanau, in The Rope of Man and Whanau II. Significant is the trope of the trauma by which Ihimaera conceptualizes the historical impact of the world on Maori communities and on his writing, and its counterpart, the image of the rope of man, which he develops in order to indicate a path from conflict to reconciliation. Noting that Ihimaera risks a seemingly uncritical endorsement of globalization in his rewritings, I suggest a way of reading them with reference to a local Maori tradition, emblematized by the meeting house, Rongopai; I argue that their model of transformative imagination enables readers to envisage? a locally shared world. The blurbs of Witi Ihimaera’s recent books, Whanau II (2004) and The Rope of Man (2005), identify him as “a pioneer in world indigenous literature”, thus placing him squarely at the intersection of the global and the local. The location is ambivalent because “world indigenous” may suggest both the globalization of the distinctly local and also a distinctly localized interpretation of globalization. The figure of the pioneer seems to offer guidance to such ambivalence, yet its application to Ihimaera in the context of his latest novels seems no less ambiguous since these are in fact explicit revisions of his first two: Whanau II is a substantially expanded rewriting of Whanau (1974), while The Rope of Man comprises two novels, a rewritten version of Tangi (1973) and a sequel, The Return, set in 2005. If such self-revision confirms his role as a pioneer of world indigenous literature, it also reveals the reinterpretation of the past as an important aspect of the interplay between the local and the global. Ihimaera’s engagement with his pioneering role indeed allows us to examine how he negotiates the