Bringing Home The Body: Bi/multi Racial Maori Women's Hybridity in Aotearoa/New Zealand

... (T)he landscape functions as a scribe recording the passage of history of the nation and its people. The emotion attached to the landscape relates to its ability to release memory, allowing the past to exist simultaneously with the present. Thus a metonymic link between bodies, landscape and nation, in that they are all contiguous... function to temporarily replace one another... The landscape which initially unites bodies and creates an identity through place becomes repressed in the formation of the nation. Landscape features or geographical contours always underpin the meaning of a nation and the formation of national boundaries. But in this repression the term 'landscape' becomes meaningless without the mediation of the political construct of the nation. The thews and sinews of the body shaped by our relationship to our specific environment are covered over by the forging of a national identity. In other words, the discourses of nationalism subscribe to a different form of embodiment (as in race/ethnicity) which requires the foregoing of an embodiment mediated through nature: our bodily relationship to our landscape is repressed so that we may come into coherency via the nation. Notions of race are a part of nationalist discourse (Radhika Mohanram, 1999, pp. 5-7).